Silly Little Country

Intriguing Question?

Having had to suffer from this question for years as I went through various schools, I likely have a less positive view of it than Norm has, though calling it 'intriguing' seems to leave a LOT of ambiguity.

why would you want to insist that some of the novels read by certain children should be Canadian?

The link he points to provides one simple answer - it depends on who you are!

When B.C. mom Jean Baird realized her son had managed to graduate high school without having a single Canadian book assigned to him in English class, she decided to do something about the situation. She lobbied the B.C. government, gathered support from writer friends and family — she's married to former Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Bowering — and managed to extract legislation from the B.C. Ministry of Education requiring at least one Canadian book per year on each class reading list.

The nice thing about this is that if you have done some simple reading in economics you recognize this as simple rent-seeking and no argument at all! Simply, it's in my interest, so get other people to pay for my interests.
The writer then waxes personal:

I read a lot of books in high school, way back when. Of the Canadian books assigned, I remember one in particular, Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Was that novel the best choice for introducing the wonders of literature to a teenage boy? Probably not. But I never looked at my grandmother the same way again, that's for sure. And when that sad, proud old Canadian woman went reluctantly into a full-care facility near the end of her life, we shared a gallows humour that would have been unavailable to me had some teacher in Aurora, Ontario not been forced by curriculum to teach me that damned depressing book.

Gol' darn it, the profound weakness of this argument is also available in the best economic literature of the early 19th Century - Mr. Bastiat's 'seen' and 'unseen'. Now the writer does argue for a positive influence of reading one book on one relationship. What he utterly fails to do is even suggest that he could not have had better influences on his life by reading some other, possibly non-Canadian. book.
I think the whole article is a very bad bit of special pleading.
Some Canadians write good books. Even non-Canadians read some of them! Why I have even read a few.
I am unconvinced the gubmnt and its supporting bureaucracy is any better at determining what we should read than any other group. Maybe they are no worse. But I sure liked my Dickens best of all my high school enforced reading.
Where Norm comes from, in the UK, they might pass a law that forces one novel by a British novelist to be on the English literature syllabus every year. Everybody would die laughing at that. That is how it ought to be here.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:49 PM