Caroline Elliott: The left's brazen takeover of our children's education
A well-rounded education includes teaching children -- from a position of ideological neutrality -- how they might challenge existing knowledge. Instead, we're seeing an activist agenda.
With last month’s back-to-school rush now settled into a day-to-day routine, most parents are happy to put their trust in the education system and to get moving on their fall priorities. But that system has its own priorities, dictated by an ideologically-driven provincial government hellbent on promoting its radical agenda to schoolchildren.
If that sounds implausible, take a look at B.C.’s Anti-Racism Curriculum Guide for Teachers. The guide purportedly gives elementary and secondary school teachers various tools and strategies to promote anti-racism education as part of their teaching practices. It sounds harmless enough, but a deeper dive reveals its role in advancing critical race theory doctrine in our school system.
As the B.C. government declares elsewhere, “[i]t is not enough to be ‘not racist,’ we must be anti-racist.” And as far as they’re concerned, our kids are the perfect little soldiers in their social justice war, even as educational outcomes plummet and pride in our country amongst our youth trails behind that of older generations.
The curriculum guide begins by instructing teachers to have children participate in “reflecting on and building awareness of privilege, identity, and positionality,” ensuring that the colourblind bliss of early childhood is replaced by an awareness of their role as either perpetrators or victims of discrimination.
Children are also to be trained in “developing a mindset of cultural humility,” which presumably does not involve appreciating the societal merits that draw millions of people to apply for Canadian residency each year.
Teachers are further instructed to guide students in “challenging and decentering colonial structures, knowledge systems and hierarchies, and dominant cultural narratives.” The guide is not clear as to whether the challenging of such structures should extend to our colonially-introduced democratic institutions, our legal processes that provide for non-violent dispute resolution, our national defence system that protects against hostile foreign powers, our constitution that protects our freedoms and the rights of minorities and Indigenous groups, and so on.
What, exactly, decentering “dominant cultural narratives” entails is similarly unclear. Is it stories of the fur trade and the integral role Indigenous groups played? The Battle of the Plains of Abraham? The War of 1812? Is it our unlikely story of Confederation and our distinctive founding peoples? Is it the Red River Rebellion? Building the railroad? The heroism of our troops in World Wars I and II? There are plenty of ‘dominant’ Canadian narratives, but no indication of what aspects of which cultures ought to take their place.
The guide goes on to offer numerous examples of how we might apply an anti-racist lens across the curriculum, from Kindergarten through Grade 12. Among the less intuitive applications is the Physics 12 “anti-racist lens,” which requires students to ask “how can research using Indigenous research paradigms… impact awareness of our own biases?” The Pre-Calculus 12 “anti-racist lens,” on the other hand, expects students to “incorporate First Peoples worldviews, perspectives, knowledge and practices to make connections with mathematical concepts.”
This almost herculean stretch of the “anti-racism” effort to fit classes like physics and pre-calculus would be almost humorous if our children’s education wasn’t already falling behind. As the Fraser Institute reports, “less than half of British Columbia Grade 10 students are now proficient in numeracy.” From 2003 to 2022, B.C.s math scores have nosedived by 42 points (a 20-point drop is equivalent to about one year of lost learning). This means 15-year-olds in B.C. are over two years behind where that age-group was in 2003.
The guide also offers an explanation of “anti-racism reminders,” which are government-produced posters that, incidentally, hang in my own children’s elementary school. They include sinister warnings that “Racism sometimes hides in politeness,” and that admonish passing kindergartners that “If you are unaware of your privilege, you might be privileged.” (The latter almost uncannily exemplifies a ‘kafkatrap’ referenced by Bruce Pardy in the National Post: “If you deny that you are a witch, then you are a witch. And if you do not deny it, then you are a witch for sure.”)
The ideological liberties the provincial government has taken with the K-12 curriculum is working. Numerous polls show a large disconnect between younger and older Canadians when it comes to perceptions that they live on stolen land, that their country is genocidal, that systemic racism is prevalent in their country, and even in terms of pride in Canada itself.
A full 58 per cent of younger Canadians aged 18 to 24 think the country belongs to Indigenous peoples, with just 24 per cent of Canadians over 65 feeling the same way. 57 per cent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 say they have observed evidence of systemic racism in their province, with just 44 per cent of those 55 and older saying the same. And while a promising 51 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds think we should focus on Canadian pride, this number trails far behind the over-55 age group at 81 per cent.
Obviously, a well-rounded education includes teaching children how they might challenge existing knowledge. It includes explaining the darker moments of our country’s history and shining a light on the existence of racism in the past and present. It is entirely possible to do all of that from a place of ideological neutrality. But instead, we’re seeing an activist agenda imposed by politicians, permeating every subject from primary school to Physics 12.
Our education system plays a hugely influential role in how the next generation sees the world, and how they see each other. It plays an immense role in shaping the future leaders of our province and country who will determine our collective path forward. We can’t continue to allow politicians to dictate the terms of our children’s education along their own ideological lines.
Dr. Caroline Elliott is a co-founder and contributor to Without Diminishment.
Watch Caroline’s viral Without Diminishment introduction and call to action on Twitter/X, or on Instagram.
When the ‘public education’ system becomes focussed on indoctrination instead of education we all lose. It is time for massive reform that provides parents and students with more choices, the opens up the system to the expertise of the who community, that questions the orthodoxies that hold us back. It’s time to meet each child’s needs rather than meeting the doctrinal needs of government.