Jamie Sarkonak: Education activists need to leave the kids alone

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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 generic 17th-century ocean-crossing galleons in what was likely the Caribbean, as if elementary students enrolled in Ontario have the capacity to be traumatized by something that happened 400 years ago. A game about walking on a nature trail has taken its place, ignoring, of course, that park trail systems in North America are also creations of colonialism.

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Most egregiously, the “Three Bears” game “portrayed (a) narrow concept of family, stereotypical gender roles and the attribution of human characteristics to animals.” The classic mom-dad-child depiction of a family, which has propelled western civilization for ages, was problematic. They were too heterosexual, and that they were animals made it even worse: on the frontier of oppressor-oppressed thinking, it’s considered wrong to show children images of anthropomorphic animals while also feeding them real-life animals. Thus, this game was replaced with one about making an alphabet soup.

To be fair to Ontario’s education department, the Strong Start program isn’t a government initiative — it’s a charity based in Waterloo, Ont. Most of its funding comes from other charities (whether those charities get their money from private donors or the government, we can’t say). It takes cues from the provincial government, but it does so by choice.

Other iconoclast moves have come directly from schools and their boards. “Equity-informed weeding” to cull books from school shelves — an ongoing phenomenon that shocked students in Ontario schools last fall upon finding their libraries half-empty — continues to be a recommended practice at Canadian School Libraries, a school library professional group. The group insists that equity-informed reading should never amount to censorship, even though its criteria for book removal is censorious: “classics” are overrated, it says, and removing “cultural appropriation” is of greater importance.

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Its recommendations have been taken into consideration all over the place. Waterloo’s public schools implemented them with a massive book audit in 2021 — to root out “harmful” content. New literature had been added to diversify collections, but that wasn’t enough, according to one staffer. The board’s policy even recommends that the books not be given away because they could harm the minds of children — instead, they’re to be trashed.

At the Peel District School Board, a similar audit was carried out, resulting in one school losing all its books published prior to 2008. Later, this was attributed to an on-the-ground misinterpretation of board policy — a pretty big misinterpretation, if you ask me. The board denies that it has banned any books, and says it’s replenishing its collection.

Unfortunately, the board didn’t make a list of resources to trash because it wanted teachers and librarians to apply the weeding principles themselves — to develop “critical consciousness” and train them to “recognize harm,” according to a district library administrator. Hints as to what the condemned titles might be can be gleaned from elsewhere: To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men were removed from a Surrey, B.C. school’s recommended list, and they were outright banned at Toronto’s Catholic school board.

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Aside from the books, it’s all the other little things. Even Mother’s Day is too traditional and non-inclusive for certain fragile school administrators. One Toronto school took down its student-created Mother’s Day sign last year which read, “Life does not come with a manual. It comes with a mom,” because it “does not reflect the inclusivity of our community.” And one province over, a Quebec school gender-neutralized Mother’s Day entirely. Celebration of normal parenthood, Three Bears or real-life, is slowly becoming off-limits.

Like a proper iconoclasm, this movement in schools has reached some of our deepest, religion-sourced celebrations, too. Christmas concerts were cancelled at a number of Nova Scotia schools last year “In the spirit of fostering a sense of inclusivity, belonging and respect for diverse backgrounds and traditions.”

Switching out a few references to fairytales and feudal Europe in a board game for reading-challenged students probably isn’t going to make or break their passion for studying folklore-related fiction in young adulthood. But taken with everything else public education is doing to kill the link Canadian children should have with our shared cultural values and symbols, we have plenty of cause for concern. If students can’t even interact with boats and ships — and even the concept of heterosexual, monogamous, stable families — because today’s educational experts have determined that these are harmful ideas, we can’t expect them to learn anything.

Instead, we’re priming them for a life of perpetual curiosity-killing shame: for their mystical identity-based privileges, for their country and for their collective history.

National Post

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