Leave it to over-sensitized teachers and public school bureaucrats to think that the biggest problem with taking children on a field trip to attend a political rally is that they might have heard something that “negatively impacted” them.
Last week, some Toronto students were taken on a school trip in what was billed in advance as an “educational opportunity … to learn about Indigenous activism, environmental justice and human rights.” Parents were told that students would “observe,” but wouldn’t be “participating in the rally itself.”
Specifically, parents were led to believe their kids would be learning about the Grassy Narrows First Nation and that community’s long struggle with mercury contamination in its waters.
Video posted to social media, however, shows school-aged kids wearing backpacks and marching through the street as someone with a loudspeaker leads a chant of, “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” (“Turtle Island” being the name that those who want to delegitimize the Canadian state have given our country.)
Other photos show youngsters holding overtly political signs. Some were reportedly sent home with stickers that read, “Zionism kills.”
Although boilerplate statements sent to the media by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) acknowledge that, “In general, students should not be participating in organized protests as part of a field trip,” they seem to suggest the biggest issue was that, “Some students may have been negatively impacted by what they saw and heard” — not that parents were misled and students used to advance their teachers’ political agenda.
The issue is that kids — or anyone else, for that matter — should not be pressured into lending their support to a cause of any kind. School children should be given an unbiased accounting of the facts and the tools they need to think critically about that information and come to their own conclusions.
When I was growing up, I recall my mother taking me and my brothers to a rally over provincial cuts to child-care funding. It seemed fun at the time because we got a few seconds of fame on the evening news.
But looking back on the event makes me uneasy, because I don’t think it’s right to pretend as though children support a particular cause by bringing them to a rally (though I suppose if the government hadn’t cut child-care funding, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to go).
And that’s exactly what showing up to a protest says: that you support the cause. Adults at least have the choice to leave a rally if it, for example, devolves from a protest over environmental contamination into an anti-Israel hate-fest. Students who are there on a field trip do not.
Parents, of course, have a right to make decisions for their children, even if they may seem morally questionable to some. School teachers and administrators, on the other hand, have no right to use their students as pawns in their political games.
This is something that at least one of the teachers who was apparently involved in organizing the trip doesn’t seem to get. “Do you really believe it’s harmful to kids to hear the chant ‘From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a crime’?” tweeted Anne-Marie Longpre, before deleting her account.
Well, no, I don’t think it’s necessarily harmful for students to hear that. But it is harmful to society for impressionable young minds to be indoctrinated in an anti-western ideology that seeks to undermine the legitimacy of our country and implicitly supports a genocidal terrorist organization that is at war with one of our allies — and that’s exactly what that slogan means.
It is precisely because generations of young people were taught to loathe western liberal values and the Jewish state in universities that so many people thought it was appropriate to party in the streets to celebrate Hamas terrorists who raped and slaughtered innocent Israelis on October 7.
The sharp rise in antisemitic violence in this country that we’ve witnessed since that fateful day is also a direct result of allowing anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda to spread unchecked on university campuses for decades.
And now, the graduates of those universities seem intent on instilling their ideological biases in elementary students, who are far too young to separate opinion from fact, and cannot be expected to have the breadth of knowledge necessary to come to an informed opinion on complex political issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Canada’s history of colonialism.
On Facebook, Nigel Barriffe, a teacher and vice-president of Elementary Teachers of Toronto, a chapter of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario union, is promoting a petition that characterizes the TDSB’s half-hearted apology as an example of “anti-Palestinian racism” taken under pressure from the Jewish lobby.
“The #TDSB’s recent apology under pressure from CIJA and the Friends Simon Wiesenthal Center is a prime example of anti-Palestinian racism,” wrote Barriffe. “The Board has chosen to bow to organizations spreading misinformation and spying on our children. This is not leadership—it’s complicity.”
I don’t think that sharing video of school kids being used to pad the crowd at an anti-Israel rally counts as “spying on our children,” but Barriffe is right about one thing: the TDSB has not exercised anything resembling “leadership.”
If it had, it would have made it clear that politics have no place in the classroom, regardless of the issue. Students should never be taken to an organized protest as part of an official school function. And any teacher who thinks it’s appropriate to peddle opinion rather than fact, to get students involved in political causes or to brainwash youth who haven’t even mastered the three Rs should be out of a job.
As parents and taxpayers, we all have a right — and a duty — to demand that our hard-earned money goes toward educating future generations and preparing them to become productive members of society, not indoctrinating them and teaching them to disdain the values that Canada, and western society more broadly, were founded upon.
That means placing a greater emphasis on civic education and the importance of Enlightenment values such as reason and free expression, which are essential components of a free and democratic society. We cannot allow extremists to keep degrading our education system and continue to churn out generations of terrorist-supporting, statue-toppling youngsters.
National Post
[email protected]
Twitter.com/accessd