Jamie Sarkonak: Jordan Peterson is right — schools should be unabashedly pro-western

Conservatives continue to cede education with 'apologetic neutrality'

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Published Sep 09, 2024  •  6 minute read

A grade two classroom is shown in this Monday, September 14, 2020 file photo. Photo by Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS

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 than conceptual learning, though this was less ambitious than the earlier draft, which was allowed to be shouted down by activists.

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Most noteworthy, Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick are all on the path to rolling back some of the gender insanity in schools, specifically mandating schools get consent from, or inform parents of pronoun or name changes, which with any hope will end the stories about children being conditioned by their schools to live as the opposite sex.

But on the whole, conservatives have largely remained hands-off, and it’s to the detriment of everyone. Lots of families don’t agree with the progressive chum fed to their children by public schools, and would surely appreciate a moderating counter-force. Their kids deserve a fact-filled education that doesn’t alienate them from their roots. And most importantly, we need them to receive that education because one day they’ll be running the place.

Teacher education, for example, remains barely touched. So as conservative policymakers make small adjustments to curriculums and expectations around gender in schools, little is being done to change how those schools are staffed. Faculties of education are still run by people who beat the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) drum, who insist they live on “stolen land” and who claim that teachers must offer “redress” for “injustices.” Programming is changing too: the University of Calgary, for example, is re-examining some of its course offerings for “ethical relationality” which “does not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and position us in relation to each other.” Cultural relativity is a dominant theme in the course of a teaching student’s education.

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Solutions could involve reforming universities or at very least prying faculties of education from their monopoly on the teacher pipeline, but those remain far-off ideas.

Teachers continue to risk persecution if they speak out against DEI-oriented, anti-western education programming for children as their activist colleagues receive honours for their work.

The unions that should be defending these teachers’ professional concerns, meanwhile, have instructed members to keep quiet. One Kingston-area teachers’ union told members last December that “Supporting a so-called ‘right-wing’ political view (example: Parental rights)” could result in discipline, according to a True North report. The same was said for expressing the idea that “there are only two genders.” When asked by the publication whether the union would defend a teacher disciplined for doing such things, the union’s representative didn’t respond.

Teachers’ unions, however, have been quick to attack rules when it comes to limiting their ability to facilitate social transitions among their pupils.

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Then there are the glimpses into schoolroom policy that can be found here and there. Ontario schools, it seems, will allow teachers to wear sex props to work as long as they self-identify as transgender. Oakville’s Kayla Lemieux had to be included on staff. Now back to Kerry, retransitioning into a man was as simple as taking off those Z-cups.

The assignments are more subtle, but no less concerning. Chanel Pfahl, former teacher and now Canada’s top broadcaster of classroom nonsense, has made public plenty of examples: a Hamilton teacher’s request for “at school” and “at home” pronouns; an LGBT terminology board in a Guelph Catholic school; flag displays for demisexual, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, and polyamourous pride in Kitchener.

On both the outside and the inside, there are pressures to attack western culture and the people who come from it. Discussions of white privilege are common enough with students in classrooms and hallways, training their young minds to make skin colour assessments as a matter of routine. These are likely a factor of teacher interests: in 2022, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario actually circulated a series of  “white privilege” lesson plans for deployment in the classroom.

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Beyond school walls, complaints are made that Canadian curriculums are too Eurocentric. The accusation has been levied in Alberta, in Ontario, in New Brunswick; and, to some degree, they work.

What’s the alternative? Rigorous, fact-focused schooling that doesn’t force-feed children ideas that were stylish in 2020, and teacher education that suits this end. Respect for and education about other cultures, paired with a confident refusal to denigrate and erase our own in the process. This kind of schooling is delivered in independent bubbles for now, demand for which far outstrips supply (the Alberta Classical Academy in Calgary was only able to enrol 840 students this year, far short of its 3,000 applications).

Most of all, government ministers must be unashamed to defend the western tradition and ensure it’s passed down to students with pride.

It’s an idea that Jordan Peterson recently pitched to BC Conservative Leader John Rustad, British Columbia’s premier-in-waiting — who, as it happens, is angling to neutralize the politics within the province’s education system.

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“Why neutral, exactly?” asked Peterson in his Tuesday podcast. “Why not unabashedly anti-communist? Unabashedly pro-free-market? Unabashedly western tradition of freedom, you know? Because it seems to me that one of the errors that conservatives and classical liberals have made consistently across time is a kind of apologetic neutrality.”

Unfortunately, he’s right.

“They’re so terrified of being demolished by the woke mob, and also of being accused of something approximating social conservatism,” Peterson continued. “They do take refuge in something like neutrality, but I’m not sure it’s time for neutrality anymore.”

People on the other side of the political spectrum know that neutrality is a loser — that’s why gender-neutral washroom renovations are all the rage, why pansexual flags can be found on bulletin boards, why land acknowledgements are opening assemblies and school board meetings and why curriculums tend to de-emphasize the importance of learning facts.

Well, good luck to Rustad. And if he fails, the next new conservative premier can just recite the old adage: True neutrality has never been tried

National Post

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