Why Parents Need to "Wake" Up to "Wokeism" in Schools
Few realize how pervasive this ideology is in classrooms
The ‘woke’ ideology of today that brings with it the triad of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a cancer that is infecting virtually every element of our society. And like a cancer, you often don’t even realize it is there until it’s too late. There are few places that don’t have DEI principles enshrined within their policies, programs, guidelines, practices and communications. This includes our governments, major corporations and businesses, our military, the medical field, our mental health field, the legal field, the list goes on. We should be aware and worried about all of this, because at its core are elements of postmodern Neo-Marxist philosophy that focuses on identity politics, real or invented racial inequalities, real or imagined victimhood, exreme transgender ideology, and intolerance of anyone that does not share their ideology.
There is one place though, where it has taken an alarming foothold and that is the Canadian public school system. Many parents may not be aware of just how pervasive it is within classroom, but they should pay attention and should be concerned. In this article I focus mostly on the Province of Ontario as an example of how matters around gender identity ideology and Critical Race Theory (CRT) have seeped into public school policies, curriculums and classrooms, unbenounced to many parents.
It was in 2012, some ten years ago, that the Toronto District School Board developed a set of guidelines regarding gender identity. This included introducing ‘all gender washrooms’, and accommodating students identifying as transgender to be able to participate in gym classes and sports, based on their gender identity, rather than the ‘gender they were assigned at birth’. The guidelines also, disturbingly, included a policy that instructed its staff to ask transgender or gender nonconforming students, at the start of the school year, how they wished to be addressed in school correspondence to the home, or at meetings with the student’s parents, guardians or caregivers. Guidelines for the Accommodation of Transgender and Gender Independent/Non-Conforming Students and Staff
So, in essence, these guidelines were designed to keep parents from being given any indication that their child might be struggling with gender identity issues!
The Toronto Board’s decision to introduce its guidelines coincided with then Liberal Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s new legislation that enshrined ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender expression’ into the Ontario Human Rights Code. At the time, it gave Ontario the distinction of being the first major jurisdiction in North America to extend human rights protection to transgendered people.
McGuinty’s motivation to make this move, very likely came from his failed attempt, in 2010, to include gender identity and other controversial sex oriented topics in Ontario’s public school sex/health education curriculum two years earlier. Parents were actually listening back then and raised strong opposition to the move and he had to scrap the idea. So, when the new Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne took office in 2013, she had the Human Rights Code to back her up when she put in place a facsimile of McGuinty’s proposed sex/health education curriculum. The topics it covered included such things as consent, specific names for body parts, and of course, gender identity and sexual orientation, etc.
Ontario’s current Conservative Premier Doug Ford was elected in 2018, partially due to a commitment to repeal and replace the Wynne curriculum. As a start, his Education Minister directed all public elementary schools to cease using Wynne’s curriculum in grades K-8, but allowed it to continue to be taught in highschool. However, in a court challenge to the Ministry’s directive, an Ontario judge held that elementary teachers were free to continue to “teach the gender identity concept in the class” (no doubt partially due to Ontario Human Rights Code) even though it was not in the curriculum. The Ford government finally announced a ‘new’ curriculum in 2019 that looked nearly the same as the 2015 curriculum the Premier had promised to do away with.
Amidst all of this activity, the Federal Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, in 2016, introduced Bill C-15 to now enshrine transgender rights and gender expression into the Canadian Human Rights Act. This prompted Dr. Jordan Peterson, then a mere Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Toronto to sound the alarms for what he saw as legislating speech, by compelling people to use trangender pronouns, which he warned was a sign of further things to come, and he was not wrong. THE LEFT HAS GONE TOO FAR - Jordan Peterson | London Real
The enshrining of transgender rights in the Canadians Human Rights Act, on top of its inclusion in many provincial Human Rights Codes essentially opened the flood gates for many other boards to follow the Toronto school board’s lead. Many began introducing policies or guidelines regarding the treatment of transgender students and began teaching a curriculum that included gender ideology and identy elements into their sex/health education lessons.
And they are still doing it. For example, In June of 2021 the Greater Essex County District School Board (GECDSB) and the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board (WECDSB) introduced policies regarding gender identity and expression for students that again was aimed at keeping parents in the dark if their child was having gender identity issues. The new policy reads, “A school should never disclose a student's gender identity, chosen name and/or pronouns to the student's parent or guardian without the student’s explicit prior consent, regardless of the age of the student. Both boards used the the Ontario Human Rights Code as their rationale for introducing the policy, which according to both boards, aims to respect students' confidentiality as well as protect their well-being and safety… by keeping parents completely in the dark when something as critical as this is going on with their child, regardless of their age!!
In January of this year the Waterloo District Public Schoolboard banned a teacher from her school and teaching her class for raising concerns over some of the ‘transgender’ books the Board had approved for grades K to 6. Carolyn Burjoski had simply, in a presentation to the Board, expressed concerns that some of those books seemed to make transitioning to another gender seem ‘simple’ and ‘cool’.
She used a scene from a book called ‘The Other Boy’, where Shane, born a girl, who was transitioning to become a boy, was voicing excitement over starting testosterone treatments. When told by the doctor ‘he’ likely won’t be able to have children, Shane says, “it’s cool”. Again the Board held up the Ontario Human Rights Code, as it pertained to transgender rights, to defend its decision to ban her from teaching at the school. Carolyn Burjoski may have lost her job, but she hasn’t lost her voice and is urging parents and grandparents to also speak out about, which she views, as children being exposed to some very age inappropriate literature in school.
Ontario public schools now include transgender education as part of their curriculum, for kids as young as five and six. And apparently parents can do little about it, as an Ottawa mother discovered when her six year old daughter came home from school upset because her teacher had told her class that, “boys are not real and girls are not real.”
This occurred during a story time session in her daughter’s grade one class, when the teacher read a book called “My Princess Boy'', to her young charges. It was about a boy who liked dressing as a girl, which apparently prompted one student to tell the class that ‘you can go to a doctor to change your body’. The teacher affirmed that to the kids and then showed them a video called “Queer Kids Stuff” YouTube video to ‘help’ explain to them that some people aren’t boys or girls. Later when the class tried to organize into groups according to their sex, she told them “there’s no such thing as boys and girls.” The child’s mother Pam Buffone lodged a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, but not surprisingly, the Tribunal ruled against her saying the school had not violated the girl’s rights with its gender themed instruction, as there was no direct evidence she was harmed by the material (remember a six-year old)!
Now when my daughter was six, (thankfully before this curriculum was introduced), she came home from school once, frantic because, in her health class, she ‘learned’ that foods like french fries were really bad for your heart. She was in a panic because she thought maybe she ate too many french fries and because of that she was going to die. I tried to assure her that wasn’t going to happen, but we eventually had to go see the teacher, to whom I calmly explained the situation. He very genuinely told her that eating french fries with her supper was fine and wasn’t going to hurt her heart. But this is an example of how a six year old’s young mind works. So it should raise the question, is teaching young children something as confusing as gender ideology–and that’s what they are doing–really a good idea, or is there another agenda of ‘woke’ indoctrination at work?
Then there is the ongoing outrageous situation at Trafalgar Highschool in Oakville where a ‘trangender woman’ has been teaching shop class with giant fake breasts, with huge nipples, stuffed under a skin tight blouse and wearing an equally disgusting mini skirt. The school and board officials continue to stand with the teacher, and ‘her’ ‘transgender rights’ rather than listening to real concerns of the parents, who, by the way, are paying their salaries. Meanwhile, the Ford government has been tiptoeing around the issue like a frightened kitten. He had his Minister of Education pen a letter to the Ontario College of Teachers asking them to review their professional standards and get back to him by the end of November. That’s it.
Then there are these ‘drag queen’ storytelling groups popping up everywhere. One at a museum in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was protested by parents against it, and transgender activists defending it as ‘free speech’ because it was not just of who is doing the reading, but what they are reading to young children.
https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=1982935528543596
And then onto Edmonton, Alberta and protests over a drag queen storytime in a public library.
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2022/08/07/protesters-drag-queen-storytime-library/
There are numerous media reports about these ‘family friendly” drag queen storytimes and shows for kids, going on in libraries and other public venues. Unfortunately, because the legacy media, it should be noted by the reporting in the Edmondon report, has been considerably co-opted by the ‘woke’ ideology, they side with the ‘queens’, rather than concerned parents who describe it as grooming and sexualizing children and they are not wrong.
In the United States, many parents have switched onto this type of nonsense that is happening in their schools and are making their voices heard a lot louder and more effectively than parents in Canada, it would seem.
https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=642983354028183
But it’s not just transgender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, there are other ‘woke’ ideologies as well. Take for example the Hamilton Wentworth School Board’s (HWDSB) “Learn.Disrupt.Rebuild” curriculum apparently designed to address the twin ‘pandemics’ of COVID and anti-Black racism.” Parents were actually denied access to the document by the Board when they first requested to see it. It was only after considerable persistence and successful badgering of Board members that a parent was finally able to get it. One Board member even had the nerve to demand, “Why do you need to see it?”
As a parent, I would certainly be interested in seeing a document entitled Learn/Disrupt/Rebuild, because I would have some concerns about what exactly needs to be disrupted and what are they planning to rebuild it with? Well a quick look at Lesson 13, Lesson # 13 - Check Your Privilege | HWDSB, might give you a pretty good idea. The material is nothing more than thinly disguised Critical Race Theory (CRT), for kids in grades in one to eight. These are the teaching points, remember for kids as young as six or seven.
Privilege: A special right, advantage, or immunity granted only to a particular person or group. Privilege can be earned, or unearned. Privilege is often invisible (or hard to see) for those who have it.
Myth of Meritocracy: The myth that your success in life is based on your ability or how hard you work.
Oppression: Refers to the injustices and disadvantages some individuals or groups suffer because of intentional or unintentional practices within a society. Different identities come with different privileges and oppressions.
Intersectionality: How the combination or intersection of our multiple identities and the privileges and oppressions we experience influence our lives and how we interact with the world. No one experiences one form of privilege or oppression. Our lives are shared by our racialization, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability/disability, height (to name only a few). “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives.” —Audre Lorde
So, in a nutshell your kids will learn that if they are white, they are privileged and don’t really have to work at achieving success, and that any success they do achieve is because they are white. All kids will learn that there is no point in working hard to achieve success in life, because the privileged will always attain it regardless of what they do, and the oppressed never will because they are, well, oppressed. Black and brown kids will learn that they are oppressed by their fellow white students, with whom they may be friends and therefore may start questioning that friendship. Then there is intersectionality, which based on the Audre Lorde definition or description, I can barely understand, let alone expect any child in grade school to grasp.
In mid-July of this year the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) began distributing pre-made lesson plans on so- called “white privilege” to be used by their members teaching across primary, junior and intermediate grades in the province. The new lesson plans are an extension of ETFO’s larger White Privilege Project which includes a workshop for educators. The booklet they use contains themes and teaching points very similar to the Hamilton board’s Learn/Disrupt/Rebuild. White students are taught that their successes are not due to their personal effort or hard work, but because of their skin colour. Students of colour, on the other hand, are taught that despite personal effort, their chances of success are greatly diminished, because society, as a whole, is racist, and against them, in other words, they are oppressed. White students are also taught that even if they hold no conscious animosity to non-whites, unconsciously they embody racist tendencies that, whether they realize it or not, make them the oppressors. They are told that the only means to lessen their ‘oppressiveness’, is to step back and ‘recuse’ themselves from opportunities as a means of denying – or ‘checking’ their white privilege. So, in other words, if after working hard and graduating at the of top of their class at, say, law school, a white student is offered a dream job at a prestigious law firm, based on their credentials and academic record, they should ‘check’ their ‘white privilege’ and turn it down, ‘recuse’ themselves. Again, there is nothing else to call this type of teaching what it is, Critical Race Theory (CRT)
https://etfovoice.ca/sites/default/files/curriculum_spring_2017.pdf
Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario - Overview
The problem with CRT is not really a theory, since one expects a theory to be based on solid, empirical evidence. CRT actually evolved from Marxist ideology, as it essentially appropriated the Marxist notion of society being divided into oppressors and the oppressed. But rather than applying the labels according to economic status as Marx did – capitalists versus the proletariat, CRT applies them according to racial status – whites versus non-white.
There has been a growing resistance to CRT being taught in elementary schools, particularly in the US where parents have come to realize how much it has infiltrated their local learning institutions. For some two years parents across the US have appearing before local school boards to express their displeasure with CRT instruction in the classroom and how it is negatively affecting and polarizing their kids.
Watch Black Father Blast Critical Race Theory At Board Meeting In Viral Video
Mom Goes Nuclear On School Board Over Critical Race Theory
In the US, parents who express these objections to what is being taught in the classroom to Boards of Education have been labelled as bigots by ‘progressives’ or even “domestic terrorists.” by their government.
Canadians are going to have to face up to the fact that this contagion of extreme gender ideology and CRT indoctrination is happening in our schools.
Many are afraid that they will be labelled as transphobic, racist, anti-gay, and all those other labels. It is not transphobic to question whether gender ideology like this belongs in the classroom, and certainly the wisdom of teaching it to very young kids, who are extremely naive and impressionable. It is not racist to maintain that CRT does more to divide and impose unnecessary guilt on one race and chronic victimhood on another. It is not bigotry to be concerned about what values your child is being taught without your knowledge or consent.
We’re in the eye of the storm right now, and we won’t be able to see the true magnitude of its effect on our kids until it has passed. But parents can make the difference and not accept what is happening. Start contacting your local Boards of Education and hold them accountable. Demand access to the curriculum and ask them if concepts like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology are part of their ‘Equity Toolkit’.
If they cannot deny that intersectionality, anti-black racism, and the gender spectrum are instructed in the classroom, or they tell you outright that they are, and the Board supports it, express your concern, and organize with other parents. Demand to be informed about which of those topics are being taught, and when, so you can remove your child from the classroom on that day or time. Make your objections known to the principal and the teachers. Write your Mayor, your City Councilor, your local Member of the Legislature or Member of Provincial Parliament, your Provincial Education Minister, and your Premier. On the federal level, write your Member of Parliament, write the Prime Minister, and write the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. Write the Leader of the Opposition and other opposition party members demanding they bring this issue up in the legislature, make your concerns known to them.
Unfortunately we don’t have a politician like Florida Governor Ron Desantis, in the US, who is not afraid to speak out on this issue and defend parent’s rights to have a say in ensuring their kids are getting an education and not an indoctrination.
https://www.facebook.com/100086926578906/videos/1528880690884808