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A book-banning controversy in Surrey schools that made headlines a week and a half ago is no ban at all. And the controversy tells us that our school system is working as it should.
But first, let’s look at the so-called ban. In a November decision that only recently received public scrutiny, the Surrey school district removed four books from its list of recommended materials for high school English courses: Of Mice And Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian, and In The Heat Of The Night.
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The provincial high school curriculum does not name books, plays, and other texts students are to study. Rather, it is a competencies-based curriculum where students learn how to read and examine texts — any texts.
Approving recommended materials such as novels is up to the district, which must have a policy in place for selecting books. Surrey’s recommended materials list still contains modern classics such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a period piece about slavery’s intergenerational effects.
A book removed from Surrey’s recommended materials list is not banned from classrooms. It is not removed from school libraries either. A teacher who still wishes to use a non-recommended book must get approval and must make the case that the book is appropriate for the course and that the teacher can provide any context that students need in order to study it.
The four books in question — Of Mice And Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian, and In The Heat Of The Night — are some of the most frequently challenged school books in Canada and the United States. Reactionaries have challenged them for sex, violence, and profanity. Wokes have challenged the same books, but have raised different objections. They have objected to how the books portray African-Americans, other racialized minorities, and women. There have also been objections to the multiple times the authors Harper Lee and John Ball, who are white, use the “n-word” in Mockingbird and In The Heat Of The Night respectively.
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Any young person who wants to read these books can still easily get their hands on them. They can go to the public library or even their Surrey school library to get them. All of these books have considerable literary merit and carry strong moral messages, including anti-racist messages, that have resonated with generations of youngsters. However, in Surrey schools, no young person who does not see the experiences of people like them truly represented in these books will be forced to read them. Young people who are Black, and other IBPOC youth, will not be asked to read the “n-word” over and over to get through an assigned text.
It is a fact that we live in a multicultural and multi-racial society. It is a fact that Surrey schools are multi-cultural and multi-racial as well. In such schools, and in such a society, we must learn to accommodate one another. Surrey’s decision about these four texts is what that accommodation looks like. The district should be credited for accommodating by listening to differences, sharing space on classroom book shelves, and for not denying anyone’s wish to read — or not read — these books. This is no book ban and this is not censorship. It is merely what a functioning, diverse community looks like.
Jason Ellis in a historian of education and an associate professor in the department of educational studies at the University of B.C.
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