The Door Is Slamming Shut

I have been retired from teaching high-school English for almost 20 years. When I look back, I realize how fortunate I was to have been able to spend the bulk of my career free from too much interference from administrators and public sentiment. For me, teaching literature was the gateway to helping create analytic skills, reading appreciation and, perhaps most importantly, critical thinking skills. Honest inquiry was sacred in my classroom, and nothing was ever really off-topic, given the range of human experience that literature encompasses: human dignity, cruelty, exploitation, savage monopolistic business practices (read The Grapes of Wrath for a full display of those qualities) among them. 

Alas, that is no longer the case. I doubt that I could thrive or even survive in today's atmosphere, an atmosphere that sees increasing restrictions on what can be discussed in the classroom. 

A temporary ban on students sharing their family’s culture in class. A parent-organized Pride event moved outside school hours. Teachers afraid to answer students’ questions around the Israel-Hamas war.

Over the past academic year, Toronto parents and teachers say activities and discussions that would typically be normal to have in the classroom have suddenly become a source of fear and confusion — and they pin the blame on an edict dropped by the Ontario government last September.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, then-education minister Jill Dunlop issued a memo to Ontario school boards to keep “political biases” out of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

Given the risk-averse nature of today's school administrators, that memo is having a chilling effect, even though the directive is vague as to what constitutes political biases.

Can civic lessons on who is prime minister continue as normal? What about sex-ed lessons on different genders and sexualities? Class discussions around race?

“Nothing is neutral,” said Carl James, a professor and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University. “The curriculum cannot be seen as outside of providing and producing a way of seeing things.”

The Star spoke to a number of Toronto teachers and parent, many of whom do not wish to be identified for fear of reprisal.

When a public speaking competition was coming up at the elementary school of Zoë Wool’s child this past year, the west-end parent said students were invited to write a short speech on an important issue.

But when Wool’s child wanted to talk about Palestine, she said they were told it was “not a good idea.”

Wool said the incident came around the same time the school’s principal allegedly put a blanket ban on students sharing their culture in class — but that the ban was later lifted after the principal met with parents.

Neither Wool nor her child is Palestinian (they are Jewish), but she worries about the impact the ministry’s memo will have on those who are.

“Palestinian families are being given the message by the Ministry of Education that there is something wrong or dangerous or problematic about their very identity and history and that acknowledging their existence puts other kids at risk,” Wool said.

The Palestinian issue has presented a problem for many. 

Palestinian teachers who spoke to the Star said they, too, felt constrained by the province’s edict, even when students ask them questions about their heritage. 

“I’m too scared,” said a Palestinian TDSB elementary teacher, who explained how she doesn’t answer her young students’ questions on what the Palestinian flag and watermelon pins attached to her fanny pack represent.

Amongst the other casualties of the memo are Pride events, now being forced to take place outside of school hours. Indigenous issues may also be sidelined.

Unfortunately, some of the public (and they are usually a loud minority) conflate discussion and information with indoctrination, preferring that children learn in a sterile and contextless environment.

However, we have already seen where that has taken Americans, further down the road of prejudice, intolerance and ignorance. If we allow the door of critical inquiry to slam shut here in Canada, will we not follow the same trajectory?

 

History: An Update

As one who taught high school for 30 years, I have always believed in the power of education. It is the best and perhaps the only way to narrow the disparities that exist in society. In my experience, the truly educated are rarely the ranters who seem to dominate media today.

In my previous post, I talked about how many reactionary states are bound and determined to limit  education about Black history. Not only would such instruction empower Black people; it would also help to reduce the prejudice that is still very common against people perceived as "the other." To know about a rich history would limit the kind of reductionism that often defines Black people today.

At this point in my life, I am profoundly world-weary. But even this cynical, hardened heart was gladdened by news that the Ontario Ford government is going to make Black history a mandatory part of the curricula in Grades 7, 8, and 10, starting in 2025.

Stephen Lecce said Black history is Canadian history and adding it as a mandatory part of the curriculum will ensure the next generation will better appreciate the sacrifices and commitments Black Canadians have made.

"We are committed to ensuring every child, especially Black and racialized children, see themselves reflected within our schools. It is long overdue," Lecce said during a Thursday morning news conference at Lincoln Alexander Public School in Ajax. 

While I rarely have anything good to say about the Ford government, this is one initiative I heartily applaud. 

MPP Patrice Barnes, the parliamentary assistant to the education minister, spearheaded the curriculum change and said she wants it to deepen students' understanding of the country's diverse and vibrant heritage.

"Celebrating the remarkable achievements of the Black community within Canadian history is vital in providing a modern curriculum that reflects the truth of our democracy, one that combats hate and fosters inclusivity," Barnes said.

"This isn't just about Black experiences, it's not just about Black students. It's about the responsibility we have to provide all students with a comprehensive understanding of our country's rich and varied history."

This kind of curriculum was, of course, entirely absent when I was a student. Consequently, I grew up with little thought about the Black experience, usually equating and identifying Blacks with the sordid history of slavery. And it is clear that such education is sorely needed in Canada. Edward Keenan writes that we cannot be smug about being so different from the Americans, whose MAGA mentality drips with racism:

If anyone were under the impression the border keeps such thought currents from infecting Canadian politics, Pickering city councillor Lisa Robinson was recently happy to demonstrate otherwise, writing a column in a local newspaper arguing against observing Black history month (and indeed, the teaching of Black history) and outlining how it is racist to call her "white priviledge" (sic) and explaining how having her pay suspended for 90 days recently by her colleagues made her a "modern day slave," demonstrating that slavery is "not a Black and white issue." She then reminded people of the era "during the world wars" in the early 1900s when, she claims, soldiers sacrificed "without thought or division based on colour" (which might have been news to the soldiers serving in the segregated Black No. 2 Construction Battalion in the First World War, as well as to the 20,000 Canadian-born citizens of Japanese descent interned in camps during World War II).

That we have our own version of Marjorie Taylor Greene in elected office should be a comfort to no one, and, of course, Lisa Robinson is hardly alone in her prejudices. One hopes that with the education revisions just announced, we will see far less of her kind in the future.

Revisiting The Past

In this blog, I try as hard as possible not to repeat myself. True, that is often a difficult objective to achieve when, with the same fascination that train wrecks and natural disasters exert over some people, I have an ongoing obsession with the political outrages embodied in people like Stephen Harper and Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak.

But for this post, I have to revisit my teaching career, something I rarely do because it is part of the past, a completed chapter of my life. In today's Star, there is a story on a report from People for Education, a group that has been headed for many years by Annie Kidder that works toward monitoring and improving public education.

While the report admits that the roots and patterns of inequality are complex and interconnected, it makes the following observation:

... teens from low-income homes make up the bulk of those taking non-academic credits ... The numbers show the lower the average family income at a particular secondary school, the higher the percentage of students taking “applied” math.

In schools where families earn an average of $110,000 a year, fewer than 10 per cent of students take that course.

While I have no reason to question these statistics, they really do not tell the full story, rife as it is with the implication of some kind of class discrimination colouring the advice students receive from educators on their course selections:

Charles Ungerleider, an education professor at the University of British Columbia, said the government must pay attention to the findings. “Mathematical ability, like other abilities, is normally distributed across the population …. Why are youngsters being slotted into applied courses in disproportionate numbers?” said Ungerleider.

As my policy-analyst son has reminded me on more than one occasion, issues and problems are never simple, outward appearances notwithstanding. And it is this truth, I think, that needs to be applied to the above report.

A constellation of factors influence a student's academic performance: language skills (for example, whether or not the student is a newcomer to English), general intelligence, behaviour, attendance, home situation, and social-economic status are among them. In my own experience, although not invariably true, those whose parent are reasonably affluent can better advocate for their kids, but that doesn't mean that none of them are in the applied courses. Yet it seems to be true that those from homes of poverty or little affluence are over represented in applied programs, but one of the reasons for that is that they tend to be homes where parents, having less education, value education less themselves and transmit that attitude to their children, and often provide little oversight of their study habits, etc. Again, this is not intended as a gross over generalization, but merely an observation borne of my own teaching experience.

When a respect for the goals of education is weak, there are consequences that combine to detract from student achievement: lack of self-discipline, low completion rate on assignments, tardiness and absence, and disruptive classroom behaviour. Despite the public perception that teachers are trained and competent to deal with all of these variables and still deliver the desired educational outcomes is more myth than reality. Some teachers are better in such situations than others; in all frankness, I rarely felt that I did a particularly good job in the applied classes that I taught.

Hence, the problem itself becomes one of not only addressing the problem of growing poverty and income inequality in our society, but also of how to impart an appreciation of the importance of education to recalcitrant families and their children, and motivating them accordingly, no easy tasks, I can assure you.

Sadly, in my mind, there are no simple solutions to this problem, but I write this post only as an effort to balance what seems to me to be the temptation of People For Education to interpret the issue as a form of class warfare.

Administrative Hypocrisy

I came across this letter in The Hamilton Spectator yesterday. I consider the topic of feckless school administrators, operating without integrity, to be quite appropriate for this blog, given how it is yet another example of corruption and decay that undermines all institutions, perhaps most egregiously our political ones. But just as the latter's landscape is littered with those who crave power and influence to the detriment of the collective good, so too, far too often, is education, again to the ultimate detriment of everyone.

The issue revolves around a disciplinary hearing involving Matthew John Chiarot, a science teacher at Bishop Ryan Catholic Secondary School. You can read the details of the allegations against Chiarot here, but the most salient aspect is the assertion that the teacher inaccurately recorded grades following a final exam in January 2007. Hermon Mayers, the school principal, is reported to have earlier said, “It’s just fundamentally wrong to give a mark that’s not correct to a student.”

Given my own personal experience, before I retired, of young teachers being increasingly pressured by administration to raise students' marks so as not to have a high failure rate, I found this letter of particular note:

Artificially high marks are nothing new

Accused teacher’s performance ‘good’ (March 21) The statement, “It’s just fundamentally wrong to give a mark that’s not correct to a student,” caught my attention. The school administrator is admonishing the teacher for this. We don’t know what this teacher is accused of doing with the marks, but in my high school teaching career, teachers were routinely ordered, by school administrators or their board bosses’ directives, to artificially change students marks.

This practice has steadily increased since the 1990s. I can only speak to a public board’s practice. In the race to lower the bar to feed the positive PR machine, we were told we weren’t to fail more than 20 per cent of a class, even deservedly. Marks would have to be artificially raised. Students achieving a failing mark of 46 to 49 per cent would have marks raised to 50 per cent.

Now teachers face disciplinary action and potential loss of career for something previously accepted by principals and boards. Teachers face further castigation by the more recently created, already bloated and blinkered bureaucratic organization, the College of Teachers. For this principal to come out with such a statement without looking in the mirror first is hypocrisy of the highest order, if the Catholic boards follow similar practices to the public.

Don Harrington, Smithville

Cross Posted at Education and Its Discontents

Beyond Cynical By Any Standard

Using the legislative power that Bill 115 provides, Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten has announced she will impose contracts on Ontario teachers but then rescind Bill 115 because it has become a “lightning rod.”

In doing so, she hopes teachers will forgive and forget and resume coaching sports teams and supervising school clubs when students return to classes on Monday.

Incredibly hypocritical and cynical even by Ontario Liberal standards, isn't this a bit like killing your parents and pleading for mercy because you are an orphan?

A Victim of Bullying Speaks Out

I have a confession to make: I'm a survivor of bullying. Educated in the Catholic elementary and secondary high school system, it was common for me to be the target of verbal harassment that questioned my worth as a human being and physical abuse in the form of sudden and explosive slaps to the face, hair-pulling, and books slammed over my head. Needless to say, I was not the only victim of such assaults

It literally took decades to lose my hatred of the teachers, both lay and religious, who perpetrated those acts of violence against me, under the pretext of 'corrective discipline'.

It was those experiences, I suspect, that planted the seeds of what became a life-long suspicion of all institutions, both religious and secular, and a deep, abiding contempt for all who abuse their authority in any arena of human activity.

And so it is with a mixture of fascination, bemusement and contempt that I read about the current outrage being expressed by Catholics and political opportunists (i.e., the Hudak Conservatives) in Ontario over the McGuinty government's insistence in its amended anti-bullying initiative that all school boards, both public and Catholic (the latter of which in fact is public, given that they are taxpayer-funded) permit the use of the term gay-straight alliances if requested by students.

Indeed, no less a church luminary than Toronto Archbishop and Cardinal Thomas Collins has weighed in on the controversy. The frequently red-accoutered prelate, in rhetorical flourishes approaching the hysterical, warns ominously, and with holocaust overtones, that

other faiths could become targets of the government if the anti-bullying bill becomes law and doesn't allow Catholic schools the right to deal with homophobia in their own ways.

"I would say to people of other faiths and even those who disagree with us on (gay-straight alliances): if this could happen to us it can happen to you in some other area," he said.

"When religious freedom becomes a second-class right, you also will eventually be affected."

Consider us warned, Cardinal Collins. And one more thing: get over your fear of the word 'gay' and try practising Jesus' command of unconditional love.