Baby Boomer and Generation X era textbooks were panel recommended for classroom use but then quietly excluded by senior education department staff at a subsequent stage prior to distribution. CANADIAN MOCKINGBIRD lists impacted books by subject and provides a description of the government censor and its process. My best estimate is that there were hundreds of these censored texts in total, books the state didn’t want circulating in spite its own paid expert consensus. Students back then could still encounter and read these books in many cases. None of television, mobile phones or computing technologies had yet de-skilled so much of the population. Reading and writing of print was more of an everyday activity. Students may have encountered the books at home or in public libraries or books stores, without knowing anything of the Province’s censorship program.

Censorship of educational media, news and entertainment is always with us, so it seems. Guiding bodies, employing their own inspectorate or policing divisions, compete and collaborate. Before Ontario’s Catholic systems of education were beholden to the Province, they were already governed by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.^[1] Enforced 1560 to 1966, the Index was made searchable online by the The Beacon For Freedom of Expression.

A new censorship program, based in Toronto, Ontario arrived with the department’s 1960 emergence from an even more restrictive era. With it, the Egerton Ryerson era Circular 14 list of approved textbooks transformed from a publication that hadn’t regularly even considered publisher submissions. Superintendent Ryerson had imported one Canada’s first printing presses, by horse from New York, and was also publisher Ryerson.

In 1960, acting as the most relevant Canadian authority solely in population terms, where nearly half of English Canada resides and attends school, the midcentury Ontario began evaluating frequent textbook submissions from Canadian publishers, sparking a more complex publishing industry and a Canadian identity that knew more of itself.

Also in the 1960s Education Minister Bill Davis extended public funding to the Catholic Church’s separate school system, but only far as grade ten. The transition to full funding didn’t occur until 1984 with Premier Davis. By ignoring or defying civil protections and snubbing the subject expertise, the reformed Circular 14 process saw the education department adopt a more active role in dumbing-down public, Catholic and residential school students.

The corollary is that examining 1960s to 1980s censorship is, by default, a look at the state’s mythological Canada through high school.^[2] Fortunately for Canadians, many colleges and universities permit further specialization where the brakes come off to an extent and students may spend more time weighing official history against the obscured. Statista claims that in 2022, 62.7 per cent of adult Canadians 25-64 years sought a tertiary education.^[3]

What About Canada?
My pdf of TEACHING CANADA: A Bibliography was converted from the book’s 1974 second edition. Its authors were William J. McAndrew and Peter J. Elliott. The first edition had been released in 1971. Since then two thousand copies had been distributed, a decent achievement but not close to Circular 14‘s readership. This was a Maritimes production. It was also a different offering than OISE and Paul Gallagher’s 1978 Teaching Canada for the 1980s, resulting from a separate academic endeavour. The late W. J. McAndrew, PhD was born in Dalhousie, NB in 1934 and served as infantryman in Korea, Germany, and Ghana, and also as history professor at the University of Maine.

McAndrew gives credit to a number of compilers, not just the co-listed Elliott. Among them are Claudia Bunting, Marc Boucher, James Harpell, Bruce Rickard and Joan Caron. The bibliography was undertaken in association with the New England-Atlantic Provinces Center in Orono, ME and funded by the William H. Donner Foundation.

William Donner is known for being a Columbus, Indiana born business magnate who had participated in a range of industries before his steel operations became large and prosperous. He funded a number of educational pursuits, as industrialists commonly will. See Carnegie libraries for example. Donner established five chairs in science at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania for example.^[4]

What was TEACHING CANADA‘s purpose? How did the team narrow the material to be recommended to its audience?

As many as possible trade and other sources of information issued through the spring and summer 1974 have been consulted; but a selective process, sometimes on a quite arbitrary basis, has been used to reduce the number of entries to manageable proportions.

At publication, readers were being asked to contact the listed sources for more information. “Contact them not us.” To me arbitrary suggests personalization, and much less interaction with either publishers or subject matter experts than in Ontario. Still, like the first edition the second had success and may be located online via Internet-linked catalogues.

An “Introduction to the First Edition” was reprinted, repeating its mission to “broaden knowledge and understanding of Canada in American educational institutions, especially those of Maine and New England.” It’s also in this introduction that readers learn of the First Edition’s first author Alice R. Stewart, originally of Jonesport and Brunswick Maine.

Different sections make suggestions for elementary, secondary and college school students as well teachers. The suggested books and materials primarily support history, social science and literature. In addition to nonfiction textbooks and novels, a range of media was proposed.

TEACHING CANADA media

Serials
Jackdaws and multimedia kits
Films, film loops and strips
Slides, art and artifact collections
Cassettes and records
Simulation games
Selected government offices, organizations and corporations

Contact information was provided if not specific suggestions.

Notes
1. According to a brief online search, the Anglican Church didn’t publish a list of censored texts but did target individual books. Whether or not this is fully true is of interest. The personal library of Elizabeth I’s astrologer, Catholic bishop of Carlisle John Dee, was allegedly sacked during a period of fear for a Catholic invasion.
2. Viewable online thanks to archivist Andrea Mills’ dedicated sharing of annual individual issues to the Internet Archive.
3. University students typically take a wider array of introductory classes at the beginning of their studies before specializing.
4. 1958 MIT press release.

Updated April 6 and 7, 2025

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.