(LifeSiteNews) — After years of fruitless protesting and lobbying by parental rights groups, the radicalization of Canadian public school curriculums will finally be an election issue over the next few years, with premiers from New Brunswick to Alberta putting forward policies acknowledging parental rights and federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre expressing his support. It would be a mistake, however, to see these positive policies as a significant step towards reforming the public school system.
The reality is that many teachers and educators will find ways to introduce these subjects to their students anyways – which is why parents must be vigilant. Libs of TikTok has posted hours of video clips of teachers explaining how they integrate LGBT and other woke content into their lessons – many of them went in to teaching in order to further the causes that they care about. If you’d like to read just one chilling example, take 10 minutes to read this recent report from City Journal about one immigrant family’s nightmare experience with a widely-liked teacher who groomed students with gender ideology – eventually, they fled the country to save their family.
The issues with the public school system, to use a favorite progressive term, are systemic. On February 22, the National Post’s Tristin Hopper reported on the new Toronto District School Board handbook, which is distributed to all 20,000 Toronto public school teachers; it states that the Canadian education system exists exclusively to perpetuate “white supremacy.” This was news to me – I thought progressives believed the education system existed exclusively to promote LGBT ideology. But progressive self-loathing remains no matter how successful their institutional takeovers, and the handbook states that the public schools were “inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture” and that education itself is “a colonial structure that centres whiteness.”
Indeed, as I’ve written before, public schools do serve as purveyors of official state dogma or “the dominant culture” – which is why now, instead of opening with prayer, schools instead fly the LGBT flag for all of June and litter their lessons with LGBT ideology.
According to the official handbook, titled Facilitating Critical Conversations: “Race matters—it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining people’s social, political, economic, and cultural experiences.” Focusing on the racial identities of students (diversity is our strength, and deliberate divisiveness is our policy!) is essential because the public schools “must be actively decolonized.” According to the handbook, teachers should ask themselves: “Am I thinking about the various identities students may hold, whether they are part of a group, their comfort in identifying as part of this group, and articulating/coming out as part of this group.”
As Hopper wrote: “The ‘critical conversation’ itself is defined as a means of conditioning students that ‘identity and power’ is inextricable, and that the world around them is chiefly defined by ‘structures that privilege some at the expense of others.’” Indeed, the guidebook informs teachers that: “White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and communities.” The new guidebook replaces one from 2003, which doesn’t mention anything about “White Supremacy” or “decolonization” – an indication of just how far backwards we’ve gone in 21 years. Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce indicated that he disagrees with all of this when asked; that said, his opposition doesn’t seem likely to matter.
The Toronto District School Board handbook gets one thing right – the system is now “designed for the benefit of the dominant culture.” They’re just wrong about who holds the levers of power in that dominant culture. It isn’t “white supremacists” – it’s LGBT activists and woke progressives.
