The broken promise of taxpayer-funded, public education was that it would help unify our diverse society by bringing students from all backgrounds together to learn, and to learn from and about one another.
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Last week’s controversy involving the Toronto District School Board – the largest public school board in Canada – was the latest example of how public education today divides students, teachers, the education system and society itself into a world of victims and oppressors.
This idea is repeated over and over again in a 37-page, board-generated document called “Facilitating Critical Conversations – A Teaching Resource for Challenging Oppression in Toronto District School Board Classrooms.”
Intended for internal use by teachers and other educators, the contents were leaked.
The document says the TDSB’s “Core Beliefs” as defined by its “Equity, Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression Department,” include that public education and society are built on “White Supremacy,” where race “is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining people’s social, political, economic, and cultural experiences.”
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Public education “is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized.”
“Schooling in North America is inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture (i.e., white, middle-upper class, male, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc.)” and because of this “the interests, and needs of the dominant culture determine established behaviours, values and traditions that are considered acceptable and the ‘norm’ in education, other institutions and the broader society.”
While the board has – at the request of Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce – temporarily removed this document from its internal website to review some of the language, let’s not kid the troops.
While it was meant for internal use, the views it expresses are widespread in public education today and can be found in many publicly available TDSB documents.
They are based on identity politics – defining people by race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, etc. – and critical race theory – the assumption that society and every institution in it is systemically racist.
Ostensibly intended to make society more inclusive, they have in fact made us more divided and tribal.
At the TDSB, for example, there is an ongoing controversy over the suicide of Toronto high school principal Richard Bilkszto last summer.
His family alleges this was due to bullying and harassment he was subjected to during board-authorized “diversity equity and inclusion” training sessions for staff, where the views expressed by the DEI instructor were consistent with the TDSB’s “Facilitating Critical Conversations” document.
The family’s allegations about Bilkszto’s suicide have not been tested in court, the company that provided the DEI training says they are false, and the reasons anyone takes their own life are complex.
But reasonable people are left to wonder how an observation by Bilkszto, that he disagreed with a statement by a DEI instructor that Canada was more racist than the U.S., escalated to the point where the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board ruled his DEI training was “abusive, egregious and vexatious,” intended to damage his reputation and make an example of him, and that it rose “to the level of workplace harassment and bullying.”
The thinking behind “Facilitating Critical Conversations” has also been illustrated in some truly bizarre decisions by the TDSB.
In 2021, for example, it banned female students belonging to a book club from talking to top Toronto criminal lawyer Marie Henein about her memoir Nothing But the Truth.
Why? Because she defended former CBC media star Jian Ghomeshi on sexual-assault charges. The board was unable to grasp that everyone is entitled to a defence in our justice system.
The TDSB did the same thing to Nadia Murad, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was recognized for her advocacy of survivors of genocide and sexual violence and wrote, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State.
Why? Because the board said it could promote Islamophobia. Apparently the TDSB was incapable of distinguishing between a terrorist group and a religion.
The board apologized after its actions became public.
In 2021, Toronto school board trustees narrowly voted down a motion to censure one of their own – Alexandra Lulka.
Why? For criticizing two teaching manuals that contained virulently anti-Semitic material supporting violence and terrorism against Israeli Jews.
In 2017, the TDSB voted to remove Toronto Police School Resource Officers (SROs) from Toronto high schools – a program that began in 2008 after 15-year-old Grade 9 student Jordan Manners was fatally shot in a high school – despite the fact the board’s own surveys showed it was strongly supported by students, parents and teachers.
lgoldstein@postmedia.com
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