It was sometime in the late 1970s when I remember an eleven-year-old version of me finding Ben Bova’s Exiled From Earth in the “Teen” section of the library. Seeing the “not today, son” look in the librarian’s eyes, I knew I would have to justify my selection.

“Read the first chapter out loud to me, and we will see”, she said. So I did.

I walked out with that book, devoured it, then went on to read the entire trilogy in short order. I fell into the books, entirely enveloped in that possible dystopian future. It was full of conflict and coercion, power, and control. While the story has a science fiction premise, at its core it is about politics, power, and control, like most science fiction – a reflection of the human condition. In later years, I buried myself in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World and so many other amazingly insightful works that forced me to think critically about the world I was living in.

This past week, a leaked document showed the Edmonton School Board had a list of 200 books they had directed libraries to pull from shelves. The Calgary Board of Education is currently reviewing more than half a million book titles for potential removal. A modern book burning without the gas and matches. This was apparently a misinterpretation of an Alberta government directive to identify and remove “pornographic images” from libraries accessible to K-12 students. Specifically, the Premier stated, “The point of this work is to keep graphic, sexually explicit content out of elementary schools“. Now it seems there is a need to rewrite the directive to make the task simple enough to follow without supervision. But can we blame the school boards for following orders? Probably. But they would not have orders to follow without misguided leadership.

There is some complex irony here that makes it pretty clear that none of these people have actually read Fahrenheit 451. While the government’s goal seems to have been the removal of mentally hazardous images from school libraries, the result was to remove almost every classic work that teaches young minds to question authority and challenge the status quo. That is dangerous in so many ways. It is hard to think of a future where people are only allowed to read what the government wants them to read. Oh, wait, no, it’s not; I have read 1984, I know how this story ends.

It’s almost like people with power and control don’t want your children to learn to think critically about people with power and control.

Hmmm..

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