Castles, ships and the 'Three Bears' are now considered too problematic for children's eyes, says one Ontario reading program

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Some Ontario schools use a little program called Strong Start to help kids learn to read. For years, it’s done so by using games: its “Three Bears Alphabet” board game centres around a mother bear, a father bear and a child bear; its “Treasure Hunt” game takes place on a sandy beach with trading ships off the coast. And the “Race to the Castle” game has children move along the board doing just that.

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But in a 2024 update to the program, all of these games have been replaced for diversity, equity and inclusion reasons. It’s yet another area within Canadian education that has felt the sector-wide iconoclasm: widespread destruction of works and symbols newly deemed unacceptable by a handful of zealots. Instead of religious images being burned and trashed, as has historically been the case, it’s Canadian heritage and tradition.

Strong Start’s castle game, according to the program’s explainer, was far too Eurocentric for Ontario schools. It was replaced with one about a playground. In other games, the image of a queen to teach the letter “Q” was replaced with a quill. The diversity-minded people behind the switch evidently weren’t aware that castles and queens aren’t exclusive to Europe — though, even if they were, there was no harm in showing them to kids. Medieval fortresses inspire wonder, and they’re part of this nation’s roots, after all.

Similarly, the Treasure Hunt game “had a distinct colonial theme” because it included a depiction of........

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