More politicized brainwashing of children by the Toronto District School Board

Reading, writing, arithmetic. There was a time when primary school was created to provide the basics of education. But the people responsible for education in Toronto see another value in having a captive audience of impressionable young minds.

Napoleon Bonaparte recognized that schools could be used not only to teach, but to instill a particular set of values that was useful to his authority and made sure that a curriculum was created instilling ideological values that suited his ability to rule. That approach to education has become a routine facet of totalitarian societies ever since, being used by the Soviets and the Nazis in the last century and in dictatorships like Iran, North Korea and Cuba today.

It should be alarming to Ontarians that the ideologues who run the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)  who are determined to shift the thinking in society to their socialist goals are utilizing the same process as dictatorships to indoctrinate the children entrusted to their care.

In a democracy with a public education system, schools aren't supposed to indoctrinate children to a particular political party. However if the goal is indoctrination rather than education, then that rule doesn't apply. This accounts for the TDSB's publication of a poem titled Election Day by a Grade 1 student named Ahmed Nur from Shoreham Public School:

The poem is a paean to the New Democratic Party that seems suspiciously unlike something an unprompted 7 year old would compose independently. Even if little Ahmed has developed pre-pubescent political partisanship, it it completely inappropriate for the TDSB to publish something of that nature unless they were exhibiting students advocacy of all Canada's major political parties. Did the TDSB print other poems extolling the Liberal and Conservative parties? Of course not.

The message the TDSB want to instill in it's students is even more clearly delineated in the "Earth Hour Rap" it made available at the School Board's website, which contains lyrics such as:

But can we save the world, before all we know is gone?
These corporations are all filled with nothing but actors
Trying to take us out, break our back like chiropractors

and:

 I'm expressing my mind, it's like I'm stressing for time
Watching every second before this hour is gone
It's Al Gore and Suzuki combined into one
All I say is real, and I ain't gonna be fake.
So let me ask you, how much more can you take?

If this blatant type of indoctrination is worrisome, don't expect it to get any better. With a looming leadership race to determine the next Premier of Ontario, one of the leading candidates is Kathleen Wynne, whom the fanatically politicized Ontario Institute for Studies in Education boasts is one of its graduates. If you think things are bad now, wait until the province has an OISE Premier running the show.

While at the TDSB's "Futures" conference last spring, which promoted equity in schools by attributing the ills in the education system to "white privilege," to an audience of credulous educators, I was sitting at a table  during lunch with a group of young teachers.. One of them, a male in his early thirties', earnestly related to the group how his mission was not to teach his students what to think, but how to think.  That sort of self-serving, self-righteous pomposity typifies the thinking in Ontario's Ministry of Education and The Toronto District School Board.

Human beings are born with the innate ability to think. School exists to provide students with information that they can utilize to advance themselves and to reapply in the various circumstances they will find themselves in life. When someone at the  TDSB  says he or she wants to teach their students how to think, what they mean is they want to teach their students how to think exactly the same way as their teachers.

That's not education, it's brainwashing, and it's something the public should be doing everything in its power to prevent from happening to our children.


h/t Matthew at the Eye on a Crazy Planet Facebook group