Ford Government to Audit School Boards

But they are looking for molehills among mountains

Doug Ford - image from CBC

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

Media reports are circulating that Doug Ford finds it “appalling” that School Boards are spending tens of thousands of dollars on luxury retreats for senior administration, some to exotic locals like the Hawaiian Islands. He should be appalled, of course, but the sad fact is that this is chump change; a veritable drop in the ocean of the waste of taxpayer's money handed over to these inept and ideologically driven Boards.

At least the retreats Ford is complaining about could, in theory, have some beneficial effects. Time for senior administrators to relax and connect and consider the big picture strategies they are looking at without the distractions ever present in the workplace. Of course, in reality, the current band of woke warriors running the Boards would just spend it dreaming up yet more ways to implement “anti-racism” (racism against white kids) and to “indigenize” and “decolonize” the classroom as well as encourage teachers to convince kids objective reality doesn’t exist and the truth is whatever you say it is. If you really want to track down where the waste is, look at those things.

Indigenization means introducing Indigenous “ways of knowing”, sometimes referred to as “Indigenous Epistemology”. As I wrote recently, the PDSB has spent millions on the Centre for Indigenous Excellence and Land Based Learning. While we teachers are reminded regularly that these Indigenous ways of knowing are important and must be considered equally valid to European ways of knowing (i.e. the scientific method) we are never told exactly what Indigenous ways of knowing are. How do they work? Asking such questions is usually regarded as inappropriate somehow, even disrespectful. Indigenous “knowledge keepers” just know stuff, period. When they “have a knowing” you are to accept it, or be branded a racist/white supremacist. 

In practice, what you get is things like groveling and misleading “Land Acknowledgements” or an Indigenous version of O Canada being played on the PA in the morning. The version often heard in PDSB high schools lilts along with a lot of whooping and hollering, essentially a capella, with a honking ostinato. 

This is a real head-shaker. Why would Indigenous people, who scoff at the idea that they are Canadians, sing O Canada? This version is tri-lingual and starts out in English:

O Canada

Our home and native land

True Patriot Love

In all of us command

They're taking commands from Canada, to love it- a country which they deny belonging to and which they say perpetrated a genocide against them? Hmm.

They continue in French:

Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix

Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits

That means something like:

For your arms know how to carry the sword

As they know how to carry the cross

Your history is an epic story

of the boldest and most daring feats

If ever there were symbols of colonization, they would have to be the sword and the cross. Indigenous activists often accuse colonists of “stealing our land” and wiping out Indigenous cultures. From that perspective, what are these bold and daring feats if not that?

The rest of the anthem is sung in an Indigenous language (not sure how they decided which one), presumably a translation of either the English or French version or some combination, or maybe (joke's on us!) a slur against the evil “settlers”.

The whole thing is just bizarre. I'm thinking the singers got paid a lot of money to make that recording and didn't think much about the politics of it. 

Decolonization is an even more murky concept to nail down. It is certainly true that Indigenous people are no longer left to fight one another over the tiny fraction of the resources that exist in this country that are accessible to stone age hunter-gatherer horticulturalists. They have been dragged forward millennia into the space age and it has been, predictably, a rough ride. But the idea that any Indigenous people living today would want to give up any of the material advantages of living a modern, 21st century, Western lifestyle and go back to living the way their ancestors did hundreds of years ago is as absurd as the thought that a modern Canadian of European ancestry would want to go back in time and live in a Medieval village. Black death anyone?

No, Ford won't do a full audit of school board spending and question the millions of dollars being spent to promote anti-racism, indigenization, and decolonization, or gender ideology; the mountains Ford has been ignoring for years. These are the things which are actually eroding values most Canadians support, such as individual freedom, rights, and responsibilities, the pursuit of the truth in all matters no matter where it leads, and embracing our common humanity. 

As the education system continues in its death spiral, Ford wants your outrage to be focused on a few thousands spent on some senior administration retreats and remain oblivious to the real travesty: Billions spent only to see declining academic standards and an explosion of belligerent and often violent student behavior, along with brainwashing into far-left ideologies, all of which he has been tacitly supporting for years. It's a diversion- a slight of hand Ford has been using all along, and he won't stop until he gets called on it. 

But don't expect either the NDP or the Liberals to do that. 

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Canadian Teachers not Free to Discuss Reasons for Trump Victory

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