Suggesting that teenage years may be confusing is analogous to warning that the water may feel wet, I suppose. In Canada or elsewhere, more so without consistent parenting, a stable home or community. In 2019 just under half (44%) of the 1.2 million children from separated or divorced families, who were also in contact with the non-custodial parent, met with them regularly.[1]

When a book is published promising “to enable the student to draw his own conclusions about man, his activities upon the earth, and the manner in which he has described them,”[2] potentially it could become an important resource, play a role assisting students from single-parent families on becoming helpful, contributing adult citizens.

If government would adhere to its own policies, follow its own rules of democracy. But that’s not what’s happened in Canada. Not in Ontario, overwhelmingly the country’s most populous province and centre of English-language publishing. That’s not what happened to McClelland & Stewart’s Adolescents in Society. Following evaluation and majority recommendation, the resource book was covertly censored, as if posing a danger to Canada instead of offering valuable insights.

MORE THAN A SEX EDUCATION READER

Author Anne McCreary-Juhasz was Stratford, Ontario-born in 1922, attended New York’s Courtland College and then Cornell. She taught education and education psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and then Chicago’s Loyola. George Szasz, the medical doctor, was Hungary born and began his MD program nearly in tandem with UBC’s medical department accepting students. He was “particularly interested in the social and cultural determinants of health behavior, and his main concern is the application of the behavioral sciences in medical education.”[3]

The authors and I didn’t discuss their book’s rejection. My agreement with the Archives of Ontario directed me not to speak directly with the authors whose censored texts I was investigating, withholding a class of research from the project. Primarily I ended up interacting with retired Curriculum Branch employees, those brave souls, in addition to transcribing Ministry files from the provincial archives and photographing the publishers’ fonds from McMaster University’s collection. I also purchased the censored texts that were still available, hope to exhibit them.

Table of Contents

Were you required to take a sex education course? I wasn’t, despite completing high school through the Ontario Academic Credits (OACs), that year previously known “grade thirteen.” Wasn’t sex ed mandatory? I distinctly remember the course was topical on nighttime television in the 1980s and ’90s. Maybe that was the United States.

Students would have benefited, especially that small minority of children without both parents. It was a far smaller number in the 1970s and ’80s than it is now. Maybe a book like this wouldn’t have prevented so much trouble in class. If one of those problem child’s grade six teacher, at Owen Sound’s Alexandra Public School had to pick them up from their desk by the hair before they’d return his ruler, this book wouldn’t have prevented the confrontation because Adolescents in Society would have first been assigned in secondary school. Nor would it have prevented the occasional unsanctioned physical contest.

But if the young reader and mother were always moving, almost every year, never once remaining longer than two years at a single school, this resource may have provided suggestions for meeting new friends. But if angry, alcoholic parents split around the child’s third birthday, the same year his grandmother was lost on a surgeon’s table, that kid may have wondered less about how her death impacted his parents’ divorce, instead of carrying the question into eternity.

Chapter ONE, “Living With Others” begins with twenty-eight lines from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Act II. “…All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” Young learners would have then encountered an adorned series of concentric circles for thinking about relationship categories beyond the Individual; Family, School and Church, Clubs and Organizations, Communities. They’d read that “Psychologists think that about 50 percent of an individual’s intellectual growth takes place by the age of four , and an additional 30 percent between the ages of four and eight.”^[4] Chapter subsections included references and questions. The discussion topics could have been enlightening for so-called latchkey kids.

Following high school in London and then Norwood, Ontario I’d have a chance to explore some questions like these in Anthropology at Trent University in Peterborough. I took Anthropology and Computer Studies, but also worked for the Anthropology Department before commencing classes. As role models, the faculty and staff were ideal. It was possible to ask difficult questions, across cultures. What a valuable second opportunity.

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It’s likely you know already that Canada is a multicultural country. My own parents were from visibly different communities, had different expectations. My father was African-American. His mother’s family had fled to Upper Canada in the 1850s. Some of Owen Sound continues to refer that area as “Mudtown” today. There are regularly wet escarpments all around the city, but this area was also a Black neighbourhood. I don’t recall the eponym Mudtown from childhood. As an adult though different narratives have been explained to me as the true significance. There is a restaurant named Mudtown Station today.

My Grandfather George Rick Tompkins Jr. was born in Greensboro, North Carolina where his father, George Rick Sr., taught engineering at the Agricultural and Mechanical College for the Colored Race before moving to Wilberforce University in Ohio. Grandfather George was always going to the United States, where many of his associates lived. WDIV’s Bob Bennett and Grandpa were close. Mr. Bennett attended Grandpa’s wake. Grandpa received multiple U.S. pensions, at least from Bethlehem Steel and the U.S. Armed Forces where he repaired aircraft engines during WWII. As a child, I knew a far more industrialized Owen Sound. In Owen Sound both Grandpa and my Aunt, Carolyn Tompkins, worked for Black Clawson Kennedy in steel and computer networks.

My mother was Irish-Canadian, including the indigenous Irish and British. Her father, a sailor with the last name Farrell, deserted her and her brother before returning to the west coast and eventually dying in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside of bad habits. The wealthier Coulsons, Grandma Mollie’s family, were related to the Harris tractor family. Mom’s step-father, at times, acted like a grandfather, was of Italian descent. Christians, Jews and nonbelievers all contributed to both my parents’ families.

Until age twelve, in London, it was unclear to me that society insisted on unique terms for people with different complexions and hair. Then in grade seven, some elementary school friends and I were walking across a field describing our cultural histories, until they reached me. “I don’t know. I’m Canadian.” Marco looked at me and alleged that “you’re a moolie,” crashing through the stupor. Life was never the same, became more complex immediately.

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Chapter TWO’s title “Living in Primitive Societies” is admittedly archaic, but likely still appropriate in 1969. The authors considered sexuality and sexual instruction, puberty customs and ceremonies, pre-marital intercourse, courtship and marriage, all with global examples. McCreary-Juhasz and Szasz even discussed homosexuality, and its ordinary place in the jungles of South America and plains of North America.

Chapter THREE, “Learning to Live in Other Times” and FOUR “Living in the Twentieth Century” sealed the primitivism pretense by dashing away from the old continents and focusing on the Hebrews’ and the Europeans’ development from Ancient Europe to their place in North America, where it becomes a familiar retelling of Canadian and United States historical events. Nothing about African Hebrews. From Chapter 4’s seventh subsection “1965 Onwards” through chapters FIVE “Teenage Sexual Problems” and SIX “The Miracle of Life,” the authors returned to sex, sex problems and reproduction in a basic straightforward manner that wasn’t pornography. A glossary and acknowledgements concluded the printed pages.

DECISION

Despite 4/6 reviewers approving the book, including the one or two Ministry of Education employees who ALWAYS participated on panels, the book was rejected. What Ontario decided for Adolescents in Society was not going to be general distribution. A memo from the Branch’s Director of Curriculum read “(t)his book should not be listed at this time because of the possible controversial nature of some of the content. Instead, I recommend that we continue to give experimental permission with the qualifier that it be followed up a year from now.”^[5] Isn’t it odd how management uses the easygoing “recommend” to convey its decision? That language matched how the Department liked to publicly describe its role in curriculum selection. Polite.

Likely this small 88 page “Resource Book” couldn’t have operated as the one and only text, even in a half-course, as was often the practice. But were the teacher to pull in one or two others, as university professors often will, it would have been partially sufficient. But it was too provocative.

References

[1] Statistics Canada, 2021. “Contact with children after divorce or separation” released with The Daily,  September 28, 2021. “The data in this analysis are from the 2017 General Social Survey (GSS) – Family and the 2019 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth (CHSCY), https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/210928/dq210928e-eng.pdf

[2] McCreary-Juhasz, Anne (PhD, MA) and George Szasz (MD), Adolescents in Society: Selected Sources in Personal and Social Relationships. McClelland & Stewart, 1971.

[3] McCreary-Juhasz and Szasz, Adolescents in Society, viii

[4] Ibid, 3-4.

[5] Crossley, J.K, December 21, 1971. Adolescents in Society evaluation folder, file #B145049.