By Selwyn Duke

A Utah art teacher was recently fired for showing children art postcards that included nude images. Now some parents are up in arms and the school is accused of Puritanism and, contradictively, political correctness. But there’s more to the story than the media have told. 

The issue began December 4 when Mateo Rueda, then a teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Hyrum, instructed his sixth-grade charges to “look through some art postcards in the classroom library for examples of color usage in notable paintings,” as the Herald Journal tells the story.

The paper continues, Rueda knew the postcards “portrayed a wide variety of classic artworks, but he has since said he was not aware that three or four of the 100 pieces featured in the box showed nudity.”

“Asked if he thought the nudes were appropriate for the sixth-graders in his class,” wrote the Journal, “Rueda said he did not. ‘This is not material at all that I would use. I had no idea,’ he said.”

But Rueda apparently thought the nudes were appropriate for fifth-graders — because that’s exactly who he showed them to after the sixth-grade class in question, according to Lincoln parents I interviewed. This was not revealed in the Journal’s story, which led readers to believe only one class had seen the nudes.

Read the rest here.