Dear
Trustee Bolton and Director Spence:
I am
the Co-Chair of the Parents’/School Council at Central Technical School in
Toronto, which as you know is one of the largest high schools in the city with
a student population of over 1900.
Regarding
the current consultations conducted by the TDSB for the K-12 Strategy for the
coming years, there is an issue of very serious concern about which I would
like to offer my comments.
The
so-called social justice aspects of
the curriculum frequently reflect a subjective and highly politicized
interpretation of the word “justice”. As such, the way it is approached needs a
very serious review, and in my opinion a complete overhaul.
There
are inappropriate attempts in the TDSB to integrate so-called social justice
aspects into subjects like Math, where questions such as “Calculate how 5 global social issues could be solved if the US military
budget were applied to them” are posed to children in their mid-teens. The obvious
implication is that military budgets and the military in democratic countries
like the US and Canada somehow detract from the resolution of social problems.
What are not addressed are the catastrophic results that would occur if democracies
did not have the means to protect themselves. Anyone who is familiar with European
history between the World Wars understands the horrendous consequences of
Britain and France’s decision to decommission most of its naval capabilities
after WW1. One can have reasonable debates about such matters, but the clear
purpose of questions of the nature in the example provided is to indoctrinate
to a particular type of thinking. And frankly, the people at OISE (The Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education) who have designed such questions have
nowhere near the knowledge in geo-political affairs or history required to
understand them thoroughly.
That
is reflected further in the way the TDSB teaches about such issues as the
internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War 2. It is right and proper
this be taught. But it is taught in
middle school to students who are not instructed about the causes and history
of the Second World War. Nor, as in innumerable such examples, are they yet provided
with reasonable context, such as the treatment of minorities by Imperial Japan prior
to and during the war. The result is an implication that Canada is and was a particularly
and unusually racist country for its time when that is historically untrue.
In
fact, the TDSB’s providing politicized indoctrination under the guise of social
justice is becoming pervasive through the system. I was at the TDSB Futures
conference earlier this year where Director Spence delivered an address. One of
the keynote speakers was Tim Wise, who blamed the inequities in the education
system on “white privilege.” That fatuous reasoning left absent the fact that
inequities in education in Canada transcend racial divisions and far more often
than not are independent of them. More alarming, Mr. Wise, with the apparent
approbation of the TDSB, said that education needs to focus less on the
individual and more on the collective, including collective racial identities.
This
flouts everything opponents of racism have been fighting for many years. As a
society, we have been working towards achieving a color-blind world that deals
with individuals as such and not as part of separate collectives differentiated
by ‘race’ or ‘color.’
It is
deeply disturbing that, while with the best of motives, the TDSB, has been
working to counter such progress through its use of ill-advised trends put
forward by politicized activists in the education system and in politicized
programs in institutions like OISE.
These
are but a very few of many examples currently occurring within the TDSB.
These
questions are designed through programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, which has programs that specifically advocate for teachers to be
activists against neo-liberalism (i.e.
free-market, liberal democracies) in schools. These same people frequently
advocate for solidarity with Communist Cuba. It should not be necessary to
point out how disturbing it is that our children’s’ curriculum are in many
instances designed by people who advocate against a system that has produced the freest, most prosperous
societies in the world’s history in favor of a repressive, totalitarian society
that imprisons dissenters. Yet because of its recurrence in the TDSB, such
admonitions are regrettably necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.
Honest
people can disagree about ideas and we should always strive for improvement.
People have a right to hold different opinions on how to approach the matters
discussed above. Unfortunately, the term “critical thinking” which is so often
used by TDSB personnel in describing the approach they want to instil actually
means trying to create a “group think” that is critical of our democratic
foundations while promoting ideologies that are antithetical to them.
Social justice for someone who admires Che
Guevara has a very different meaning for those of us who believe in free speech
and parliamentary democracy. People have
the right to share their views with their children on their own time, but not
to attempt to indoctrinate the children in Toronto’s public school system with
them.
Some
of the fault for the concerns I have delineated rests squarely with the Ontario
Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the Province’s curriculum. But
much of it also rests with the TDSB.
With
the challenges facing our children, who will grow up in a world undergoing a
technological revolution, the limited time they spend in schools should focus
on giving them the tools they need for success in such a world. This is the
focus on which I hope the TDSB will concentrate going forward.
Sincerely,
Richard
Klagsbrun
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