Re: Durham high school students don’t have to read To Kill a Mockingbird, board decides, June 27

Durham high school students don’t have to read To Kill a Mockingbird, board decides, June 27

The Durham District School Board’s decision about choices of literature leave me quite ambivalent.

That is, I am unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Ontario’s English curriculum seems not to have escaped from the 1960s, when the founding principle seems to have been “literature as hagiography.” Within that model, one does indeed teach To Kill a Mockingbird as if it were some sort of sacred text, and as if the students were novitiates to some sort of holy orders whose purpose, to use a homophone, is wholly unclear.

The school board, the teachers, the parents and the students need a reminder.

To Kill a Mockingbird is not the curriculum. It is merely a means by which teachers deliver the curriculum to their students. At very least, an English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum’s goal is to provide students with skills in reading, writing, listening and speaking. At very best, that curriculum would add “viewing” and “representing” to the foregoing minimalist foursome. The additional two skills reflect the increasingly graphic nature of communications and the school’s obligation to ensure that students can graphically represent reality, and to ensure that they have the decoding skills necessary for identifying others’ specious and/or spurious graphic representations of reality.

Within the ideal six-point version of the ELA curriculum’s goals, the criterion for judging the merits of reading selections (be they fiction or non-fiction) is quite simple: do the selections contribute to the attainment of the six goals?

If they don’t, the remedy is obvious: you discard them (and never mind whether somebody considers the discarded items to be “great literature” or “classics,” or whatever).

As already noted, the aim of Ontario’s ELA curriculum should never have been the perpetuation of hagiographies, and it disturbs me to no end that it is still mired in that aim.

Keith Bricknell, Toronto