Quill & Quire: 2008 May 20
Derek Weiler
As the Toronto Star reports, the Toronto District School Board has removed a Barbara Coloroso book from its high school curriculum.
Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide
had been selected as a resource for a new Grade 11 history course about genocide and crimes against humanity, but the book and the course came under review after they were challenged by members of the Canadian Turkish community.
While the board’s review committee decided to remove Coloroso’s book from
the curriculum, deeming it “far from a scrupulous text,” the Armenian genocide
will still be taught in the course.
The move comes two years after the same school board limited access to Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes (Groundwood Books), a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, to students in Grade 7 or older. There’s been no comment or statement on the Extraordinary Evil situation from the book’s publisher, Penguin Canada, which had not returned messages from Q&Q at the time of this post. But Groundwood publisher Patsy Aldana has released an open letter to the board; it appears in full below.
Dear Trustees and staff of the TDSB,
As the publisher of Groundwood Books I am suffering from déjà vu. Once again you are succumbing to pressure and pulling a book. This is the THREE WISHES controversy all over again.
I am also the publisher of a different book on genocide currently listed for your course. In light of this decision I have to wonder for how long. Our book GENOCIDE: a Groundwork Guide by Jane Springer presents a different definition of genocide from Coloroso’s though our book also describes the events in Armenia as genocide. As in the case of THREE WISHES it would seem that Coloroso’s book among others was originally selected by knowledgeable people for a reason. Now all of a sudden it’s “inappropriate.”
What is offensive in your decision is that it reflects what seems to have become the TDSB’s habitual response to pressure – get rid of books that are “problematic.” This is a Grade 11 course – thus obviating the weasel words “age inappropriate” used in the THREE WISHES case. Is Barbara Coloroso’s argument unworthy of being considered, discussed, debated? Bernard Lewis is a noted Islamophobe and yet you seem to have included him in your course. Why not – isn’t the point of education to stimulate critical thinking? Or have you already decided what kids should think about this difficult topic in advance?
As a citizen of Canada, as a resident of Toronto, as a book publisher, as a human being I find the TDSB’s reflexive instinct to censor problematic, contentious, or (in the view of one group or another) incorrect books and their points of view deeply disturbing. Have you learned nothing? Our children need, urgently, to be educated to be critical thinkers capable of drawing their own conclusions based on a range of ideas. TDSB does not seem to embrace this principle, quite the contrary. You are once again doing the children you have been charged with educating a terrible injustice.
I condemn your withdrawal of this book. It is deplorable. It is inexcusable. And I wonder what book will you be afraid to give to our children next?
Patricia Aldana
Groundwood Books
http://tinyurl.com/69tdal
