Burning and banning books has an evil reputation and for good reason. It conjures up images of demented zealots besieging a school demanding that students’ minds be kept closed. But nowadays the calls are coming from inside the school. At least the government school.
One might dismiss as an isolated antic the news that the Peel District School Board, just west of Toronto so part of our Galactic Megalopolis, has been purging its library of all books published before 2008 as double-plus-ungood. But given the tendency of government-run schools to promote the state agenda, and its increasingly aggressive post-modernism, it’s much wiser to treat it as an urgent warning sign about the goals of the people the state wants raising your children instead of you doing it.
No, really. If you stagger through the bromides and woke babble on the PDSB website you encounter gems like “Your children are our children.” No they are not. The state does not own its citizens. Though it did under Communism and fascism.
As under Communism and fascism it erased the past. Particular in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge declared 1975 “Year Zero” and erased all previous culture and traditions along with anyone who wore glasses on the theory that they could read. And now it’s here, soft and insidious but determined and venomous.
In getting rid of everything ever written by anyone not exactly like them, the School Board is supposedly looking for three warning signs. One is that a book is falling apart, and fair enough. Another is that nobody’s reading it. Which could mean it’s lousy, or that students are not being challenged sufficiently to stretch their minds. But the third is ideological impurity.
It’s not as though they didn’t have room in the library for, say, The Diary of Anne Frank, whose removal seems particularly ominous. The National Post reports that “Reina Takata, a Grade 10 student, said a librarian told her and other students that ‘if the shelves look emptier right now, it’s because we have to remove all books (published) prior to 2008.’” So the problem is that they didn’t have room in their minds for any dissenting opinion even on minute points of woke etiquette.
If students are very lucky, the shelves will only refill with things that recall Conrad Black’s denunciation of Canadian journalism in the 1990s as an “overwhelming avalanche of soft, left, bland, envious pap”. They will have the same tiresome characters, insipid plots, tedious moralizing on the same small selection of points, and deliberate inculcation of resentment and psychological fragility.
Of course the PDSB also burbles that “We have a responsibility, under the Ontario Human Rights Code, the Education Act and the board’s policies and procedures, and a moral obligation to ensure all students feel safe and included in our school communities.” But try standing up for traditional social values, or putting a Red Ensign on your backpack, and see how “safe and included” you feel.
Heck, just ask for a copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the library. Even though it’s a powerfully anti-racist book, it’s not the book these myrmidons would have written if they were Mark Twain and since they’re not, he’s got to go lest they should feel inadequate.
One of the demoralizing aspects of this movement it its mediocrity. The favoured books, the activists’ shallow understanding, their trite rhetoric, everything confirms Chesterton’s biting observation that “all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like…. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.”
Heaven help us if it is. And of course we do not live in a totalitarian society. But neither did Cambodians until the Khmer Rouge marched into their capital, cheered on by the New York Times whose scandalous headline “Indochina Without Americans/ For Most, A Better Life” ran four days before Cambodia fell and was datelined Phnom Penh.
Nor did the French until the Revolutionary regime that not coincidentally made 1789 “Year I” (and then 1792), renamed all the months boring things like “Thermidor” and “Brumaire”, abolished the week and the hour in favour of a decimal system and created a new ersatz religion. All while killing anyone who objected or, they thought, might do so, in a murderous frenzy of identity politics.
Think they’ve got Carlyle’s The French Revolution on those PDSB shelves? No. Nor Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its chilling warning that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” (Which former Finance Minister Joe Oliver just invoked in a different context expecting his audience to get the reference, and the point.)
The episode should also remind teachers, of all people, of the possibly apocryphal favourable account of Caliph Omar ordering the final destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 642 AD because “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.” If, that is, you’ve heard of the Library of Alexandria. And are allowed to criticize Islam, rather than just Christianity. Except now the one and only text is Jaxx has Three Genitalsor something desperately lacking even the Koran’s literary merit. Sorry, Qur’an.
Obviously Canada has deep cultural roots that are resistant to tyranny, political and ideological. But it also has a government determined to bring in about a million people a year from places that don’t have such roots. And my guess is those school libraries won’t be carrying any books that express concerns about immigration either.
So here’s a book by a dead white British guy that they should stock, and get students to read while they still can. As soon as teachers have struggled through it, I mean.
It’s called On Liberty and it’s by John Stuart Mill. And it contains such stirring, or to the snowflake disquieting, passages as: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.”
Led by authority sounds good to the teachers, I suppose. But not to me… or Mill, who also has some choice things to say about public schooling after first inventing school vouchers with “If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them.”
Mill then delivers this thundering denunciation, by his standards, against actual state schools: “The objections which are urged with reason against State education, do not apply to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State’s taking upon itself to direct that education: which is a totally different thing. That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as any one in deprecating. All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”
So no, it’s not an isolated antic. It’s a warning sign that, if allowed to control the schools, the state will attempt not only to fill students’ minds with its doctrines, but also deprive them of the strength of character necessary to push back.
Don’t let them.
