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Could you elaborate on what specific harm showing an anatomically correct sculpture to sixth graders does to them?
The reasons we don't want to show actual pornography are varied. We don't want to encourage kids that young to have sex by showing it to them. We don't want them to conflate the exaggerated performance of sex in porn with normal sex and have them immitate it. And we don't want them to think adults showing them pornography is normal and prime them for future abuse.
I think a group presentation in the context of art history is distinct enough from some creepy dude showing you porn alone that it's not priming children for abuse. It's not a sexualized performance or a depiction of sex children are likely to immitate. It's possible 11 year old straight girls and gays boys will experience arousal at the sight of a naked male body for the first time and seek out other depictions of naked men, leading them to engage in sex too early.
I don't think David is so fake it's impossible to become aroused by looking at him, the healthy male body is normal site of arousal for women/gay men, but he's not designed to be highly arousing either. He also expresses the Renaissance ideal that the human body is a beautiful creation of God worthy of veneration and is undeniably important in art history. The school's policy of letting parents decide through permission slips whether the harm of potential arousal at the sight of a healthy male body outweighs the educational value seems wise and it's important to note that only 1 parent of the fifty kids actually objected to his inclusion, the controversy is that they didn't issue the permission slips like they did in years past.
This is a wholly irrelevant question. I know it's what the pro-David side likes to focus on, because it makes their opponents look like aliens to the ingroup, but it fundamentally doesn't matter.
If we can agree that there are two groups who differ on the answer to your question: regardless of the substance of their answers, this is an issue of how a community has decided to navigate through this difference in opinions. Now, it may seem to some like the question is so stupid that the community process no longer matters, but this is a great way to destroy a community. This is the essence of a lot of culture war issues at the moment, a focus on terminal values above the process by which we allow competing values to co-exist peacefully.
I would disagree. The essence of many culture war issues is that our ability to stand up and say "this is fucking stupid" for most of these topics is broken.
Are you complaining about "Microaggressions" or how damaging the white culture of being on time is? Are you complaining about one of the most famous pieces of art being shown to kids in school?
Well, that's not worth anyone's time to even consider as an issue. You should scream into the void where nobody hears you.
YOU think they're stupid, but other people clearly don't. What happens to your community when you're done yelling "You're stupid!" at everyone you don't like? Do they agree and change into smart people? Do they grow to hate you? What has it accomplished? You have broken more than you were trying to fix.
EDIT: Also, I don't know what world you're living in, but the number of people saying "this is fucking stupid" seems to be at an all-time high. Have you seen Twitter? This the Daily Show-ification of public discourse. It makes the person saying "that's stupid" feel smug and makes everyone else hate them. Is it working?
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It's a violation of property rights. If I'm paying six figures a head for 18 years (well, on paper; in practice it's closer to 25) of
latent ability to challenge meinnocence, you better damn well believe I'm going to go after anything that threatens that. While I understand that I can't dictate society impose my standards- would that I could- it disturbs me that my property might be made to grow in ways that run counter to my interests.I don't think it's more sophisticated than that. It's not maximizing the objective well-being of the kids we're worried about; they don't matter and are objectively worthless to society (a long-term net negative, if TFR is any indication) beyond the tasks their parents have for them.
The concept that society cannot violate parents' property rights over children are a socioeconomic wage in the calculus of having children- anytime someone says "but what if my kid grows up to be [undesirable thing]?" this is what they mean. If the wage is too low, society doesn't get kids, so society must defer to them or even the people arguing for these wages to be lower (for culture war reasons, or just rational ones) go extinct.
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