Killing a mockingbird

According to a story in today’s Toronto Star, St. Edmund Campion Secondary School in Brampton has chosen to withdraw To Kill a Mockingbird from its tenth grade English curriculum, following a complaint from a lone parent about a racial epithet used in the book.

Although it remains available in the school’s library, the book will no longer be included in any of its lesson plans, despite the fact that the staff considers it a valuable tool for discussing race at a school with a substantial black population. With less than a month to go before the start of the school year, the teachers still don’t know what they’ll be teaching instead of the controversial book.

“There will always be a small number of people to take offence to words, images and ideas in books and think that the best way to protect society is to remove them,” says Franklin Carter of the Freedom of Expression committee of the Book and Periodical Council. “But in the long run, it is illiberal, arbitrary – and censorship usually fails. People will read what they want to read anyway.”

This is small consolation for what many, myself included, would consider a regrettable decision. The tenth grade classrooms at St. Edmund Campion won’t be allowed to discuss the history of racism within the context of a classic novel, just because that novel happens to contain a word that happens to be an unfortunate but highly relevant part of that history.

The folks at Quill and Quire responded by conceding that “school boards are always in a tough spot when it comes to parental complaints,” but countered that “there must be some way of heading off lone bigmouths.” They also point to a current campaign by a Jewish group in Germany, calling for the nation to lift its ban on Mein Kampf so that it might be published in a new edition that includes academic commentary on the evils of Nazism.

Not that everyone thinks To Kill a Mockingbird is such a revolutionary book. When I mentioned this earlier today, my friend Josh pointed me towards an article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he argues that the book’s supposed call for civil rights was really more of an appeal to southern liberalism.

But that’s Gladwell’s opinion, and the point is that it’s an opinion that won’t be discussed in St. Edmund Campion’s classrooms this year. Not unless the media attention resulting from this decision prompts a discussion of its own.

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