Sitting on a little over an acre of prime real estate, just on the other side of the south end of Toronto's trendy, hyper-liberal Annex neighborhood, is Central Technical School.
Amidst leafy streets lined with Victorian row houses in an area populated largely by university professors, downtown professionals and urban hipsters, Central Tech is a huge Edwardian structure that, with its adjacent playing field, takes up an entire large city block. The century-old stone building physically resembles any number of large high schools throughout North America erected around the same time. But the school is unique in Toronto in that it draws students from all over the city who come for its specialized technological, trades, and arts courses, which they provide in addition to the regular provincial curriculum.
My son is a student there and through my involvement as a co-Chair of the School Council, I have come to learn that Central Tech has the advantage of an exceptionally professional administrative team and some outstanding teachers.
But some of them have taken the curriculum that was the brainchild of former Education Minister and current Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Deputy Minister of Education, accused child pornographer Ben Levin, more to heart than is comfortable for many patents.
In the newly commenced semester, one of my son's courses is English. On the first day, the class' permanent teacher was not yet assigned and a temp took charge.
The day's assignment was to read a
Toronto Star article about the "genderless child" whose sex was being kept a secret by its parents, one of whom is a Toronto District School Board alternative school teacher. They were also assigned a short story called
The Story of X, by Lois Gould. First published in
MS. Magazine in 1972, it is a whimsical, but rather tritely-written short story that questions gender roles and apparently served as the inspiration for the Toronto couple to turn their child into a human Guinea Pig for a social experiment.
Now thanks to Kathleen Wynne, her rubber-stamp Education Minister Liz Sandals, and the social engineers running the TDSB, every child in the public school system is part of their deplorable experiment in restructuring human behavior.
Discussing the role of gender in society is not something I would find objectionable. But it belongs in a Social Studies class. The aim of the radicals running the school system in Ontario is to alter the next generation with a type of politicized education masquerading as "social justice" that is insinuated into every course,
despite its irrelevance to the actual subject matter.
Making the situation more egregious is that there actually are opportunities to discuss gender in established literature. If a teacher feels the need to discuss gender issues in English class, why not teach
Twelfth Night,
in which the female protagonist Viola assumes the identity of a male? A
teacher who shared that play with a class would provide to students the
added benefit of familiarizing them with one of the most important works
in the body of English Literature. But perhaps expecting Shakespeare
to be taught by the Wynne/Sandals/Levin educational regime is unrealistic. After all, that would require students to spend a lot of
time immersed in the Eurocentric, patriarchal values upon which western
civilization was built. And that runs contrary to the new belief system
in which Ontario wants to condition all of its children.
If a lesson requires a short story, there are innumerable volumes of outstanding works which the current crop of students find excluded from their curriculum.
Instead, we have a generation of children who are entering universities unable to punctuate sentences properly. The only O Henry of which the vast majority of these kids have ever heard is the homonymic candy bar. Yet rather than de Maupassant or H.H. Munro, they are subjected to polemical, on-the-nose, banal literary detritus. Because a primary goal of the TDSB is the social
objective of explicit instruction in the proper way of
thinking in our-soon-to-be genderless civilization.
One of the architects of contemporary Gender Studies is a dour academic named Judith Butler. Though acclaimed in some circles, Butler is widely derided as a tedious pedant whose main talent is her ability to utilize copious amounts of
meaningless jargon to obfuscate and equivocate. When Butler is nailed down on a position, it is often on something as puerile as her pronouncement that the misogynistic, fanatically fundamentalist, religious terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah are "social movements that are progressive, that are on the left." That assessment of Butler's was based on her sole, defining criterion of them being "anti-imperialist." Even within that nescient framework, she discounts those terror groups' support for the imperialism that led to the spread of Islam throughout the Middle East and parts of Asia, Africa and Europe and their current aspirations to expand it further.
Gender Studies is essentially a politicized branch of Philosophy. Its adherents in our system, driven by a cult-like devotion in places like the
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, lack a basic knowledge of relevant biology and psychiatry. But even so, they feel qualified to proselytize a new order of gender roles and have invented a pseudo-science backed up, not by data, but by their aspirations for a world that reflects their own image. Tellingly, they are heavily invested in outmoded psychoanalytical theories which were almost completely abandoned within psychiatry decades ago.
So while the least capable minds in the academy populate 'grievance studies' subjects like Gender Studies, real science has left them far behind, establishing that
there are distinct, discernible differences in the brain structures of men and women.
It wasn't so long ago that a medical term for someone whose sense of gender didn't match their biology was "mentally ill." Evidently the difference between sex and gender is that the former is
biological and the latter is a sense of self. But since the biological component drives behavior, it seems that plenty
of us, including the "genderless" child's parents, are confused about
the whole matter.
In nature, female lions are no more
socialized to care for their young than a male Black Widow spider is
socialized to allow the female to eat him during mating. Still, despite obvious biological differences between male and females, Toronto's educrats want children to believe that male and female roles among humans are merely a "social
construct" which they should abandon.
We shouldn't discriminate against transexuals in any way.
They are people who have a condition that causes them great difficulty, and
it is often a troubling and courageous effort that leads them to alter
the sexual identity with which they were born. But consider that their
condition is something that requires surgery to correct, which is covered
by publicly-funded heath insurance. So it is, by
definition, an illness.
But more to the point, English classes are supposed to teach English and not to encourage children in public schools to question and abandon their concepts of gender.
The troubling part of this sinister remodeling is that, for the most part, it slips by unnoticed. Most parents are oblivious to the particulars of their children's daily curriculum. Once the symptoms become apparent, it is well past the point where serious damage is done, as in the plummeting math scores of kids who were subjected to Ontario's faddish educational designs.
One thing is for certain. If Kathleen Wynne's government is returned to power, they will take it as an endorsement of their mandate and the indoctrination of Ontario's children will only intensify.
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