Banning in Canada

Children's author, Deborah Ellis, writer of novels such as Looking for X, winner of a Governor General's Award for Children's Literature, the accaimed Breadwinner series, and The Heaven Shop which tackles the subject of the AIDS crisis has come under attack by the York District School Board. Three Wishes is a hard-hitting reflection of life which profiles the lives of Israeli and Palestinian children and the pervasive hatred that fills their formative years.

Under pressure from the Canadian Jewish Congress, the York District School Board has removed Three Wishes from their Silver Birch Award list. The Silver Birch is an award for which children from grades 4 - 6 vote their favourite from a list of 20 nominations. Librarians choose these books. The book was not on the curriculum. It was on a list of suggested reading for the Silver Birch.

The Canadian Jewish Congress is pressuring other school boards to follow suit. The Toronto District School Board is keeping the book behind the counter in the library (shades of the past back to haunt us) and parents are required to bring a note from their parents in order to borrow the book.

Ellis says of the stories in the book, "Some are disturbing, even shocking. But they reflect the world these children live in."

What is it that the people who are keeping books behind the counter or off of reading lists think they are protecting the children from?

You Can't Get There From Here

My husband who is now my foreign correspondent in China is letting me know which sites are and aren't available for him to access. The CEO of the Pelham Public Library, where I work, was very interested to know whether or not our site was accessible in China. The answer is yes and no. Although the Pelham Public Library site is accessible, he cannot reach the Fahrenheit 451 discussion through our site and a search for Blogger does not bring him the information for which he is looking. Evidently, it has been blocked.

Because the last post was about a Wikipedia entry, I asked him to try that one. The collective wisdom of all of our societies can be found there but not in China.

Interestingly enough The Freedom to Read site was available to him.

Most surprising was that Google looked the same. However, he is in a Western hotel and he has not tried to look for controversial subjects.

!@#$%$

There was an interesting article in the A&E section of the Toronto Star on Sat., Feb. 25 about how the creative use of fictional phrases is flipping the finger at the censor boards. Gosh darn it! Does a "frak" or "frik" convey the same degree of consternation as a real swear word? Does it even reflect the real world?

The author, Vinay Menon, suggests that there are no boundaries left to cross in the use of swear words. On the other hand, many TV shows are going back to the use of euphemisms because we have been exposed to words that would have been unacceptable a generation ago. Professor Timothy Jay, author of Why We Curse and The Psychology of Language believes that the use of euphemisms during prime time is due to pressure groups paying more attention to the family hour. At the same time, Jay explains, "The other tension is the effort on the part of broadcasters to offer a more appealing, sexy or emotional product that will compete with cable, DVD and movie rental materials."

A crackdown by regulatory boards may be coming to television in the US.

"The unspoken truth is that there is no scientific evidence that a word harms a person," says Jay. "Words do not harm women and children, which is the underlying grossly false assumption motivating censorship. This is part of the conservative mood in North America where belief is valued over science."

Wikipedia has a page devoted to euphanisms.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. True?