The Canadian Scopes Monkey Trial

Cancelled teacher Jim McMurtry to appear before the BC Teachers Regulation Branch

Image from Appalachian History

By Jim McMurtry, PhD 

In quoting from the Franz Kafka novel The Trial, “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” It was the morning of his 30^th birthday. 

On the morning of my 61^st birthday I was walked out of my classroom at WJ Mouat Secondary School in Abbotsford and suspended for seven months for talking about the serial killer Paul Bernardo, who was in the news at the time as he had applied for parole. 

I didn’t think I had done anything truly wrong in describing Bernardo’s capture, which came about when a Toronto cop came up with the idea of comparing lists of persons-of-interest in a cold case of a rapist in Scarborough in the late 80s with a case of a child murderer in Burlington, Ontario in the early 90s. 

The following year I was walked out of another school in Abbotsford, this time permanently, for saying that students who died while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease and not murder. The Commissioner of the Teachers’ Regulation Branch (TRB) wrote to my union ten days later to express “concern about Mr. McMurtry’s broader pattern of behaviour and [that] he would like Mr. McMurtry to consider his future in the teaching profession, particularly now that he has been suspended again as of June 1, 2021.” 

In May of 2023 the new commissioner of the TRB proposed a consent resolution agreement that would have me make an “admission of professional misconduct” and accept the “cancellation” of my certificate of qualification. On May 1^st of this year, I will be appearing before the TRB for the first time. In other words, I was asked to leave teaching and later to consider a lifetime ban from the profession before ever having been heard. 

I have suggested to the lawyer from my union, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), that the new commissioner, Ana Mohammed, recuse herself from the proceeding owing to her partiality and prejudice. Then there is the matter of her subscription to identity politics, as she is described on a provincial website as someone who “brings a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) lens to all the work she does.” 

Others holding the DEI lens have already painted me as a residential school denier. As Jamie Sarkonak wrote recently in the National Post: “Mandatory Indigenous education has been introduced, and it’s doubtful it will provide a nuanced view on the history of colonialism.” 

Kafka’s novel The Trial is said to illustrate an ordinary person’s struggle with unreasoning and unreasonable authorities. In the end, Joseph K. is taken by guards to a quarry outside of town and shot in the name of the law. 

The TRB used to be called the B.C. College of Teachers, the latter coming to an end in 2012 after a report commissioned by the B.C. government found it dysfunctional. Every year there are dozens of teachers investigated by the TRB, with one case standing out for me, that of a Prince George elementary school teacher, Andrew Dennis, who was suspended in 2018 after a parent complained he had shown his Grade 6/7 students the films To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hobbit. 

The TRB commissioner, Howard Kushner, determined the film was not “age appropriate” as it dealt with “racism and rape” and contained the “N-word.” Kushner also said the films were not curriculum-related. “In B.C., the book To Kill a Mockingbird is listed as a secondary school resource for students in Grade 10 or above.”

 In actual fact, the B.C. curriculum does not list any books because the province’s school districts are the arbiters of what books are suitable in schools and at what grades. The Ministry of Education used to evaluate novels but stopped doing so in 1998, passing the task over to local school districts which are free to develop their own policies. Hence, it was the Prince George School District which decided the novel was to be read in grades 10 and up, not the province as reported by the Commissioner.

 In 1925, a high school biology teacher named John Scopes was put on trial for teaching Evolution in his Dayton, Tennessee classroom. The trial was a dramatic clash between scientific facts and the values of early 20^th century society. My trial is a clash between established historical facts and an early 21^st century ideology which weighs an Indigenous elder’s testimony over physical evidence. Scopes, though represented by famous American barrister Clarence Darrow, was convicted and fined $100. 

History may repeat itself. 

(Jim appears before the B.C. Teacher Regulation Branch from May 1-3 after being led out of classroom and career in 2021. He is still awaiting arbitration).

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The many faces of conformity

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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