Alberta revises school book ban policy to focus on sexual images

The Alberta government made good Monday on its promise to revise its school book ban, stating that from now on written descriptions of sex are OK, but images and illustrations of sex are not.

Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides told reporters that visual depictions had been the government’s main concern from the start.

When asked by reporters why the government wasn’t concerned with written descriptions of explicit sexual material, he said, “An image can be understood and conveyed at any grade level with any degree of comprehension.

“Whereas, of course, vocabulary and understanding progresses and develops throughout the school year.”

And he said the revised order ensures that literary classics, some of which include sexual content, will stay on school library shelves.

The change comes after Edmonton’s public school board put together a list of more than 200 titles it was going to take out of schools, including classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to comply with the initial ministerial order written in July.

Banning classics in Alberta brought worldwide news coverage.

It even led Atwood herself to mock Premier Danielle Smith and her government by crafting a short story to social media about a boy and girl who lived happily ever after practising rapacious capitalism while having kids without having sex.

The government’s initial policy had put a number of famous books on the chopping block, with Edmonton Public also listing Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as titles that would need to be stripped from libraries in order to comply with directives to limit explicit sexual content.

The popular Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and Game of Thrones books by George R.R. Martin — both of which were turned into award-winning television series — were also on the EPSB list.

Last week, Smith accused the Edmonton public board of intentionally misinterpreting the government’s intent and being heavy-handed with the books it planned to pull from shelves.

Smith at the time said the government was mainly concerned about images and illustrations of explicit sexual content and promised a revised ministerial order to clarity that point.

The government has, from the start, linked the rules to four graphic novels officials found in school libraries that contained explicit images of sexual activity.

Also Monday, Nicolaides extended the deadline given to school boards to remove library books deemed inappropriate.

School boards will now have until early January, instead of October, to remove any books that violate the government’s order.

However, school divisions have until the end of October to deliver to Nicolaides’ ministry a list of books they plan to remove under the new rules.

Nicolaides said those lists won’t need provincial approval, but by having school boards submit them in advance it would give the government a chance to review them and provide further guidance as necessary.

“We’re doing that because we want to be able to have an opportunity to ask questions of the school division, provide more clarity, and just create an open space for some collaboration and coordination before the Jan. 5 timeline,” he said.

The new ministerial order also does away with the requirement to have teachers digitally catalogue their personal classroom libraries.

Nicolaides said he had seen social media posts of teachers boxing up books and giving them away to avoid the extra work of cataloguing them, and that was something the province wanted to avoid.

He added the policy still requires parents to be “informed” of the material kept in classroom libraries.

The ministerial order was also being simplified, Nicolaides said, by having the same rules apply across all grade levels. The previous policy had stipulated that only students in Grade 10 and above could access books with some form of sexual content, as long as that content wasn’t explicit.

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