School board cleaning out libraries
They don’t usually say it quite so bluntly.
Books deemed ‘harmful to staff and students’ are being removed from region’s public school libraries
And…”harmful” how? Oh you know…just not the kind of thing the reader would have written. Which reader? Any reader, obviously. If someone says “I don’t like this,” out it goes.
The Waterloo Region District School Board is undertaking a multi-year review of its library collections to identify and remove any texts deemed “harmful to staff and students.”
Graham Shantz, coordinating superintendent in human resources and equity services outlined the ongoing work during Tuesday’s board meeting as part of an overview of the board’s 2021-2022 strategic and operational plan.
“We recognize as our consciousness around equity, oppression work and anti-racist work has grown, we recognize some of the texts in some of the collections that we have are not appropriate at this point,” Shantz said. He explained how the board developed a framework last year for reviewing its collections in elementary and secondary school libraries.
“We’ve done a great job over the years of adding collections that promote the diversity both of our workforce and our students and our community as a broader point, but we haven’t spent the concentrated effort that we need to spend on ensuring that we’re removing inappropriate or texts that are questionable and don’t have the pedagogical frameworks that we need,” Shantz said.
School libraries can’t have all the books there are, of course, so they have to be selective, but I’m not sure screening out every book someone considers “inappropriate” is the right filter to use.
Shantz said the process to edit school libraries will involve educating teachers about the board’s framework so they can consider removing texts from their classroom collections.
In the new and better tomorrow they will have removed all of them, and peace will settle over the land.
Earlier this year, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum after its advisory committee on equity agreed with a student who said the book’s themes were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures.
Well now almost all books are outdated, aren’t they, because that’s time for you. It just keeps passing, and so books keep getting older. Maybe we should class them with apples and eggs and other things that go bad over time? Give them a shelf-life stamp?
Other books recently removed from Canadian school libraries and/or curriculums in response to complaints about racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes, include Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Er…I think somebody somewhere missed the point.
Did we think it would come to the day when building a “Little Free Library” and stocking it with banned literature would be a revolutionary act?
The Ottawa Board is deeply in thrall to transideology, one of the trustees is MTF.
There are some book that may have racist imagery that I can understand removing from a collection, like Dr. Seuss’ “If I Ran The Zoo”. But removing “McElligot’s Pool” and “To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street” is an overreaction.
Next I suppose they’ll remove Moliere’s plays for being misanthropic…
Michael,
I had a similar thought this morning about how we might have to build our own banned libraries. I probably have most of the forbidden books already. There’s a local bus shelter that’s been turned into a free library, I’ll make some additions next time I’m passing. Should have done it already.
All this censorious behaviour bemuses me. Lord of the Flies wasn’t so much a social commentary as a horror story and weird, Christian allegory. But if it’s “outdated and too focused on white, male power structures” then that’s brilliant, isn’t it? Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing kids are supposed to write about in English Literature classes? What sort of non-white, non-male, up-to-date power structures are there? How do those compare? How might the story have played in those alternative counterfactual worlds? I mean, if I were an English Literature teacher, I’d be rubbing my hands together with glee at the idea of getting a few essays to mark that weren’t all identical.
I know this isn’t where the pressure is coming from, but still. Oh you don’t want your children to learn the lessons of the past? Oh really? Why’s that then?
I always thought that one of the drawbacks to home schooling was the lack of diversity: students were less likely to encounter different people and challenging ideas. Ironic then if home schooling ended up being the best option for exposing your kid to the outside world.
The OED is potentially harmful, at least if they stack it on a high shelf. That thing could take an eye out.
But I guess that’s not what they’re talking about.
So early in the morning and someone already wins the internet!
These people aren’t librarians, they only identify as librarians. Librarians have always been the first line of defense against this sort of behavior (though I will admit, public librarians and school librarians are often not professional librarians, and are probably more subject to the whim of the populace than academic librarians and those in enormous public libraries). If librarians are so ready to remove any book deemed offensive to someone, then the role of librarian is truly dead.
And Handmaid’s Tale? Yeah, I know it has misogynist language, but that is spoken by the bad guys. Is comprehension of the English language truly dead in Ottawa?
Maybe the English here can explain why the English are so obsessed with To Kill a Mockingbird. I think youall read it in English class? I mean, it’s OK, but it’s very specific to its time and place, and it’s not as if there aren’t books by English people that might be more worthwhile to include in an English class in England.
On the subject of works about white male power structures, has anyone told them about Hamlet? Might need to remove that as well.
The Bible should be on the top of the bonfire. It has everything: lust, violence, treachery… you name it. Oh, and bullshit galore. Out it goes! And good riddance..!!
I think they are missing the point of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Handmaid’s Tale” by banning them. Weren’t the racists the bad guys in TKAM? Didn’t we learn that Boo Radley was not in fact a scary dude after all, despite his differences? People who want to ban those books (like Huckleberry Finn) have either not read them or don’t understand them.
At the public library where I live, they have changed the way they buy books (in theory; in practice, it hasn’t worked out so well). Supposedly, they want to discourage disinformation by not buying books from people like Mark Levin (who despite being, er, factually challenged, is extremely popular). They caved and ended up buying Levin’s book anyway. My fear is that this sort of judgement is open to abuse no matter how well-intentioned the policy might be. Sure, it starts with not purchasing books by Trump or Trump-adjacent people, but where does it stop? I wonder what they would do about Jenny McCarthy’s books since she is famously anti-vaccine? And there are plenty of pro-environment books that are shaky, if not downright terrible, on actual science.
I get that it is not easy to make these decisions. They cannot buy every single book. Do they not buy new copies of Too Kill A Mockingbird because of the racism? This library has so far not purchased Trans or Material Girls, but I don’t know if that is because of the subject matter or because they are relatively obscure (in the States anyway). But it worries me.
Amy, I think the point is that it was a white man who “saved” Boo Radley. That is not acceptable, even though in the place and time where that book was set makes that the only plausible situation. And you may not want to quote me on this, because I”m not 100% sure that’s the reason; it’s what I heard.
A white man who tried to save Tom Robinson (Boo Radley was the recluse). It’s a “white savior” book. Honestly I think that’s a fair criticism, and it’s always bothered me some, even before “white savior” was part of the dialect. It is all about the consciences of the white people, and Robinson is mostly a prop. Should it be thrown out of libraries? No. Are there better novels? Thousands.
I think it’s better on childhood than on race. It’s a better “what it’s like to be a small child in a small Southern town in the 30s” novel than it is an anti-racism novel.
No Huck Finn, then.
Huck Finn has been contentious for a long time. On the upside it’s also a masterpiece.
Oh, my bad. Since I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird, I was sort of using what was written above. Should have googled. I will now go sit in the corner and write on my chalkboard a hundred times “I will be more cautious when I speak of things of which I am not fully informed”.
I saw the film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I have not read the book. But if the plot had invoved a black lawyer and a black defendant in a Southern town in the 1930s, it would have created a very different film with a very different social purpose and outcome; black victim, black saviour; white oppositon and white racism to be overcome. Whites in the audiences would have varied in their responses, from sympathy right down to contempt and hostility. Blacks would have had a different set of reactions yet again.
As the film played out, white women in the audience had characters to identify with, and as well all whites, particularly men, had the heroic white lawyer played by the iconic Gregory Peck as their own mentor and hero, if they so chose.
A nice touch was Gregory Peck’s shooting of a rabid street dog right at the start. Symbolism, anyone?
@12
Yeah, I get that the narrative is certainly dated at least. It’s one of my favorites but I get that not everyone feels the same. Mostly I’m just irrationally more irritated at liberal book-banners than at conservative ones.
iknklast @ 16 hahahahaha it’s not a big deal. I assumed it was just a spoonerism, thinking of one character & naming another.
Omar – there are more possibilities though than just changing the white lawyer to a black lawyer. Tom Robinson could have been the central character instead of Atticus Finch, to name just one. Or it could be essentially the same plot but with a lot more space and attention given to Tom Robinson and his family and friends. But it isn’t, and that’s not a crime, but I find it easy to see why it would grate on a lot of people now. He’s only there to provide a heroic role for Atticus and a motive for Ewell’s revenge.
OB: And that means that the film is hoist on the petard of the modern reality that it helped to build; in its own modest way.
Not the film so much. I’m still talking about the book, and libraries, and libraries removing books for dubious reasons.