Tag: freedom

School Libraries and Intellectual Freedom

School Libraries should be bastions of intellectual freedom. Tragically, the School Library has always been a battleground in the struggles between those that would protect our rights and freedoms and those that would impose their beliefs on others.

This has become all too evident in the U.S. in recent years, and sadly we in Canada are not immune. Provincial Ministries of Education, School Boards, and individual schools and school libraries have been sucked into the current climate of extreme political polarization. Attacks on the freedom to read are on the rise, and include recent decisions made by the government of Alberta. The following are quotes from the response of Canadian School Libraries:

“Individual parents have the right to decide on their child’s reading, but they do not have the right to impose it on everyone.

The selection and availability of school library and learning resource materials should be made by trained professionals, not politicians and bureaucrats.

Not every book in a school library is meant for every student. Schools need to have a wide range of age and developmentally appropriate resources that cover the needs of the student population.

School library collections, with a richness and diversity that allows students to see themselves and experience lives other than their own, are developed within the lens of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the rights and freedoms it affords to all Canadians, including children.”


Find out more about Canadian School Libraries

Rosa Parks

One of the icons of the US Civil Rights movement looked an unlikely hero but proved to be someone whose strength of character belied her appearance. Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1934.  In the face of the overt racism of 1950’s America, Rosa famously refused to give up her seat on the bus, as black people were expected to do for white people. She was arrested, and the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott proved to be one of foundational events of the Civil Rights Movement.

For more on Rosa Parks:

Come down to the School Library to check out our titles on Rosa Parks and other books for Black History Month:

Freedom to Read is Useless if People Don’t Read

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

Source: Unknown*

The rights and freedoms of Canadians include the right to read what you want to read. Such rights and freedoms are fundamental to democracy. However, such rights and freedoms are meaningless unless citizens exercise these rights and freedoms.

There are authoritarian forces at work in our society that seek power by attacking your rights, including attempts to censor or limit your freedom to read. Totalitarian states know that uneducated and illiterate citizens are easier to control and oppress. Such forces can only celebrate that the work is much simpler when significant portions of the population choose not to read. Censorship becomes less pressing when “aliteracy” becomes prevalent.

A true democracy guarantees fundamental rights and freedoms to its citizens. But to work effectively, indeed, to survive, democracy requires that citizens exercise those rights. In particular, democracy breaks down if citizens aren’t educated, informed and active.

The rise of powerful new information technology in the last few decades has made it more important than ever that citizens are highly “information literate.” Citizens must not only have access to information, they must have the tools required to wade through increasingly destructive levels of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies. Citizens need to have access to information that is credible, accurate and trustworthy.

The rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-science movements, perhaps most recently represented by anti-vax conspiracies, are part of the wider breakdown of democratic institutions. There is little doubt that attacks on public education over many years have reaped some these results and are integral to the rise of authoritarianism.

It is not enough to celebrate the Freedom to Read. As citizens of democratic societies, we have an obligation to exercise our Freedom to Read, in part so that we are equipped to defend our democratic rights and freedoms.

It is clear that democracy is under attack, throughout the world, and in our back yard. We must act.

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Note* The above quote, or variations on it, are often popularly attributed to Mark Twain. However the original source of this quote, or its variations, remains unclear.

Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright died on March 23, 2022.

Madeleine Albright was born in 1937 in Prague ( in what is now Czechia). Her family fled from both the Nazis and the Communists. The family first left the country after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, returned after the end of the Second World War, only to flee again, this time from the Communists in 1948. Albright was a brilliant student who would go on to earn her PhD from Columbia University. She then served in both academic and government positions, providing expertise as a foreign policy advisor. In 1993 she became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1997 she became Secretary of State, the first female to be appointed to that prestigious position in the U.S. Cabinet.

Madeleine Albright leaves many legacies from her life of academics and public service, including the book Fascism: A Warning.

If you don’t read, they don’t need to ban books.

People need to read books for book banning to even be a thing. This idea has been expressed in many different ways.

So Read. Keep reading. Read some more. Read what you want to read. Read what you decide to read.

Read for information. Read to learn. Read for fun. Read to escape. Read for entertainment. Read to experience the world from the point of view of different people. Read to cry. Read to be scared. Read to laugh.

Read to understand. Read to learn new things. Read to learn more about things you already know.

Read to learn the point of view of people that you might disagree with, even when you are certain that you will disagree with them. Read to consider new information, new evidence, new perspectives. Read critically, even skeptically, but read with an openness to change your mind when faced with rational and logical reasons to do so.

Read for whatever reason you decide. Stand up for your freedom to decide for yourself what you want to read.

That doesn’t mean you should read anything and everything. People that care about you might know why reading some things, at certain times, might not be so good for you. You might decide not read some books because of your age, maturity, or history. Some books might not be right for you because of your current mental or emotional health. Perhaps some material has nothing to offer you of any value. But that is for you to decide in cooperation with the people that you trust. That is not for other people, other groups, organizations or governments to decide for you.

People try to ban books because they don’t want you to read those books. If you don’t read books to begin with, you are doing their work for them.

Democracy v. Fascism

Our students will leave our school and soon become the adults who will hold the future of democracy in their hands.  We must educate and equip our students to recognize the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.  We must help them see the precious nature of the democratic traditions that have been handed to them by previous generations. We must help them see the fragile nature of those institutions and the peril that is represented by those forces that are at work to undermine democracy.

Most pressingly, we must help our students to recognize the rise of fascism, both in the world and in our own backyard.  We must equip our students to denounce fascist ideology and to defeat fascist attempts to destroy our democracy.

The politics of fear, division, and hate will fight for the souls of our students.  We must counter those dark forces with hope, unity and love.  Forces are at work undermining the foundations of democracy, including the rule of law, freedom of the press, public education, respect for science and reason, confidence in free and fair elections, and peaceful transitions of power. We must build up faith in those ideals in our kids, and equip them to demand them as their rightful expectation for a civil society.

Polarizing forces are at work which divide us, resulting in extreme “othering” to the point of dehumanization. We must find ways to help the next generation to reconcile that which divides us, or at least to find respectful and peaceful ways to engage with those divisions.  Somehow we must find common ground with our beliefs about truth. We must find some way to agree on “the facts” even if we don’t agree on what do with those facts.

Please check out our display of items related to the struggle between democracy and fascism.