Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry were among hundreds of books missing from an Ontario public high school library when school opened in September 2023. Grade 10 student Reina Tanaka and her friends couldn’t believe their eyes and decided to voice their concerns. It made CBC TV’s The National and attracted the attention of the New York Post and news outlets around the globe.
In May of last year, Tanaka reported to CBC News that the shelves at Erindale Secondary School in the Peel District School Board (PDSB) were full of books. When she returned to school this fall, rows and rows were half empty. She estimated that 50 per cent of the book collection was gone. Students were told by Erindale S.S. school staff that “if the shelves look emptier right now it’s because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008.”
The PDSB students, parents and community members, with the support of a public interest action group, Libraries not Landfills, protested the book removal and destruction. What they discovered was that it stemmed from the local board’s implementation of a recent Ministry of Education provincial directive. “Weeding out books” utilizing an “equity lens” had somehow morphed into stripping the shelves of books published before 2008. In other Peel schools, it had been used to cull well-known middle school books such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.
The founder of Libraries Not Landfills, PDSB parent Tom Ellard, said it was teachers who initially reached out to them objecting to the weeding process. “Who’s the arbiter of what’s the right material to go in the library, and who’s the arbiter of what’s wrong in our libraries? That’s unclear,” he told CBC News. “It’s not clear to the teachers who’ve provided us this material, and it’s not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer.” Erindale student Tanaka was blunter in stating that it might preclude discussing controversial topics and smacked of “censorship.”
Ontario’s education minister Stephen Leece reacted quickly with a September 13 directive ordering the Ontario school district to immediately stop its so-called “weeding” of school libraries based upon a policy removing books published before 2008, based on new board guidelines.
“Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities. It is offensive, illogical and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada’s history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics,” Lecce wrote in a statement.
Throwing out the library books at Erindale Secondary School provoked incredible outrage, judging from letters to the editor, social media traffic and mushrooming support for the “Libraries Not Landfills” campaign. A contributor to The Toronto Star eventually offered up a lame defense, attempting to justify “curation” as a means of ensuring democratic balance and diversity.
School libraries have lost their status in high schools as the new generation of students and teaching staff gravitate, more and more, to online sources. Some high school libraries, including the one at Erindale S.S. have even been rebranded as “learning centres.” Back in 2014, almost a decade ago, that library was revamped and renamed the “Erindale SS Library Learning Commons” marking a shift from hard copy books to online resources. Downgrading books is part of a longer-term trend in most high schools.
Purging school libraries of the modern classics is now a critical issue in the simmering education culture war in Canada. Applying an “equity lens” when it comes to culling high school library collections can have dire and unexpected consequences when students, parents and the public get wind of what’s happening with little or no consultation whatsoever. Lets wait and see whether the Ontario Education Minister can straighten out the whole mess stemming from his own earlier directive.
What is the role of a high school library in 21st century schools? With students completely wedded to social media and mostly “uncurated” online sources, where are kids going to find and easily access the original texts of classics, old and new? Does everything have to be filtered through a so-called “equity lens” at the high school level?
Educhatter 