Updated March 11, 2025

If you are Canadian and feeling a little unprepared for news of violence on your doorstep, Art & Commodity has part of an explanation. How are the newly adulterated to sustain themselves after waking up to the Province of Ontario’s historic manipulation of their reading material and minds? Deep breathing is my suggestion. Maybe a small glass of Canadian liquor? Music like always. No sweat, some of your parents gaslighted you to the nth degree as well. Still, after reading of the psycho-filtering their Canadian childhoods endured because of some behind-the-scenes censorship built into the Province’s educational infrastructure, to mislead and hold back citizens from understanding their world on a deeper level, readers could be left in shock. If they find themselves in a fog, it’s ok. We’re going to get through it together.

What happened was not right and we deserve the details. Let us get that out of the way. We’re not wrong or being anti-Canadian having this conversation. They were wrong! Only by staying offside of agreed upon civil protections like found in the Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights could elected representation and senior government managers have undertaken this work.[1]

If the revelation causes thoughts of running off, first consider that a similar sort of deception is happening elsewhere within other “democracies” and other media forms. If you’re going to escape Canada, maybe do it for the climate.

Textbook censorship is a book genre filled out internationally. Phenomenologically I envision it as underneath the broader subject of thought control. That’s one starting point at least. Canadian authors are well represented, but three American guides that fed into my thinking were Joan Delfattore’s 1994 What Johnny Shouldn’t Read: Textbook Censorship in America, James W. Loewen’s 1995 Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong as well as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in the 2002 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, including their propaganda model.[2]

Please keep in mind that print was far more important in the years we’re discussing. There’s since been a shift. We’re no longer in the era discussed in Canadian Mockingbird but in an age of wired and wireless digital communication and of screens. I keep thinking that what was social engineering of textbooks, now likely shares more in common with the work at television and radio studios or at corporate desktops and server rooms. Techniques of control becoming familiar necessitate reinvestment and adaptation, potentially. Confidentiality saves the day. Not to offend anyone but a steady economic state does likely benefit from a broad and content ignorance. Keep sleeping if you choose.

What’s being discussed here isn’t the current administration’s fault. In my opinion, there is little benefit in “taking it to the streets” about this historical wrong. But in reading more about that history, you can find the victims and culprits if you seek them. If you go searching for them in person, to “give them a piece of your mind,” you will find they’re likely already dead.

Have You Ever Been to OISE?
As with Adolescents in Society, I wouldn’t characterize WAR, from OISE’s Value Reasoning Series, a “textbook” per se. Produced in cooperation with UBC’s Association for Values Education and Research, it’s an activity book. WAR was one in a series published by U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a teacher’s college residing on Bloor Street West across from the Varsity Centre football field.

During my librarian program at what was then U of T’s Faculty of Information Studies, I was only at OISE for guest lectures, like after three Manhattan towers fell uniformly into their own footprints on September 11, 2001. But while investigating Ontario’s censored textbooks, and before deciding to conceive of them as a set to purchase, I visited the school’s library regularly.

When the Circular 14 fonds’ significance dawned on me, when the Archives of Ontario were still at 77 Grenville Street,[3] I made brief unsuccessful attempts at both OISE and York University’s education departments to network with faculty. But my first opportunity to have that conversation, with somebody closer to the subject, was with a former teacher and evaluation panelist. She was shocked.

OISE came to be in 1965, from an earlier teachers’ college, at the same time it launched Masters and Doctoral programs, during former Ontario Education Minister Bill Davis’ tenure, before he replaced John Robarts as Premier. Down Bloor some more and around the corner at St. George Street, all of U of T’s main social studies library, its Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library and Faculty of Information are located within the brutalist Robarts Library building that resembles a bird from some angles. In London, Ontario there is a Robarts School for the Deaf.

OISE’s politics grew beyond the Premiers’ own. I’d say that’s healthy, and to be expected for graduate education programs. But the Premiers Robarts’ and Davis’ administrations are critical to understanding Ontario’s textbook censorship because it’s under their successive governments that texts began to be disappeared. There was enthusiasm to begin with after 1960 when, initially, publishers were under the impression their books could be treated objectively. Based on Ontario’s statements.

Let’s Go Kill Some People
WAR along with two other series booklets Prejudice and The Elderly were rejected in a late 1981 letter to OISE Press’ Editor-In-Chief for being “reference or resource material rather than Circular 14 textbooks.” Specifically “War contains some stories involving violence which are judged to be unsuitable for students.”[4] What?

Where did you learn about the West’s war for Southeast Asia? If your experience was like mine, it wasn’t so much in the classroom but by watching Hollywood films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986) or Full Metal Jacket (1987). I can’t tell you what the rationale for avoiding the subject was. I was young, but remember a sense that here in Canada, Vietnam was portrayed as another of Americans’ overseas wars. There was so little even of that country’s role as a French possession earlier on.

In fact “[m]any Canadians served as combatants …Canada provided financial aid to South Vietnam. Canadian military industries employed more than 140,000 Canadians at home and abroad, at firms primarily controlled in the United States. Exports to the U.S. destined for Southeast Asia were $45 million in 1962 peaking in 1967 at $133.5 million, but staying above $100 million ($771 million in 2020 with inflation) to the war’s end.”[5] American industry tested defoliants in New Brunswick and B-52 pilots practiced bombing runs in the Canadian West.

For that matter Canadian uranium powered the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” atomic bombs that destroyed cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki a generation earlier. Canucks are into the war business deep. WAR contained descriptions and cartoons of conflict in Asia, including the My Lai massacre and Daniel Berrigan’s description of  “Incident of Hill 192,” originally published in Saturday Review on Valentine’s Day in 1970 and then recreated in the Brian de Palma directed 1989 Casualties of War film.

Pulling the Trigger

As much as anything else, OISE’s WAR is a 1979 print collection of thirty six student activities that came bundled with a Teacher’s Manual. It was designed to impress the paid panel of specialists who were to evaluate it within the Circular 14 evaluation process for the Ministry of Education, which it did. Prior to its rejection by Curriculum Branch management, WAR was approved by five of six panelists, including the bias reviewer who commented that it was “an example of the kind of texts we should be striving for.” Another panelist recommended “that it be used as a textbook, one for every student, rather than a reference book.”

Another series book, Prejudice, was approved by four of five panelists and then rejected.

Notes
[1] In UDHR Articles 18 and 19, can be discovered that “Everyone has the freedom of thought … this includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference.” Canadians attending publicly funded schools with an inspectorate in search of contraband and capable of handing out penalties didn’t benefit from these rights.

[2] Neither Lies My Teacher Told Me or Manufacturing Consent are indexed in Canadian Mockingbird‘s first edition despite being long-term resources for me. These are books that I’ve had with me and consulted for years. Noam Chomsky was an heroic like intellectual influence, as I’m sure he is for so many others. I feel privileged to have been able to attend a Chomsky lecture at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall.

[3] Grenville is former Premier Bill Davis’ middle name.

[4] December 30, 1981. See files B102475 and B10274.

[5] Canadian Mockingbird, page 71; C. Corday, “Lost to History: The Canadians who Fought in Vietnam,” CBC News, cont’d.

Jeremy Tompkins’Canadian Mockingbird: Exposing Censorship and Textbook-Mediated Social Engineering, the nonfiction book describing covert public, Catholic and residential school textbook censorship during Baby Boomer and Generation X eras is now available. The program regularly dismissed panel consensus of paid subject specialists by ignoring domestic and international protections.