School officials have hurried to explain that they do not actually object to the political content. Instead, they say, the book is still sanctioned for school libraries, but that lower grades may not use it because of "graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use in the seventh grade curriculum." High school teachers are still, apparently, allowed to use the book, though only with special training.

CPS then, isn't protecting the Iranian regime out of some confused notion that criticizing them constitutes Islamophobia. It is simply protecting all of our children. And, to be fair, Persepolis does include a certain amount of violence and (especially in its second volume) a certain amount of sex. Satrapi talks about how friends and relatives were tortured, both by the Shah and by the Revolutionary government. There's a picture of a man dismembered by the authorities. She also talks about the Iran-Iraq war, and there are pictures of wounded soldiers. She describes her escape from Iran to Austria, and talks (without much detail, but still) about her sexual adventures as a young woman living on her own. She describes her suicide attempt. She writes the word "fuck" once. She talks about her gay roommates. She shows herself as a young child having imagined conversations with God. She shows herself as an adolescent smoking cigarettes and dealing pot. In my experience, any one of these infractions would be sufficient excuse to keep Persepolis out of the hands of students.

I'm sure there are some parents who, if asked, would say that they don't want to have their seventh graders exposed to narratives about suicide, or torture, or God, or sex, and don't want them to read the word "fuck." There are probably parents who would be horrified to learn that my third-grader is reading Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House at his Waldorf school -- a book in which (my son informs me) virtually everyone dies in a hideous smallpox epidemic. Maybe someone would be offended, too, by the book he read about the Chicago fire (too violent!) or by the Norse myths he's studying (too pagan!).

The truth is, outside of arithmetic, it's hard to teach anything worth learning that someone won't find offensive or upsetting or frightening or off-putting. If it's interesting, if it's something people care about, then people are going to have opinions about it. That means somebody, somewhere, isn't going to like it. The drive to keep our children perfectly safe from dangerous knowledge just ends up reducing their education to a bland, boring, irrelevant slog.

And, again, you start to suspect that this is the point. As in the Iranian regime that Satrapi describes, where art students are only allowed to do figure drawing sketches of women covered in a head-to-toe chador, the aim of American education too often seems to be a quite deliberate ignorance. The revolutionary guards patrol the classrooms not to make sure you learn something about the real world, but to make sure you don't.