People for Education is now People for Indoctrination

Once proudly independent group has been captured by Critical Theory and Indigenous Parallelism Ideologies

By Igor Stravinsky, (Education Commentator, Anonymous Canadian High School Teacher)

A healthy democracy needs strong, independent voices calling out governments when they are less than honest about the impacts of their policy decisions. It was in this spirit that People for Education came into existence in the late 1990’s as a response to attacks on public education by then Premier “chainsaw” Mike Harris.

Harris had big plans to cut education funding by, among other measures, hiring poorly qualified instructors (at a low rate of pay) to replace qualified teachers in subject areas such as physical education and the arts, dramatically increasing class sizes, and reducing teacher preparation time (thus reducing the number of teachers in the system).  

As the leader of a majority government, it was his prerogative to do those things, but, as is often the case with our politicians, he was not honest about it when explaining the changes to the public. He assured people that the changes he was going to make would result in a better system for students and Ontario taxpayers, when in fact he was simply going to run a degraded  system on the cheap.

Of course, the education sector unions mobilized to get out their message that the changes would be very damaging, but people know that unions have their own agenda, just as governments do. Who to believe? People for Education was a welcome voice to the average voter who saw it as an organization not beholden to any political party or education union. 

And at first, P4E performed that role admirably. They conducted surveys which put the lie to government claims about class sizes and numbers of specialized teachers in schools, for example. Ideologically, they remained neutral, simply reporting the facts.

Over time, however, as P4E has grown, and its mandate has expanded considerably. It now pledges to

• Instigate a dialogue, both in Ontario and nationally, about the purpose, value, and future of public education.

• Build links among key constituencies, both inside and outside the education sector in Ontario, to enhance a shared understanding of goals for public education.

• Provide evidence and use research to advance public education’s promise, and to ensure that all young people have an equitable chance for long-term success.

They should have stuck to their original mandate, which was telling us whether the government of the day was being honest about what they are doing with the education system. In taking on broad dimensions like values and the purpose and goals of education it was inevitable that P4E would get sucked into the post-modernist vortex, sometimes called “wokeism”, which has captured most Western institutions.

P4E is now reporting the extent to which the education system is aligned with the objectives of Critical Theory and Indigenous Parallelism ideology, the latter of which is reflected in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “calls to action”. P4E takes for granted that the majority of Canadians agree with these things, but the fact is they don’t.

Critical theory holds that Canada, like all western democracies, is a white supremacist system, set up for the benefit of white people (especially heterosexual, “cis genedered” people) at the expense of all other groups. This does not align with most Canadians’ conception of our country based on individual rights and liberties which rejects racism and intolerance based on our common humanity (nor does it stack up to the available evidence). Nevertheless, P4E happily reports on progress schools are making towards “equity”, which means the performance, based on any kind of metrics, of one racial group compared to others. P4E would be far better to look at common denominators for excellent and poor academic achievement between all students. 

As for Indigenous Parallelism, the TRCs “calls to action”, are based on the idea that Indigenous people have “inherent rights”, in other words are to be treated preferentially to non-natives. Of course injustices against anyone should be acknowledged and addressed, but the mere fact that a person happens to have Indigenous ancestry does not make them a “survivor” or victim of anything. Nevertheless, the government of Canada has been handing out millions in compensation to anyone and everyone who ever attended an Indian Residential School- including people who openly admit they had a good experience and are grateful for the education they received there. As long as we continue to buy into the Grievance Industry narrative that the lower academic performance of Indigenous students is due entirely to “intergenerational trauma” the problem will never be solved (but the money will keep flowing). P4E should instead be demanding that the real root causes of the struggles of so many Indigenous youth be addressed. 

In a recent Toronto Star Article, P4E Executive Director Annie Kidder was quoted as lamenting the rejection, in spring 2022, by the Ministry of Education, of the proposed woke language in the provincial science curriculum. According to Kidder “I think that’s why it was so disheartening — the unilateral change to the science curriculum — because before it was changed, it pointed to the fact that there are many ways of looking at science and there are many kinds of knowledge that can be applied to scientific information.”

Kidder is an actress. No doubt her concern about public education is sincere, but she clearly has a poor understanding of science, which is a method of inquiry not captive to any culture or belief system. The proposed woke science curriculum would have conflated cultural beliefs with science, by suggesting that western science and Indigenous belief systems are equivalent and are both socially constructed (this aligns perfectly with Critical Theory). 

In fact Europeans of course had their own culturally based belief systems, predominantly Christianity of various stripes but also non-scientific practices such as astrology. It is absolutely fair to say that Indigenous spiritual beliefs were (and still are) equivalent to European ones; but neither consists of tenets based on the scientific method. 

Science is universal. Indigenous “knowledge keepers” may have many insights into spirituality, philosophy, and their traditional environments, but the fact is that Indigenous people, at first contact with Europeans, were an illiterate stone-age culture. They had not discovered the scientific method, which was the thing that allowed Europeans to rapidly advance their technology over the past few centuries. 

It is important to note that Europeans did not discover the scientific method because they were smarter than the Indigenous people of Canada. The reasons the scientific revolution happened when and where it did have been analyzed thoroughly by many academics (for example Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari) and they have nothing whatsoever to do with any notion of race-based superiority. 

Science is neither a force for good nor evil. It allowed people to cure diseases, but it also allowed them to make hydrogen bombs. It is a powerful tool that must be used wisely and in its universality and independence from culture and religion points to our shared humanity. 

I hope P4E gets out of the ideology game and returns to their roots shining a light on the things that are happening in our schools that the government doesn't want you to know about. Here is a list for them to start with:

• Declining academic standards

• Poor student attendance and participation

• Lack of discipline 

• Disorderly schools

• School violence

• The teacher shortage (currently most acute among supply teachers but soon to spread to full-time teaching positions)

• The critical shortage of Educational Assistants

• Teacher and administrator burnout caused by the lack of support from school boards

• Dysfunctional, ideologically obsessed, school boards

• Lack of teacher professional learning, which has been replaced by Ideological Indoctrination sessions 

That should be enough to get them started!

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Ontario Introduces Legislation to Take Greater Control over Education

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