Conservatives continue to cede education with 'apologetic neutrality'
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The sole determinant of a child’s gender in Prince Edward Island schools is self-identification, per ministerial decree. In Edmonton, the public school board has a new policy to “Work towards the removal of institutional and individual barriers related to heteronormativity and cisnormativity.” In New Brunswick, the school curriculum aims to mould students into “reconciliation leaders” who promote equity.
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The common thread of each education system? They’re all run by conservative governments.
Under conservative management is also Ontario, where the government piled requirements for anti-racism training upon schools in 2020 — kneeling to an industry of consultants who advocate for discrimination against the “privileged.”
More recently, Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in the province (and country) mandated that its specialty education programs be at least 25 per cent Black and Arab as of last school year. Another board instituted an “Affirming Muslim Student Identities” strategy that aims to “counter the erasure of the Muslim identity in the historically Eurocentric curriculum” by skewing school resources to include more Muslims (regardless of whether it’s warranted) and directing schools to counter “Islamophobic narratives in society.”
As for gender, Ontario remains a place where schools will secretly transition troubled children behind their parents’ backs.
In a lot of ways, it seems that education in conservative-run provinces is on auto-pilot. That’s not to say they don’t ever make improvements: Ontario, for all its schools’ faults, will be banning phones in classrooms. Though not a panacea, it’s likely to cushion falling grades. In 2021, Doug Ford’s government also rolled back wording in the math curriculum that claimed “mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges.” Alberta launched a new social studies curriculum that leans heavier into facts........