Toronto-area high school takes To Kill a Mockingbird off Grade 10 reading list over language complaint

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's not just in the U.S. that this sort of thing happens:

The classic literary novel To Kill a Mockingbird is being pulled from the Grade 10 English course at a Brampton high school after a parent complained about the use of a racial epithet in the book.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which challenges racial injustice in America's Deep South, will be removed from curriculum at St. Edmund Campion Secondary School following a lone complaint from a parent whose child will be in Grade 10 this September.

"The parent was concerned about some of the language in the book," said Bruce Campbell, spokesman for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

Principal Kevin McGuire made the decision at the end of the school year to resolve the complaint quickly. The book, a fixture on high-school reading lists across the country, will still be available in the library, said Campbell.

"The school administration was aware of the parent's concern and made the decision to use another board-approved resource that teaches the same concept for the coming year," said Campbell.

"It's not a requirement that the novel be used," he said. "It's an option on our list of board-approved resources, and the school can make a decision to use whatever resource (it) would feel best suits them."

"In this case, the principal believed an alternate resource might be better suited for that community," said Campbell.

This is a Catholic school board, not a regular public one -- both are publicly funded in Ontario -- which may partly explain the decision. Still, it seems to me that the community would be better served by having what is widely regarded as one of the great novels of the last century, "bad" language and all, read by its students (in Grade 10 -- it's not like the book was assigned to young kids, after all -- presumably advanced high school students can handle, and appreciate the context of, a broad range of language).

What is the point of shielding students from a great book that just happens to contain language that some find objectionable (in this case, one parent)? Should students -- again, Grade 10 students, not children -- also not read, say, Huck Finn? Or how about Shakespeare, whose work was hardly free of language that at least one person might find objectionable (and that was, for the time, extremely objectionable). Forget that the language used in the book is appropriate to what the book is about, that the language is actually essential to the book. This obviously hyper-sensitive principal is denying his students the education they deserve and require. You'd think he had removed not a great novel like To Kill a Mockingbird from the classroom but, oh, say, Hustler.

Is censorship -- and this, indeed, is a form of it (the book hasn't been banned, but it won't be taught) -- more important to the community than literature? It would seem so.

Is the value of a book determined more by its objectionable language (even as objected to by just one parent) than by its content? Again, it would seem so.

Apparently, what the book teaches about racial injustice is outweighed by the presence of a few "bad" words. Apparently, reading those words would corrupt those oh-so-impressionable students. Apparently, the book is otherwise disposable.

This is truly outrageous, a shameful decision, a cowardly act for which there is no excuse.