{"id":379,"date":"2009-02-23T01:03:06","date_gmt":"2009-02-23T01:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=379"},"modified":"2011-07-29T16:01:43","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T16:01:43","slug":"freedom-to-read-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"Freedom to Read Week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pwmartin.blog.uvm.edu\/images\/ftr.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"112\" alt=\"ftr.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s Freedom to Read Week in Canada this week. It&#8217;s interesting to take a look at their list of challenged books to see how many of Canadian literature&#8217;s most canonical texts are on that list, including Margaret Laurence&#8217;s <em>The Diviners<\/em>, Timothy Findley&#8217;s <em>The Wars<\/em>, and Alice Munro&#8217;s <em>Lives of Girls and Women<\/em>. Censorship at all levels is an ongoing issue. Just this past year, as discussed on this blog, there was a challenge to the presence of Margaret Atwood&#8217;s <em>The Handmaid&#8217;s Tale<\/em> on the high school curriculum in Ontario.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s important for us all to speak out against such challenges when they occur, but also to pay attention to the quieter forms of censorship such as when certain books are simply not ordered for school libraries (perhaps we should start protesting when certain books <em>aren&#8217;t<\/em> on the shelves!) or even when teachers avoid putting particular books on the syllabus because they don&#8217;t feel equipped (or paid enough) to handle the reactions that might ensue.<\/p>\n<p>If you start to look through the documented cases of people trying to have particular books pulled from the shelves, you might find your anger and disbelief occasionally turn to laughter. As I was reading through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freedomtoread.ca\/docs\/challenged_books_and_magazines.pdf\">a list of such cases<\/a> that I found on the Freedom to Read website, I came across this entry:<\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">Gill, John (ed.).<\/span> <i><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">New American and Canadian Poetry<\/span><\/i><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">1994<\/span><\/b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">\u00e2\u20ac\u201dThe school board in Sechelt (BC), responding to a parental complaint, removed<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">this book from student use in Chatelech Secondary School.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">Cause of objection<\/span><\/b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">\u00e2\u20ac\u201dAnthology was said to present an anti-establishment view and to<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">present sex and four-letter words in a positive light.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">Update<\/span><\/b><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">\u00e2\u20ac\u201dThe school board decided, following a review, that the book should remain in<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><span style=\"color: #0706B9;\">the library. The sole copy has since been stolen and not replaced.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\">These complaints all sound ridiculous to most people and it&#8217;s easy to dismiss them. But we also cannot be complacent. Our authors deserve to be defended from such actions by all of us. So, the next time you hear of a complaint like this in your town, make sure to call up the school board or library to voice your support for keeping those works on the shelves. And, maybe plan on stopping by the library at a later date just to make sure that book hasn&#8217;t mysteriously disappeared.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"font: 12.0px Helvetica\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Freedom to Read Week in Canada this week. It&#8217;s interesting to take a look at their list of challenged books to see how many of Canadian literature&#8217;s most canonical texts are on that list, including Margaret Laurence&#8217;s The Diviners, Timothy Findley&#8217;s The Wars, and Alice Munro&#8217;s Lives of Girls and Women. Censorship at all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,19,5,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practices","category-canadian-culture","category-canadian-literature","category-teachingadvising","category-worldlit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}