Government of SC says books were ‘relocated, not collected’, but omits numbers – 11/25/2023 – Panel

The Santa Catarina Department of Education offers a half-hearted explanation for the controversy involving a list of nine books that, according to a letter published on November 7, should be “removed from circulation and stored in a location not accessible to the school community”.

The secretariat denies that this means that the books were collected or censored, but rather relocated.

In response to a first contact from Sheeton November 14, the secretariat said that “the review of the collection is carried out periodically by librarians, and based on this action, there are possibilities for relocation” and that this “is a common practice to guarantee the suitability of the works for the target audience “.

According to the secretariat’s note, the titles in question were acquired in 2017 and distributed between 2018 and 2019. During the period, Santa Catarina was governed by Raimundo Colombo (PSD) and Eduardo Moreira (MDB).

According to the note, the books would have been sent to the Professional Education Centers, to the EJA (Education for Youth and Adults) Centers and to prison libraries, institutions with adult or adolescent students.

The Department of Education does not, however, inform how many copies of each book were collected, where they were and where they are at the moment. It also does not provide explanations about who created the list or what criteria were used. The secretariat also refuses interview requests.

At least five books on the list, such as “It: The Thing” and “Donnie Darko”, feature supernatural elements in their plots, but there are also titles such as “A Clockwork Orange”, science fiction with scenes of violence, and “13 Whys”. , which inspired the Netflix series and addresses the reasons for teenage suicide.

The work “The Devil’s Diary”, despite the title, has no supernatural or religious elements. It reproduces excerpts from the diary of Alfred Rosemberg, a Nazi intellectual.

The secretariat says that “the information that [o recolhimento] was an initiative of governor Jorginho Mello (PL)” but “on the individual initiative of a supervisor and a regional education integrator in the city of Florianópolis”.

In the last statement sent to the Panel, on the 23rd, the secretariat responded that “it reinforces that the books mentioned were not collected, only redistributed to better adapt the literary works to the age groups of the different modalities offered in the state education network”.

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