Editorial: Brilliant writers must not be either censored or removed from schools in Northern Ireland

​​John Steinbeck is one of the greatest writers in the history of American literature. Via fiction he chronicled the Great Depression, and he did so with a compassionate eye, depicting the human misery that it caused. His books including Grapes of Wrath have for decades been taught around the English speaking world, including at schools in Northern Ireland. Pupils are the richer for having been exposed to his wonderful story-telling gifts.

Of Mice and Men is one such work, and it tells the tale of displaced migrant ranch workers, who move around and search for work in the western United States in the 1930s, a period through which Steinbeck – who was born in 1902 – had himself lived. Now there have been calls to remove the book from the GCSE English literature course because it uses racial slurs, and a black student in Northern Ireland has said that this makes her feel uncomfortable.

This demand is one of many that have been made in Europe and America. Some of the best writers in the history of the English language face censorship or removal. Such efforts must be repudiated entirely. We report today how Lord Weir, a former Stormont education minister, thinks the removal of Steinbeck would be a “dangerous move”. A teacher on Radio Ulster yesterday expressed similar concerns.

These long dead writers were portraying the times through which they lived, and they typically did so with great humanity and in ways that would help later generations know about, and try to avoid repeat of, the bad times. The world is a better place for their brilliant observations, and that is why they have been taught to children for generations – and why they must continue to be so.