Canada’s annual Freedom to Read Week takes place during the last week of February. With this year marking the 40th anniversary of this important observance, it seems most appropriate that this book, part of Biblioasis’ “Field Notes” series, should be published midway through the week when we pay closer attention to the banning of books.
The author Ira Wells is, among other things, an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. In addition to having work in the Globe and Mail, his writings have appeared in such notable publications as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The New Republic. So, it’s hard to want to dispute the arguments he presents in this little book—one that may be small in size, but is certainly big in ideas.
To aid us in following his several approaches to the issues surrounding censorship, he’s broken his thoughts into sections, each with a distinct focus of its own. These range from the notions of ‘protecting children’ from particular kinds of books, through a comprehensive history of book-banning, as well as chapters on the philosophical foundations for freedom of speech. Although clearly well-researched (his nearly 200 endnotes occupy ten pages in a tiny font at the back of the book), his tone only rarely verges on academese. For the most part, his arguments are straightforward and direct.
As someone who spent nearly two decades employed as a teacher-librarian in British Columbia’ schools, working with students from Kindergarten through Grade 12, I’ll admit that quite a bit of this book hit home. The most frightening actions that Wells relates concern the culling (or, to use the official library term for same, ‘weeding’) of books from library holdings. The most drastic situation he cites is said to have occurred in Ontario’s Peel County District’s schools, where books published before 2008 were pulled from shelves and trashed, all with the goal of protecting children—though truly, I ask: from what?
This arbitrary-sounding dateline for decisions about weeding means that students no longer have access to materials such as Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, or Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. Isn’t it a good thing for students to be able to read about what it must have been like to be a young teen in hiding behind a wall, for the simple reason that she was Jewish? And what about Kogawa’s book, which opened our eyes to the treatment of Japanese-Canadians in our country during World War II? Wells quotes a student, “who is of Japanese descent,” and her observation: “’I think that authors who wrote about Japanese internment camps are going to be erased and that the entire events that went on historically for Japanese-Canadians are going to be removed.’”
That same student, a daily library user, on returning to her school in the autumn of 2023 “was stunned by what she saw: “‘This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.’”
As for the process of weeding, it’s a legitimate and important aspect of managing a library collection. Yet, there are rules guiding the choices librarians make. “The Library Bill of Rights states that weeding should not be used as a deselection tool for controversial materials.”
Books to be weeded are determined by a thought-filled process: is the physical book badly worn or damaged? Has a new edition of the book superseded a particular version of a book’s usefulness? As an example, outdated computer manuals have provided a steady stream of books that need to be pulled from shelves.
But, “‘When you remove a book because you believe it [advocates for] critical race theory, or portrays LGBTQ lives or because you believe it’s too vulgar, that’s not weeding … that’s censorship.’” Yet “The 2023 mass book purge in Ontario’s Peel District schools was characterized as ‘weeding’.” Such mis-naming feels a lot like too many of the pronouncements currently coming from the country to the south of us where (in a county in Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida), even “the Merriam-Webster dictionary, had been banned [because] its descriptions of sexual acts might constitute pornography under Florida law.”
Wells goes on to wave a caution flag over actions he fears may occur during the new presidential term, with its “Project 25, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s nine hundred-page wish list for Donald Trump’s second presidency, [suggesting that it] promises to supercharge book banning.” He cites that document, as it rails against “transgender ideology,” which it determines as pornography, and offers this chilling quote from it: “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who produce and distribute it should be classed as registered sex offenders.’” Wells concludes this cautionary note by saying that “regardless of the degree to which Donald Trump will implement these Heritage Foundation priorities, the censorious impulse woven into Project 2025 isn’t going anywhere, and will seek to effect policy wherever it can.”
But allow me to digress. I’ll admit to having experienced a similar kind of stunned shock as the student who found her library’s shelves devoid of books. Last spring I had occasion to visit the library of the high school where I used to work. An area that had housed the bulk of the non-fiction collection (thousands of books) had been cleared out. But not only had the shelves been emptied, those five banks of shelving had been removed, completely erased—as if that once-solid collection of science books, literature (hello, Shakespeare, are you allowed to be here?), art books, history and more, had never existed. That library, once so familiar to me, had been transformed, like so many of those in the Peel District, “into a Library Learning Commons (LLC), which affirms a student’s right to ‘resources that mirror lived experiences.” In truth, the most engaging items I found in this large, hollow-feeling room were structures that had been fashioned out of Lego. The only saving grace I could hope for with those was that they’d been inspired by and built through the lens of some student’s imagination and hadn’t been constructed according to a set of boxed instructions.
Whereas of course, “We must hear students who emphasize the transformative impact of finding themselves in literature, and ensure that this form of literary engagement is open to all.” Yet we also need to remember that being able to ‘identify’ with a character is not the only mode for engaging with what we read. “Literature is, among other things, a medium for young people to transcend their quotidian reality, generating encounters with lived and unlived experience. Children are avid for knowledge of the world beyond their immediate purview. Grade six students don’t want to live in a cultural space limited to the experience of eleven year-olds.” Nor should they be forced to do so by having most of their choices removed before they can even become aware of the opportunities a free and open library can provide.
While the timing of this book’s release is remarkable, its existence is both important and urgent, its value enduring well beyond the annual week when we decry the banning of books.
While the timing of this book’s release is remarkable, its existence is both important and urgent, its value enduring well beyond the annual week when we decry the banning of books. I can only hope that it will find its way to libraries across the land and that it will remain there beyond any imaginary ‘stale date’ when it might be tossed out. Because really, if we throw away all that makes reference to our past—especially its errors—how can we learn anything from it?
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.
Publisher: Biblioasis (February 25, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 4″ | 184 pages
ISBN: 9781771966634
Heidi Greco lives and writes in Surrey, BC on the territory of the Semiahmoo Nation and land that remembers the now-extinct Nicomekl People. Her most recent book, Glorious Birds (from Vancouver's Anvil Press) is an extended homage to one of her favourite films, Harold and Maude, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021. More info at her website, heidigreco.ca
(Photo credit: George Omorean)
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
- Heidi Grecohttps://miramichireader.ca/author/heidi-greco/
