Most Canadians are not aware that there is a movement afoot by the educational bureaucracy to purge school libraries of “harmful” and “hateful” books. Of course, what is “harmful” and “hateful” is a subjective analysis by those who see themselves as the anointed of enlightened opinion that we must all accept.
Dissenting views are treated as a disease from which society must be vaccinated by the removal of the written word. Improper words are feared. They are the catalyst for the epidemic of ideas that run contrary to accepted opinion. Therefore, by definition, they are malevolent and dangerous. Books containing such must be destroyed.
While Bradbury’s “firemen” have not yet commenced their residential burnings of those houses containing contraband books, we are now seeing school boards take it upon themselves to be Bradbury’s lackeys and ensure dissent will not surface in schools. Thousands of books deemed “hateful” or “harmful” are now being expunged from school libraries. The hardback covers are ripped from the spine and put in the landfill, while the pages are sent for recycling. This is obviously a more environmentally favourable approach than Bradbury’s burnings—though perhaps, for such ecological heresy, Bradbury’s own novel is meeting the same fate as John Milton’s.
Proponents of the all-digital information age argue that all books are available online. “The problem with that,” Farquharson said, “is anything online can be revised.” I am sure that if Orwell were here now, he would concur.
“When you remove a book from a collection for any reason,” says Farquharson, “you are denying someone access to that information. That’s censorship.”
Not only are the students disadvantaged but so too are the teachers, who are “very reluctant to have those kinds of conversations because they’re concerned about being accused of something and being disciplined.” The students, he said, “are reluctant to challenge anything [as] it might be reflected in a poor mark.”
“It’s systemic now, I would say, in education, in order to align thinking a certain way. And it is a dangerous direction,” Farquharson said. “The purge of the books is an example, like a physical example, of what this looks like.”
There is, he said, a “non-financial cost,” which is the lack of access to information. “It’s priceless because you can’t quantify that. ... Those opportunities to access information are gone. And that’s forever. Those books will never be back anywhere, and some of them were very expensive, irreplaceable books.”
Sadly, “we now have prevented this generation, [and] future generations, to learn from those eras and contextualize them appropriately, because now they don’t have the opportunity to access it. That is really the shame of this, is that you have now denied learning opportunities.”
As Bradbury’s character, Guy Montag, observed: “And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.”
As Milton famously said, he “who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.”
The purpose of books is to allow us to form ideas. Wrestling those ideas to the ground of understanding helps in part with what we know to be true based upon our life experience and individual reason. We cannot accept ideas simply because the self-proclaimed anointed tell us what to believe.
As Winston aptly put it in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” “If there is hope it lies in the proles.” Indeed, the common person has obtained much wisdom from his daily experience that baffles those who purge books. It is us, the proles, the common people, who must answer the cry for the restoration of common sense and keep in our libraries the works of Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and yes, the Bible too.
Otherwise, the worst fears of Milton, Orwell, and Bradbury will be at our own doors sooner than we think.
