News that an Ontario school board had removed books from its library based solely on their publication date (prior to 2008)—allegedly to meet a provincial government mandate aimed at better inclusivity and diversity—has raised hackles across the nation. And so it should.
The waves of book banning taking place in recent years, with those on the far right and ultra-woke both taking aim at tomes that offend their sensibilities, should raise alarm.
Some credit should be given to the provincial government for walking back this ill-advised attempt at washing history of, well of what still isn’t very clear, although the claim that the directive was never issued has been met with a great deal of skepticism. It should be noted that Island libraries assert they never received any such directive, and the Rainbow District School Board is adamant that no such policy has ever been instituted in schools under its jurisdiction.
Good.
The wave of outrage that erupted when it was suggested that books such as ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ were pulled from the shelves of schools led the Peel board to assert that was never the case—although it is noted that books might have been pulled due to their being weathered and worn to too great a degree to retain.
There is no doubt that there are books that should never grace the shelves of elementary school libraries, and some that might be best left off those of high school shelves as well… Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ readily springs to mind. Books that exhort or attempt to elicit hate among their readers would best be left to higher academic levels, it can legitimately be argued, but outright banning should not be countenanced.
It is, of course, a challenging line to define and draw. But that line should always be carved with great care—not by an arbitrary or careless hand.
There is currently a fair bit of backlash to the so-called “woke” cadres who advocate the pulling down of statues, renaming of streets, schools and public works. Too often those lines are drawn without proper consideration of context or even evidence (witness the attempts to pillory the abolitionist Dundas). The bathwater is rarely checked for babies in the rush to condemnation. Reactionism is not a sound basis for public policy.
We can look to history for glaring examples of the path down which those who would ban, or burn, books would lead us. This is not a question of right or left ideology. The left’s zeal to banish hatred and exclusion from our midst can be just as dangerous as the right’s hysteria over gay depictions in books. It behooves us all to be mindful of what we are doing and to be extremely careful when it comes to what we include in the literary diet of our youth.
History has plenty of signposts laid out for the unwary, but if we ban the records of those roads best not travelled, future generations will inevitably find their way down those paths.
Freedom isn’t easy.
