Back in the day, and we are talking about the free-wheeling 1960s here, Australia was still, politically and culturally speaking, a very conservative country.
So much so, in fact, that a book by Jewish scholar, theologian and philosopher Martin Buber was inadvertently banned. The book was titled Between Man and Man and, without so much as a glance at Buber’s masterwork, government censors decided that this was possibly a topic alien to Australian sensibilities.
The books, destined for Sydney University’s bookstore, sat on the docks for months.
Then someone discovered that Buber’s scholarly thesis simply examined the deepest reality of human life as one involving the relationship between one human being and another.
Joining Buber in a dark corner of a dockside warehouse was a book by revered children’s author Enid Blyton because, again, the censor detected evidence of a questionable relationship between the two characters Noddy and Big Ears.
Now you might, in 2014, think I’m embellishing the story here, were it not for the fact that recently, despite a demand to ban the Dr. Seuss book, Hop on Pop, because it “encourages children to use violence against their fathers,” the Toronto Public Library rejected the request after careful consideration.
“The children are actually told not to hop on Pop,” reads a recently released report by the library’s materials review committee.
Oh. OK. Fine then.
As such, the committee rejected the complainant’s request to remove the book and “issue an apology to fathers in the GTA and pay for damages resulting from the book.”
Where are John Cleese and the Monty Python crew now that we need them?
But there’s more. In addition to Hop on Pop, one anonymous library user sought to ban Lizzy’s Lion, a 1984 rhyming picture book that features a girl’s pet lion eating a robber.
In declining to remove the book the library’s committee, mustering up as much dignity as possible, found it necessary to explain that “the author wrote it to help children deal with bullies as it shows a little girl facing her fears and finding her own inner strength, depicted by the lion.”
It seems there is a rising tide of political correctness, unchecked by any seawall of simple common sense, which insists that nothing should offend anybody in any way, anywhere, ever.
The latest example comes in the form of the push on several U.S. campuses for “trigger warnings” — statements that advise students that a particular book or other work includes disturbing content that might trigger traumatic reactions in certain people.
That would preclude any further study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Readers would have to be warned of the suicide of a pivotal character. Any course covering Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice would have to warn students of the former’s racism and the latter’s anti-Semitism.
In fact, much of Shakespeare’s stuff would trigger a warning to sensitive souls that tales of sex, murder, debauchery and treachery in high places and drunkenness, cloaked as it is in iambic pentameter, are not suitable for some young minds.
A resolution passed by the Associated Students Senate at the University of California-Santa Barbara calls on professors to excuse students from class, with no penalty, when objectionable works are covered.
Much closer to home is a situation in a Vancouver Island school district that will go unnamed. A classroom teacher was accused of racism by a mother for mentioning certain types of food and reading a story that mentioned pigs, and later, for having some small felt stockings on the calendar in December.
The mother reported the teacher to the then College of Teachers for racism and demanded an investigation.
As part of respecting the mother’s right to object to classroom practices she felt were detrimental to her child’s education, a religious accommodation plan by the school district was put into place for all teachers. Most winter songs were prohibited — even if they did not mention Christmas. Certain foods are not to be discussed.
You’d be justified in thinking that here, in Canada, proud as we are of our cultural mosaic and tolerant as we try to be of our differences, this kind of hypersensitive episode seems out of place and, well, not us, not a part of who we are.
But then we learn that the Book and Periodical Council of Canada counted 46 books and periodicals that were challenged in 2011, including Hooray for Dairy Farming, which apparently offended somebody, somewhere.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
