Ontario Minister of Education Stephen Lecce has ordered the Peel District School Board (PDSB) to “immediately end [the] practice” of removing books from libraries, after a school in the district was reported to have removed classic books from the school’s library.
“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, anti-Semitism or celebrated literary classics,” Lecce said in a statement on Wednesday.
Yet a review of the education ministry’s policy directive suggests PDSB was acting on the ministry’s direction in conducting the book audit that led to titles being pulled from shelves.
Provincial directive to evaluate books
On November 7, 2019, Lecce requested a review of the PDSB after that board’s former chair and vice-chair requested assistance and intervention from the ministry.
“At the time, the PDSB was publicly dealing with issues of anti-Black racism, discord in senior leadership, and governance issues,” write Ena Chadha, Suzanne Herbert and Shawn Richard, who conducted the PDSB review and subsequently published a report in February 2020.
Their report recommends that “PDSB undertake a comprehensive diversity audit of schools — including naming, mascots, libraries and classrooms. This should include evaluating books, media and other resources currently being used in schools.”
After receiving the report, the ministry issued a set of directives to the PDSB. Directive 18 reads:
“The Board shall… undertake a comprehensive diversity audit of schools, which shall include naming, mascots, libraries and classrooms. The Board shall evaluate books, media and all other resources currently in use for teaching and learning English, History and Social Sciences for the purpose of utilizing resources that are inclusive and culturally responsive, relevant and reflective of students, and the Board’s broader school communities.”
It was this directive that led the PDSB to create a three-step “equitable curation cycle” for books in PDSB libraries, the CBC reported this week.
According to the CBC, under the first step, librarians review books published 15 or more years ago and apply the Canadian School Libraries’ MUSTIE method (which looks at whether a book is Misleading, Ugly, Superseded, Trivial, Irrelevant and Elsewhere).
For the second step, they evaluate whether resources promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity. And for the third step, they conduct a representation audit to assess whether books and other resources reflect student diversity, the CBC reported.
Late Wednesday night, PDSB Director of Education Rashmi Swarup published a statement asserting that neither the province nor board had directed librarians to remove specific classic titles.
“To be clear, books such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and the Harry Potter series remain in our collections, and where needed, newer versions may be purchased if the book is in poor condition. PDSB teacher librarians have not been given the direction to remove all books published with a publication date older than 2008, nor has the board received provincial direction to remove particular books from our collections,” Swarup wrote.
Swarup’s statement notes that “The Peel District School Board follows the library weeding guidelines set by the Canadian School Libraries Association.”
These guidelines — referred to as “Equity-informed weeding” guidelines — are published on the Canadian School Libraries’ website. The guidelines outline the MUSTIE method, explain why weeding is an equity issue and explain what taking an equity stance to weeding means.
A section of the guidelines entitled “Decolonizing Libraries,” which explains why weeding is essential to address concerns about the representation of Indigenous peoples and their role in history, culture and society, states that: “It is likely that a thorough weeding may leave the shelves a bit bare.”
‘Erases history’
“It is entirely reasonable for a school library to restrict content in ways that a public library should not,” Nomi Claire Lazar, a social sciences professor at the University of Ottawa, told Canadian Affairs. She cited the right to vote, to drive, to marry and to give sexual consent as other ways society passes age-appropriate restrictions.
“The issue is, instead, the criteria and the care with which the task was carried out,” Lazar said. “The notion that ‘outdated’ material has no place in a library, for example, is deeply wrong headed.” Even if that was not the intent of the policy, doing so “essentially erases history in general and intellectual history specifically.”
“Probably, the reckless criteria and lack of care are a result of some combination of poor policy design, poor communication of that policy design, a lack of available time to execute the task with care, and fear of making mistakes,” Lazar said.
Federal Conservative politicians have attributed the book removals to an “authoritarian” intellectual movement.
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre tweeted: “Authoritarian wokeism is a growing threat to our freedom. We must fight back to stop the censorship and restore free expression.”
And the party’s deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, tweeted that “Libraries have become the newest target by a movement that claims to pursue equity while actually practicing authoritarianism.”
