In a province that’s added a generous share of race communism and guilt politics to its classrooms and teacher training materials in the past decade, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some teachers are taking kids to protests.
Ontario’s curriculum includes teachings that promote Marxism, Critical Race Theory and the identification and shaming of “dominant” groups in society, all while denigrating colonialism — and white people, by proxy — as a simplistic force of evil.
So last week, when Toronto public school students were shepherded to a pro-Palestinian protest, some wearing blue to identify themselves as “settlers,” it was hard to feel shocked. This is Ontario’s education system working almost as intended — just with a tad more enthusiasm as required by government.
Take the province’s “equity and social justice” options courses, introduced in 2013 under the previous Liberal government for Grades 11 and 12. The Ontario curriculum specifies that these are to introduce students to the language of gender ideology, social justice theories of racial power and privilege, as well as to the relevant theorists (“Judith Butler, George Dei, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Karl Marx” are some suggestions).
Course slides and materials for one Durham school’s Grade 12 edition of the course give an idea of how it’s taught. “In groups, identify the dominant group for your assigned categories and then take notes as everyone presents,” goes the instruction for a first-day classroom activity; a corresponding worksheet has students fill in their race and sexual orientation.
And so it continues. The Durham school’s course materials on “The Troubling Legacy of Post-Colonialism” simplify the colonization of North America as a shallow, sadistic, careless process — which would be less concerning if a counterpoint was offered, but one is not. Meanwhile, its lesson on Critical Race Theory tells students that “whiteness,” “masculinity” and “heterosexuality” are all “categories of power” that dominate society. Rather than presenting it as a social theory, it’s presented as a one-dimensional fact.
The class continues by teaching students about systemic racism: the force that, through “apparently neutral institutional policies or practices,” leads to unequal outcomes that nefariously “only serves to reinforce the challenges” that minorities face. One lecture handout nudges students to blame racial crime statistics on supposedly inherent Canadian racism:
“Laws are an integral part of our society. These laws have been written with the foundational principle — respect for all…. Yet what happens when that foundational principle is not upheld? Note the following: Indigenous peoples make up 4% of the Canadian population, yet in federal prisons, 1 in 4 inmates is an Indigenous person. Why?
“Black males are stopped and documented by police 2.5 times more than white males the same age. Why?”
It’s possible that this could have been a lead-in to a discussion about how men from different groups, for whatever complex reasons, commit crimes at different rates. But the context these statistics are presented in says otherwise: it’s being implied to students that disproportionate jail demographics are produced by a lack of “respect for all.”
On gender, another course handout argues that one main factor behind segregating sport by sex is “gender superiority”: biological differences are either too minor to warrant separation, the writer claims, or better replaced by unisex weight and performance classes. “Evidently women are not expected to exert themselves to the same extent,” it remarks, encouraging female students to view sex-segregated sports as an indignity. A classroom activity has students “make arguments in favour of mixed-sex sports,” but not against.
After a discussion on neo-pronouns (“ze/zir”), the ladies are told the story of the everlasting unfairness of the gender pay gap. Canadian women are paid 17 per cent less than men. No counterpoint or context is offered, though they exist: if we’re anything like the U.S., the pay gap mainly applies to women who’ve had kids — that is, it’s is less about sexism and more about time in the game.
The guys, on the other hand, are told that the traditional concept of masculinity is a social justice issue, that it’s OK to be soft and feminine and that trying to “be a man” can be damaging to a person. Everyone receives their respective victimhood narratives.
Throughout the course, students are sung the praises of activists. Black Lives Matter protests and their road-blocking tactics are lauded, their associated disorder is sidestepped. The moral imperative to be an “ally” to social movements whose righteousness goes unquestioned — at least in the slides — is touted. The final project varies by school, but students cap off with something related to activism: whether it be an inclusive design audit or an awareness-raising project.
This is quite clearly a course on promoting left-wing politics, and it’s been allowed to continue by Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government. Activist teachers can hardly be blamed for such an inappropriate course, as the curriculum itself sets out that students will be taught progressive-left ideas. Theories of justice and movements for social change that are typically associated with conservatives are nowhere in sight — and that seems to be perfectly fine for the Ford government.
Smaller changes have been introduced, or allowed to persist throughout the core Ontario curriculum. In 2022, Indigenous ways of knowing were peppered throughout the Grades 1-8 science curriculum with varying degrees of appropriateness. Discussing various local First Nations crops might make sense, but the curriculum also goes as far as associating Indigenous practices with sustainability and conservation, which isn’t always an accurate generalization. It’s well known that the Māori hunted many New Zealand species to extinction when they arrived some 700 years ago. Human activity was almost certainly a factor in the disappearance of North American megafauna. And today, Indigenous people in Canada, like any people anywhere, vary in their conservation-mindedness: some care, others poach.
Regarding language instruction overall, the province continues to implement “antidiscrimination education” to direct classroom proceedings according to modern progressivism. English class learning materials, says the provincial curriculum, should “involve protagonists of both sexes from a wide variety of backgrounds” and “reflect the diversity of Canadian and world cultures.” Not all class materials need to be Shakespeare, but it speaks volumes that the curriculum is more concerned about book character demographics than its ability to familiarize kids with the English canon.
But that is the attitude that drives innovation in public education, it seems, which is why the Toronto public school board came up with its own course on Critical Race Theory and anti-Black racism. The course, which ended up being offered in 22 schools in 2022, raises the familiar clichés: “white supremacist ideologies” afflict North America, capitalism is oppressive to Black people, systemic racism is the reason for lower academic performance among Black students, and so on. An entire unit is dedicated to the topic of activism.
Not only is the course content driven by shallow revolutionary ideas, but so is the pedagogy. It rejects the “Eurocentric hierarchical structure” in favour of the effectively communist theory of critical education, in which teachers aren’t considered teachers but “co-learners.” The Toronto school board puts it a bit more subtly, claiming that it follows an “Afrocentric” “communal model” (even though the theorist behind critical education theory was Brazilian).
Why, then is Ontario getting so much race Marxism and gender nonsense? As always, it comes down to leadership. The Ministry of Education was the reason that school boards began implementing meticulous equity and inclusion policies a decade ago, which were expanded in 2017 under Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals. Just as easily as these policies were made to come into existence, they could be eliminated entirely.
The Toronto District School Board’s equity policies, thus, aim to have schools affirm the identities of students through courses, professional training and other means. An entire bureaucracy has been built out to address the needs of primary diversity constituents, administering strategies for “Anti-Indigenous Racism, Anti-Black Racism, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Ableism, Anti-Asian Racism and Homophobia and Transphobia.” The practical effects? Book suggestions about transgender children for elementary students.
Last year, in the wake of October 7 and the Israeli-Hamas war, foundations were even laid for a further “anti-Palestinian racism” strategy (which is confusing, as “Palestinian” is more a pseudo-nationality than it is a race); book suggestions haven’t yet made their way down the pipe.
Meanwhile, Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board has its own social justice lesson series which, it says, support the Ontario curriculum. For a Kindergarten to Grade 3 lesson on the Black Lives Matter movement, students are asked to create a BLM poster. At older ages, they’re taught that white people have “privilege” in contrast with people of colour, who are “oppressed.”
The justification for these lessons, as always, points back to the provincial government: “All content aligns with the Ontario Curriculum and Ministry of Education directions,” writes the board, adding that the courses also support its obligation to promote provincial human rights law.
It doesn’t matter that the Ontario education ministry is now conservative-run. It continues on auto-pilot. Marxist propaganda has been transparently integrated into province-designed courses. Demographic bean-counting as a means of selecting course material is encouraged right in the curriculum documents. Western culture is denigrated in the name of multiculturalism and decolonization, while other world cultures — Indigenous ones, especially — escape that highly critical lens.
Students are being taught not just how to be activists, but what to advocate for. Teachers aren’t making the case for a biological sex-based theory of gender, nor are they making the case against “systemic racism” as a concept. They dare not relax on the “colonialism was objectively immoral and wrong” story, either. Indeed, they’re correctly sticking to the curriculum.
The Ontario education minister, Jill Dunlop, has asked her ministry to investigate her school system’s latest absolute flub in Toronto, where saw students marched around as protest props. That’s great, but it won’t do much good when the rest of her ministry supports the conditions that made this scandal possible in the first place. A real, long-term fix can be found by cracking open the curriculum — and the various laws and ministerial directives that the province’s school boards use to justify their nonsense.
National Post