Matt’s Notes
Thank you for checking out this, the third episode in our fourth season!
We are going into new territory with this outing, as we talk about book bans and book burning and how they fit into the wider culture of contemporary education generally! Please give it a view or listen!
https://youtu.be/0JNlcZyw4nA
It’s just us, Garfield, and maybe Billy Joel! #ednontech
It’s audio that’s too hot to hold! #ednontech
I have to admit I was more than a bit curious when Doug suggested book bans and book burning as a topic for this episode. Perhaps even more so when I saw “morale” as one of the categories, or metadata, for the post. And while I’ll leave the audio and video recordings to speak for themselves, from the outside looking in, that is, as I write this before we record in a few days, I can see a connection between book bans and a reactionary kind of mindset which may exist in some areas of contemporary education.
Thus far, I’ve had the privilege to work in three different settings as an English teacher for roughly half my career thus far, plus putting in countless hours volunteering as a college writing tutor.
Back in April, we in Canada were facing a federal election which was essentially a referendum on whether or not our country would align with the policies of the populist American president who took office earlier this year. At the time, and in the run-up to the election, I was employed as a college English instructor teaching Media Studies, Class and Literature, as well as science and business writing. In those classes, we talked about the singularity taking place in Washington, DC, particularly as this had significant repercussions for Canadian politics and economy, and our sovereignty. The proclamations of Canada being a “fifty-first US state” from our southerly neighbours were particularly vexing. And so we discussed these things in class, as part of an historical perspective on the subjects we were exploring. You can go back and check out some of our winter Ed non-Tech episodes where we got into those and associated topics.
Exactly three days after the election, my position teaching English was ended a year early as part of cost-saving measures across the college. Despite my expressed interest in returning, I’ve yet to hear back from my former employer about filling positions that were subsequently advertised in the mid-late summer period in the wake of the institution’s reorganization. It begs the question: why did I come to Fort McMurray, Alberta in the first place?
I know that Alberta is, historically and presently, a deeply conservative province. I know that my educational practice and associated social media activities over the winter drew attention to reactionary tendencies in the American conservative movement in order to highlight long-standing Canadian narratives of cultural survival, particularly against the backdrop of our federal election. All my colleagues at my former institution are open-minded, hardworking, intellectually curious people who embrace diversity of thought and opinion. Nobody that I’m personally aware of has every condoned book burning or otherwise limiting a literary curriculum.
At the same time, as a person, the loneliest I’ve ever felt has been in Fort MacMurray. Not just from the standpoint of being away from family and friends for a prolonged period, but in the sense of being personally out of sync with the wider culture in the local area. The extreme conservative rhetoric of the provincial and federal political classes representing this place has a tangible effect on actions in classrooms and in meeting rooms and other venues across college and university campuses. Not only am I am unemployed, I am somebody who by personality and values lacks alignment with the prevailing sensibility of the place where they currently live. At the moment, I have no idea if and when I will ever work as an educator again. With nineteen years and four months in since starting as a teacher in Seoul, South Korea, I’m as without a home institutionally and intellectually as I was at the very beginning of my career. Being removed from a role ostensibly due to factors outside my control has made me feel powerless and without agency. And those are the kinds of destabilizing feelings which those who burn books or ban books or support those who do those things are trying to inspire.
This Ed non-Tech Podcast is a way of reaching out. It’s a way of making contact and inviting critique and engagement. And to that extent, I hope we’re making a positive difference in these highly-fraught political times, however small and nascent those efforts may feel at any given moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gnXPmXPCUQ
There’s something acting on this body
Something goes in when nothing comes out
And someone’s acting on this information
But, nothing’s registered from this location
From this site that I sense that I am
In asking, “What is burning in my eyes?” #ednontech
Doug’s Notes
Banning books leads to burning books
Over 10000 articles in Google Scholar about this … which really surprised me.
A work of the kind, from the hand of Confucius, was destroyed at the great book burning b.c. 220, and only some few fragments of it are retained in the present compilation.
Tagore, G. M. (1863). On Buddhism. Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 2, 182-201.
The people whose judgment should count concerning books are of course those who through study have knowledge of their character.
Hamilton, G. L. (1907). The Censorship of the Church of Rome and Its Influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature. Volume I.
THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR
“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.’* It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature.
Let us admit at the outset that there is absolutely no book that may not find its place on the shelves of some library and perform there its appointed function.
Bostwick, A. E. (1908). Address of the president: The librarian as a censor. Bulletin of the American Library Association, 2(5), 113-121.
… books are the targets because they “are the embodiment of ideas and if you hold extreme beliefs you cannot tolerate anything that contradicts those beliefs or is in competition with them.” Book burnings “are highly symbolic. When you destroy a book you are destroying your enemy and your enemy’s beliefs”
Schwartz, D. (2010). The books have been burning. CBC News, 10.
The phenomenon of book burning has been occurring worldwide for thousands of years, and as a longstanding tradition that has always drawn visceral reactions from spectators, it is still happening with alarming frequency. In America, book burning walks the fine line between censorship and free speech. It remains, however, an attack on knowledge and culture and is consequently a threat to the information management field.
Book burning in the United States is an ineffective form of censorship as it tends to lead to an increase in sales and “near immortality” for the book in question.
Olson, L. (2021). “Moral Bonfires”: An Exploration of Book Burning in American Society. Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management, 16.
Here is a list of some of the book burnings that have happened since the end of the Second World War.
Iran, 1946 In December 1946, Iranian forces burned all the Kurdish language books they could find. They also banned the teaching of Kurdish and closed Kurdish presses.
United States, 1948 That year residents in Binghamton, N.Y., burning comic books they feared would spread moral depravity among American youth.
United States, 1956 In 1956 psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich had six tonnes of his books and papers burned, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
China, 1966-1976 Books were burned in China as part of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
Chile, 1973 After their violent overthrow of Chile’s elected government, the military conducted public book burnings of works they considered subversive.
United States, 1973 In Drake, North Dakota the school board had “objectionable” books thrown into the school furnace. After learning about the burning, Vonnegut wrote to the school board chairman, “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”
Sri Lanka, 1981 In 1981 the Jaffna Public Library in northern Sri Lanka was considered one of the best libraries in Asia. Following the shooting deaths of three Sinhalese policemen in the majority Tamil city, Sinhalese security forces went on a brutal rampage and burned down the library. More than 95,000 books were destroyed.
United Kingdom, 1988 As soon as it was published, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was under attack by people who considered it anti-Islamic. The first British burning was at a protest in Bolton. The burning books “The burning of books publicly and ceremonially is a bizarre subtext of history, repeated constantly. It’s an act of violence, a punishment, a deterrent, a death by proxy. To assume this is a futile act, a deluded, empty ritual, to think of it as something that has only happened at other times, to other people, in other places, is wrong. Books were burning thousands of years ago, in other countries, and books are burning, here and now.”
Abkhazia, Georgia, 1992 During the Abkhazian-Georgian war following the end of the Soviet Union, Georgian paramilitaries broke into the Institute of the Abkhazian Language, Literature and History in Sukhumi and set it ablaze. Neighbours, including Georgians, immediately extinguished the blaze but paramilitaries returned and set the archive on fire again and prevented neighbours and firefighters from fighting it. The fire destroyed 95 per cent of the collection.
Bosnia, 1992 Serbian nationalist forces started a fire in the national library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo by bombing the building. When it started burning they shot anybody who tried to save the books. About 1.5 million books were destroyed.
United States, 2001 Harry Potter books were a “flashpoint” for book burners in the U.S. in 2001. One of those burnings was in the Harvest Assembly of God Church in Pennsylvania. “We got some people mad at us, but it’s good to have publicity,” said Rev. George Bender. Besides the Potter series by J.K. Rowling, books by actress Shirley MacLaine and psychic Edgar Cayce were also torched. There have been at least six book burnings involving Potter books in the U.S.
Iraq, 2003 Following the allied takeover of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, almost all the books in both the national library and a nearby Islamic library were destroyed by fire.
Canada, 2004 The United Talmud Torah school library in the St. Laurent neighbourhood of Montreal was set on fire, destroying about 15,000 books. The burning was carried out by Sleiman El Merhebi. The 18-year-old said he was motivated by events in the Middle East.
Italy, 2006 In Ceccano, a small town near Rome, two local councillors, from different conservative parties, burned a copy of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. They called the book “blasphemous.” A film based on Brown’s bestseller had just opened in India.
Germany, 2006 The Diary of Anne Frank was burned on June 24 in Pretzien, Germany, at a far-right summer festival. Five men in their 20s were convicted of inciting racial hatred and disparaging the dead, according to Deutsche Welle, a German broadcaster.
Israel, 2008 Orthodox Jewish students burned hundreds of copies of the New Testament in Or Yehuda, a suburb of Tel Aviv. The texts had been distributed by the group Jews for Jesus. The campaign was organized by the town’s deputy mayor, Uzi Aharon. “All the books went up in fire … in Or Yehuda, where the residents observed the commandment to ‘purge the evil from your midst,'” he said. There had been earlier burnings of New Testaments in Israel.
United States, 2011 burnings did go ahead in Springfield, Tenn., and Topeka, Kan. Those burnings led to protests in Kashmir and elsewhere. Eighteen people died in the Kashmir protests. On March 20, this time away from the media glare, Jones did burn a Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, at his church. In April 1, after Afghan President Hamid Karzai mentioned the burning, at least 30 people died in protests in Afghanistan, including seven UN staff.
The Netherlands, 2011 Upset with the use of the word ‘Negroes’ in the title of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a group staged a public burning of the book’s cover in Amsterdam on June 22. The group, Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Surinam, had said they would burn the Canadian author’s novel unless the title was changed. The award-winning book came out in 2007 but was only recently published in the Netherlands. A group member said the cover alone was torched because only the title offended them.
Those are just some of the book burnings over the last 75 years.
Schwartz, D. (2010). The books have been burning. CBC News, 10.
Word of the Podcast
Question of the Podcast
How can censorship in schools be addressed using educational technology?
Phrase of the Podcast
We are stoked you joined us today! Please be sure to come around again sooner than later!
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I’ve got to think about my own life #ednontech
