Ontario's Ministry of Education is failing both students and parents

The purpose of education is to provide children with the skills they need to become productive members of society. For each of us,  'productive' may have a different meaning, and it is very much in the interests of the public to ensure that their concept of the word is the same as that of the people who decide what type of education Ontario's children receive.

The curriculum and guidelines for schools are not formulated at the local level. They come from the Ministry of Education. Anyone familiar with the civil service and nature of government knows that while the Minister is a politician who bears the responsibility of decisions and policies that emanate from their ministry, they personally do not create those policies.  Frequently, the Minister may not even fully understand them. Policies are created by policy advisers who are usually full-time civil servants.

In the case of Canadian Ministries of Education, many of those advisers were gathered from places like the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), which is a hotbed for radical forms of social engineering that they are imposing, by stealth, on the general population.

We live in a world of innovation where huge segments of the workforce are employed in technologically-based occupations that didn't even exist a generation ago. The skills needed to succeed in a competitive global environment are to a large extent technological ones, requiring understanding of mathematics, physics, biology, and the like. All subjects which are culturally neutral and where solutions to questions aren't subjective but can be demonstrably proven.

Yet the Ontario Ministry of Education, its Minister and its policy advisers are a nest of social engineers, who appear more concerned with imposing their social values on future generations than with providing them the education they need to live successful lives.

OISE programs like Sociology and Equity Studies and other of the institutes's programs with their focus on subcategories like Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and their fixation on a neo-Marxist concept of social values have produced graduates who have been absorbed into the Ministry of Education. They have used their positions to promulgate those ideas from the elementary level upward.

They are even going so far as to try to indoctrinate children with these ideas in mathematics, where OISE professor Indigo Esmode, who sports rings in her nostril and lower lip,  (because as we all know, nothing demonstrates a commitment to intellectual development and promotion of social values like the willingness to stick pieces of metal through your face) is being financed to promote instillation of "social justice" in math class. While that may not sound frightening on its surface,  the concept of social justice coming from an institute where open admiration of Che Guevara is de rigeur may not be those with which the average Ontario parent wants to  have their child indoctrinated. In fact examples of Social Justice in Math that OISE has already promoted, such as the idea that the world's social problems would all go away if the US military budget were used to address them, betrays a frightening ignorance of history geo-politics, and international conflicts. It is that type of foolishness that undermines any confidence in their ability to either promote values that are in the best interests of society or to teach basic math properly.

The Ministry of Education, through the Toronto District School Board, is even promoting a conference featuring a radical American polemicist named Tim Wise, who under the guise of equity, makes a living promoting racial differences between people and wants more focus in race in schools. To compound that, Education Minister Laurel Broten is effectively endorsing the conference which also features a proponent of the use of Islamic Sharia Law in Ontario's Family Court system.

There isn't nearly enough public awareness of what goes on in school classes, both in terms of  the curriculum, or the messages that are being sent to children through their design. Teachers are the front-line workers who interpret the government's dictates in schools. For the most part, Ontario's teachers are dedicated, outstanding individuals. Most of them are smart enough to ignore some of the sillier dictates that come from above. But like in any profession, there are quite a few who are substandard or have simply lost interest. The price that all of us, as a society, pay when students are subjected to idiotic policies delivered by those incompetent practitioners is not one that we should have to bear.