To kill or not to kill
Re: School board warns against teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, Oct. 19
We should be aware by now that climate change in our time is not restricted to the weather.
I taught To Kill a Mockingbird for many years to a Grade 10 class of white students. I believed the novel challenged them on several levels. Its language and complex sentences require focused reading; its moral spectrum (except for the extremities) is nuanced; its underlying premise, that we can never understand someone without walking around in their shoes for a time, is at the heart of all great fiction. Finally, it exposed them to the stinking, festering carcass of racism.
Today, I would find a different novel because, as a white person, I would no longer feel comfortable teaching this one. I could never again read out the n-word if it was included in a passage, and I’d feel for the student who needed to quote that passage in a discussion. I couldn’t presume today to celebrate the heroism of Atticus Finch in taking on the white supremacists of Maycomb County, albeit in a losing cause, because today it’s unthinkable that any decent lawyer wouldn’t.
In the end, the book looks after its own. The Finches return to their privileged lives, and the Robinsons to their broken ones, in what seemed to satisfy Harper Lee as a resolution.
With all of this, if I had a black student in my class, someone whose family had actually lived in the cross-hairs of racial hatred, I would feel a fraud, a teacher with nothing to teach.
Instead, I’d read Lawrence Hill again, and learn something I didn’t know, before I tried to teach it.
Colin Brezicki, Niagara on the Lake, Ont.
The hypocrisy (and lunacy) of far-left ideologues running our education systems is again on display in your article.
Arguing against discrimination, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird focuses on black-white tensions to show that racial prejudice is horrible and poisons society. How ironic that equity officials at the Peel Region Board of Ed are insisting the book can only be taught if teachers, during related lessons, agree to denigrate whites for their “privilege.” David Millard Haskell, associate professor,
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ont.