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The Diary of a Young Girl by Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the massively popular Harry Potter series, and the Newberry Medal-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry about racial conflict in 1930s Mississippi are some notable examples of books that 10th grader Reina Takata can no longer find in her public high school library in Ontario, Canada. Why not? Because those titles were culled as part of a new “equity-based” weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board (PDSB) last spring, leaving library shelves as bare as supermarket shelves in Biden’s America.
Miss Takata told CBC Toronto that the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books as recently as May, but gradually began to empty out. When she returned to school in the fall, “I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.” (Takata herself took the photo above, of the bookshelves in her Mississauga high school’s library.) She estimates that more than half of her school’s library books are gone.
Libraries across Canada and in the United States have long followed standard weeding plans to dispose of damaged or outdated books; this is understandable and reasonable. But Reina Takata and many other students and parents are concerned that this new process emphasizing the leftist buzzwords “equity” and “inclusion” seems to have led some schools to remove thousands of books simply because they were published in 2008 or earlier.
Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers, and community members, says it has no issue with standard weeding but is concerned about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date. The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like “inclusivity” are to be interpreted from school to school.
In a May 8th board committee meeting about the equitable weeding process, trustee Karla Bailey complained that “there are so many empty shelves” in the schools. “When you talk to the librarian in the library, the books are being weeded by the date, no other criteria,” Bailey told the committee. “None of us have an issue with removing books that are musty, torn, or racist, outdated. But by weeding a book, removing a book from a shelf, based simply on this date is unacceptable. And yes, I witnessed it.”
“Who’s the arbiter of what’s the right material to go in the library, and who’s the arbiter of what’s wrong in our libraries? That’s unclear,” Tom Ellard, a PDSB parent and the founder of Libraries not Landfills, told CBC Toronto. “It’s not clear to the teachers who’ve provided us this material, and it’s not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer.”
It’s clear to the PDSB, though, which seems to believe that progressive ideology is the arbiter. The board issued a statement that explained, “Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data are removed.” So far, so good. But the board added that older titles can stay in the collection if they are “accurate, serve the curriculum, align with board initiatives and are responsive to student interest and engagement.” [Emphasis added]
Translation: titles older than 2008 can stay on the shelves as long as the content doesn’t challenge the prevailing woke worldview that the curriculum promotes.
“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,” declared the board.
And therein lies the problem, because we all know who gets to decide what is relevant and inclusive: the progressive activists who utterly dominate schools and libraries, and who have a woke agenda to control what information and ideas are available to the young, malleable minds of their students.
CBC Toronto reviewed internal PDSB documents, which include a manual for the process titled “Weeding and Audit of Resource in the Library Learning Commons collection.” The documents lay out an “equitable curation cycle” for weeding, which it says was created to support Directive 18 from the Minister of Education based on a 2020 Ministry review and report on systematic discrimination within the PDSB. Directive 18 instructs the board to complete a diversity audit of schools:
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.
PDSB’s “equitable curation cycle” is described in the board document as “a three-step process that holds Peel staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate, so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant.” [Emphasis added]
First, teacher librarians were instructed to focus on reviewing books that were published 15 or more years ago — so, in 2008 or earlier. Then, librarians were to go through each of those books and consider the criteria of the “MUSTIE” acronym adapted from Canadian School Libraries:
- Misleading – information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete.
- Unpleasant – refers to the physical condition of the book, may require replacement.
- Superseded – book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource.
- Trivial – of no discernible literary or scientific merit; poorly written or presented.
- Irrelevant – doesn’t meet the needs and interests of the library’s community.
- Elsewhere – the book or the material in it may be better obtained from other sources.
Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by “resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity.” Step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
Keep in mind what these innocuous-sounding terms actually mean:
- “Anti-racism” is not opposition to racism, but discrimination against whites, since only whites are deemed to have the political power to be racist;
- Similarly, “equity” is not “equality”; as the bestselling author of How to be an Anti-Racist Ibram X. Kendi (real name Ibram Henry Rogers) himself admits, equity is present discrimination to remedy past discrimination;
- “Inclusivity” and “diversity” mean the embrace of identity politics, which is by its very nature divisive, and which includes only the left’s designated victim categories; it excludes the “heteronormative” white males and anti-feminist women who are deemed to belong to the oppressor category. (It goes without saying that “inclusivity” also excludes people with opinions and beliefs that are on “the wrong side of history.”)
- “Cultural responsiveness” refers to those books that support and promote the prevailing cultural trends, i.e. wokeness; insufficiently woke classics from eras prior to our current state of enlightenment (i.e. before 2008) are considered to be “causing harm” and therefore cannot even be donated, as “they are not suitable for any learners.”
Trustee and chair of the board David Green told CBC Toronto that the weeding process “rolled out wrong.” Indeed it did. He said the board has asked the Director of Education to make sure that if books are being culled simply because they’re older, “then that is stopped, and then the proper process is followed.”
A motion was passed at a May 24 board meeting to ensure that, going forward, those weeding books during the anti-racist and inclusive phase of the curation cycle would need to document the title and reason for removal before any books were disposed of. That’s not nearly enough; the curation cycle should include no anti-racist and inclusive phase whatsoever.
For all of the Left’s shrill, false charges that conservatives are frenzied, anti-intellectual book-banners, it is the totalitarians of wokeness who are actively engaging in the online stealth editing of classic fiction, the mob cancellation of insufficiently woke authors, and the quiet culling of books from library shelves to accommodate the ideological requirements of “equity” and “inclusion.”
This neo-Marxist agenda is being perpetrated, meanwhile, at the same time that its fanatical activists are hell-bent on ensuring that school libraries stock pornographic works of gender ideology aimed at prematurely instilling a sexual consciousness in very young schoolchildren. Parents who object to this blatant grooming are smeared as bigots and investigated by federal law enforcement as domestic terror threats, because leftists don’t believe in parental rights; they believe the State should be raising our children.
Although the aforementioned “equity” book weeding policy was implemented in Canada, make no mistake – a similar woke targeting of the West’s literary heritage will be coming to school libraries in America, if it hasn’t already, and possibly even to public libraries and bookstores as well. And this agenda to erase the West’s literary heritage is only going to intensify unless and until it is stopped in its tracks by a determined, righteously fearless opposition.
Meanwhile, anyone who cares about passing that heritage on to the next generation should begin collecting and hoarding physical copies of classic books in home libraries, because our school libraries, public libraries, and bookstores today by and large no longer see themselves as the caretakers of that civilizational legacy but as the agents of a revolution against it.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.
White is the color of insanity.
Canada has gone white.
All,
How about the destruction of the library of Alexandria.
Ah yes, classical precedent.
I can’t help worrying that the superb Library of America series of scholarly editions, printed on acid-free paper, of the entire canon of American literature from its earliest beginnings in the 17th century to the present, is also, or soon will be, on their List of “offensive” works to be destroyed, and the LoA program eliminated.
Sadly, the war on library science has new allies that are well-supplied from the woke thugs.
Keep your books. Not merely for their physical value, but for their timeless value. These thugs know nothing about either value of a well-filled library.
Ironically, I’d wager that “Fahrenheit 454” would also be removed from the shelves for two reasons.
¹ The book eerily describes what these leftist fools are doing (the same fools that decry “book burning” in response to conservative rubes insisting that gay porn be removed from grammar school libraries).
² The author confronted the fat slob Moore over his titling his fraudulent documentary “Fahrenheit 911”. Childish leftists take everything personally.
I re-read Fahrenheit 454 and 1984 recently (it had been years). They will no doubt be the target of “cleansing” by these idiot fascists. These 2 books are must-reads as they are eerily prophetic – how did these authors know what our world would look like today? Or did they just write something that sounded so outlandish, insane and impossible to imagine (in their time) and as our world gets weirder by the day, these prophecies are coming true?
The authors knew because the seeds of what they wrote about were already in the works. It’s been going on for many years now. We just weren’t paying attention.
These two books are, indeed, required reading now that the woke herd has broke through with what they are doing to mankind’s heritage of books. It’s been happening for many years. For years I visited my home town, and would visit the local public library and the town’s college library. Each time, it was clear that collections were being culled. More and more open space – that is to say really – empty space.
Cousin Ray Bradbury was no idiot. Perhaps, we each had that memory of Salem 1692 with its own herd of true believers going against their neighbors…
I keep every book I purchase. I save books – even on a pdf format. I must have a library now in the thousands as it is quite clear to me – these people are building themselves up for a real removal of the past for that ‘year zero’ state of being the left loves.
For myself, growing up, I heard the stories of our ancestry. How those ancestors left for the ‘island’ – Nantucket. They left to get away from the insane bigots who used religion for personal gain. I am quite certain that the Capt. Joseph Gardner, who was asked to speak to the one they pressed to death was my 7th grandfather. Sadly, Mercy Short was my direct ancestor, and was used to fuel the insane witch madness. It didn’t just happened. It was allowed to happened, and really – it only stopped because the accusers ‘suggested’ the new Royal Governor’s wife was a witch, and the Governor put a stop to them. Some, after, rejected what they had done in the craze. Judge Hathorne didn’t. His wife – a second cousin… But, many tried to cover-over the evil they did to their neighbors.
This clearing out of books ‘we’ don’t like has legs for serious harm in it. First the books – then the people.
So, I would suggest – this is part of the human condition.
“First the books, then the people.” You see the poisonous root of it all.
Although the books are “offensive,” the root of it is in the ideas which sprang from the long history of westernkind. It has never been entirely white, but white people are the hated symbol of western civilization.
Fahrenheit 451°
It is amazing how ‘inclustivy’ excludes all other viewpoints. More malicious LeftTwat language manipulation
If in US, please homeschool, as challenging as that may be.
It was woke in the schools more than 15 years ago, while leftists then (the majority of staff) preened with their superiority and fake compassion. Now, those people and beliefs are passé and incorrect. But they never seem to learn how expendable they are.
I recall back then, early ed. materials pushing Arabic language and the wearing of burkas for little girls and of course, Spanish-Spanish language. They lionized Al Gore and his ranting about “global warming” burning up the world prior to the more vague “climate change” term. And they supported children viewing parents as ‘ignorant’ of all this and so enemies. But, I don’t recall overt sexual materials. It seemingly has progressed according to some long-range plan. Librarians and woke teachers,, be aware that, as woke as you are, you, too, will be expendable.
It is downright diabolical.
Exchange students from Iran flooded the State of Washington in the late 1970s. Quite a few, too many, American young women were foolishly attacked to them. Not a few came to realize the bad decisions they had made befriending them.
Actually, judging by how these people have presented these last few years, one might suspect wokeism was born in the latter half of the 1970s. If true, probably it was hatched in the education departments of state universities. Interestingly, so was woke city planning’s push for huge square box apartment buildings, imo.
If you go through the trouble of re-watching movies and TV shows from the end of WWII on, you will notice that woke-ism was already subtly introduced then. I guess those who controlled the media and who just had used their newly found tool of propaganda to convince America that it is necessary to sacrifice American blood and treasure to defend socialist Internationalism against evil nationalism saw how good it worked and used that tool now to prepare America to become a “diverse” society and to abandon their allegiance to the Northern European stock that founded the country, There certainly was a method to the madness we see today. If you ask cui bono, you just have to look at the new masters of the financial, business, education and political world.
Library used book sales have become treasure troves. All the good stuff gets “discarded.” It’s the only reason I visit the library these days.
In a free society there are no public schools or public libraries.
“Since “public property” is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its “property,” that “property” will always be taken over by some political “elite,” by a small clique which will then rule the public—a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians.” – Ayn Rand
So the poor uneducated people who don’t have access can just go to hell in a rational selfish handcart!
The result might not be that bad though because we, as a society got here with a very few highly educated people, the majority worked with their hands and developed real skills rather than academic nonsense. Today there are far too many academics who have never done a days work in their lives and they are over-educated.
So on reflection I agree with you.
Ah the anointed one cannot comprehend how the poor were educated before there were public school systems or public libraries.
What more needs to be said of the glories of public education than the braying of the uneducated, moronic, idiots such as these.
Take a bow Mo. Seldom have I sense such a jackass.
Largely they weren’t educated. To suggest otherwise is complete ignorance of history.
But hey, keep your elitist insults flying and maybe one day your philosophy degree will come in useful.
To quote my junior school math teacher
“Silence was the stern reply”
How can you agree with me when you haven’t understood my comment? Where in my comment does it say, or is implied, that the poor will be left without any education in a free society?
You seem to have a very pessimistic view of mankind and human nature. It is serfs and slaves that are the ones that are stuck by force of the elite governing with a whip over them in ignorance and poverty, not free men.
Without stating it outright, you are convinced of the Marxist and Christian notion that free men are essentially evil and stupid, or guilty of Original Sin, and must be forced to be good by a moral elite.
Capitalism is the Free Market and what Marxism is ultimately condemning is the freedom of free men in a Free Market because ordinary men are allegedly selfish, and selfishness is allegedly evil. Free men, says Marxism, and Original Sin, cannot be trusted to be moral.
“The political philosophy of collectivism is based on a view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.” – Ayn Rand
Practical solutions do not compute with philosophy degrees.
Philosophy has nothing to with the real and the practical. You have just made a philosophical statement, whether you know it or not.
It is true that most modern philosophies and ancient philosophies are in one way or another divorced from the real and the practical.
“The layman’s error, in regard to philosophy, is the tendency to accept consequences while ignoring their causes—to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as “self-evident” or as an irreducible primary, while negating its preconditions.” – Ayn Rand
“You seem to have a very pessimistic view of mankind and human nature.”
Pot, your kettle is calling.
“Philosophy has nothing to with the real and the practical.”
You are correct sir. You always have nothing to do with the real and the practical. That is why you spend your time accomplishing nothing, being an intellectual, and telling everyone else how to live their lives.
Your anti-Christian bigotry is showing. Yes, Christianity contends that mankind is fallen and prone to sin. You better read The Federalist Papers again. Our Founders and the Constitution’s Framers agreed with this view. Since human nature is fixed and prone to the Seven Deadly Sins, they invented separation of powers, federalism, an independent judiciary, and other devices as safeguards against consolidation of power (which they defined as tyranny and despotism). Marxism, on the other hand, is built on the Big Lie that human nature is malleable and people are good by nature—why it never foresees the rise of butchers like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Min, Pol Pot, etc., etc. In real life the Marxist maxim “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs,” requires gulags and executions to enforce.
You really do live in la-la land, don’t you.
Saint George of Minneapolis died in 2020, any book published before year zero should be burned, except “Heather has two Mommies.”
Maybe they picked 2008 as Year Zero because that was the year O (Obama) declared the intention to “transform” at least the U.S. and bring into being this brave new world.
As shown in the Video series “Fall of the Cabal”, this started a LONG time ago. Check it out on Rumble.com
Wow! That’s it!
If a student goes to the library to research a paper about the Reconstruction Era and the modern reappraisal of that time as a brief window of opportunity for ex-slaves vs. the usual image of illiterate plunderers and carpetbaggers etc. it would be necessary to have available Bowers ‘The Tragic Era’ the best history ever done from the ‘racist’ viewpoint. Mind you, one could not write such a paper without refuting Bowers point by point. Tragic Era was certainly weeded out a generation ago.
I suspect “1984”, “Animal Farm” and “Brave New World” have all been expunged from these libraries lest students see the world around them mirrored in the pages of these prescient authors’ books.
They have.
“To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Huckleberry Finn”, Dr Suess, and others also have been purged.
The gay porn stays; the classics go.
No doubt Shakespeare, Keats, Kipling, Shelly, Cervantes have all been tossed out as well.
Shadows of Brave New World. The younger population is increasingly unable to even read such an level of these writers with any meaningful understanding needed.
Shakespeare’s portrait was removed from Penn State U in 2016, and replaced with an activist lackluster poet.
And for the crime of being a white male, his plays have been dropped from English Lit in many universities, including Harvard & Wellesley.
(Only 4 of 52 colleges now require a study in Shakespeare.)
I have begun to buy REAL books for my own personal library and these books are in it. All books that I buy now are REAL books. If I have to store them in my attic I will. I’m absolutely furious at the progressive world today. I’m too old for this!!!
Replace all those classic kids books from Dr. Sueses and those Dick & Jane with NEEDAA NEW BUTT and CAPTIAN UNDERPANTS
And the left dares to call us the “book-banners.”
My niece is a woke librarian at a southern Ohio college.
She told me 4 years ago that she was “passionate” about taking “dead writers” off the shelves.
I asked her if that applied to the dead white male whose poem she had tattooed on her shoulder (Yeats’ Do Not Go Gentle into that Good night).
I have not heard from here since.
Not Yeats — Dylan Thomas. But this retired librarian thinks that your niece (and most of her colleagues) are a shameful embarrassment to a once-noble profession. Just saying.
What a sad situation. Having young family members go woke can be pretty devastating. I know many people who have said that they had an excellent relationship with their grandkids until they went off to college and were changed by the endless varieties of Marxist propaganda. It must be even harder to see family becoming front-line enforcers of the ideology, like your niece. So many families have been divided, as happened in our 19th century Civil War.
How about “people weeding”? I assume that if “people weeding” was “equity-based”, it would be more acceptable than the “people weeding” practiced in Nazi Germany..
THis is complete bull crap.
Correction: should have written, “attracked by them”, not attacked by them.
Sorry.
Actually, such “burning” of books further proves the decline of education in America.
Clearing out History. What is a nation without their History? Socialism must erase truth from the people.
The stocking of American school and public library shelves with LGBTQ
pornographic material for children, including drag Queen sessions for
little kids and subsequent persecution of anyone who objects is indeed
a precursor to the Left’s woke targeting and destruction of the West’s
literary heritage.
Otherwise known as forcing Communist propaganda upon the people.
The Democrats and their Rino uniparty cohorts in trying to get rid of
Trump want to establish a one-party state – where their view only
will be tolerated. Look around at present happenings literally
tearing down America to achieve that goal, especially the invasion
of millions of illegals. Targeting the nation’s libraries is to impose
only ‘the Party’s’ views – and no one elses – on the populace.
Until eventually their thugs make sure you adhere to them.
I have this image of Andrew Carnegie looking down from God’s heaven at the libraries he funded and asking, “Why did I bother?”
Nurse Ratched who I guess is now into Ebonics loves nothing better than weakness in abundance and a good old fashioned book burning albeit not quite as dramatic.
The public library used to be a sanctuary of ideas and emotions. Someone once said that ‘great writers are like stars in the sky: we can see their light long after they have died.’
No more.
This is terrible. Soon Canadian children will not know who who Wayne Gretzky is or who Bobby Orr.
Take as many of these books out of the library and don’t bring them back or go through the trash.
Mark my words, anyone making these decisions will regret it.