Schools Purging All Books from Before 2008 to Guarantee Inclusivity
During China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders urged the Chinese people to destroy the “Four Olds”: habits, customs, cultures and ideas.
Militant “Red Guards” — young people thoroughly radicalized and taught to worship everything new — responded by laying waste to the physical remnants of China’s ancient civilization.
Were such a travesty to repeat itself in the modern West, it might begin in a Canadian school library.
According to CBC, when students in Mississauga, Ontario, returned to school this fall they found that librarians had removed all books published prior to 2008.
“This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books,” said Reina Takata, a Grade 10 student at Erindale Secondary School.
As one might expect, the purge originated in a woke bureaucratic edict.
This year, the Peel District School Board implemented an “equitable curation cycle” for weeding books based on a 2020 directive from the Ontario Ministry of Education.
The curation cycle required a three-step process, the first of which involved identifying books published prior to 2008. Librarians then applied standard criteria for weeding older books, such as low circulation. Thus far, there seemed no cause for controversy.
Trouble began, however, with the curation cycle’s second step. Here the PDSB required librarians to give preference to “resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity.”
The PDSB adopted this step in response to the Education Ministry’s Directive 18.
“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,” Directive 18 read.
Several people, including trustee Karla Bailey, believed that the mass weeding-by-date took place during the curation cycle’s first step.
“When you talk to the librarian in the library, the books are being weeded by the date, no other criteria,” Bailey said at a May 8 board committee meeting.
This would seem to imply that the weeding-by-date had nothing to do with the Education Ministry’s woke directive.
But it did. In fact, anyone who understands authoritarianism and human nature knows that it did.
Consider, for instance, the public statements of education officials.
First, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce wrote to the PDSB to insist that it stop weeding by date alone.
“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.
Then, the PDSB issued a statement.
“The Peel District School Board works to ensure that the books available in our school libraries are culturally responsive, relevant, inclusive, and reflective of the diversity of our school communities and the broader society,” the statement read.
Meanwhile, according to The Globe and Mail, a Canadian news outlet, the PDSB disavowed the librarians’ indiscriminate purge.
“The board countered this week that teacher librarians had not been given direction to remove all books that were published prior to 2008 — and did not take any responsibility for the confusion,” The Globe and Mail story read.
Curiously, neither the CBC nor The Globe and Mail interviewed an actual librarian who took part in the weeding.
In some respects, the omission does not matter. After all, librarians no doubt would have parroted education officials’ rhetoric about “valuing diversity and inclusivity” or some such nonsense.
Librarians did not need specific instructions. They simply knew that in the current climate anything old might be suspect.
Thus, whether they purged those old books during the first or second curation step does not matter. They knew what the second step would demand of them. Subconsciously combining the steps would have made no practical difference.
In fact, indoctrination molds people into that kind of behavior. They anticipate what the authorities will expect and condition themselves to behave accordingly.
The authorities’ own objections to the weeding process illustrated as much.
For instance, what mattered was not that students would lose access to Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” and thousands of other classics simply for the sake of having such time-tested books.
What mattered, according to the bureaucrat Lecce, was that such books “educate students on Canada’s history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics.” Hence, he found their removal “offensive.”
Even Lecce’s language cultivated an authoritarian atmosphere. He showed no concern for students’ intellectual freedom. Instead — in an age when being offended confers moral authority — he took offense.
Librarians notice these things. Everyone does.
In this specific instance, librarians heard or read the phrase “equitable curation cycle.”
They knew that the second step required them to focus on “anti-racism” resources.
Perhaps they also read Directive 18’s demand for “inclusive and culturally responsible” books.
Though they did not yet know, they would not have been surprised to learn that the PDSB took no responsibility. In authoritarian regimes such as those founded on woke lies, responsibility rests everywhere and nowhere.
Lecce and the PDSB might not have wanted every pre-2008 book removed from the school library. That would have taken them too literally.
Then again, when Mao one day denounced the front lawn as a bourgeois luxury, students across China went outside and began pulling grass out of the ground.
They made war on everything old.
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