The End Of Sunny Ways

Classroom Politics In The Trudeau Era

This is a guest post by NotWokeTeacher.

Remember the global excitement, when Justin Trudeau became the new Prime Minister? His declaration of the “sunny ways”  to come seemed so promising, after so many years of the budget cutting, climate science-denying Stephen Harper. 

It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Trudeau probably believes he was ushering in “sunny ways,” wth his gender-balanced cabinets, pollyanna-ish expressions like “peoplekind,” and identity as a male feminist. This passes as both depth, and the height of compassion, amongst North American elites.

Of course, the longer Trudeau has been in power, the more clearly we see how naked the emperor truly is. It extends beyond his tokenistic hiring mandates  and politically correct speech. He has shown his monstrously shallow side, when he smeared the vaccine hesitant as “misogynists and racists.”

 He went further with the trucker movement, who he perceives as a bunch of swastika-wavers,  without even so much as having met with a single member of the convoy. Apparently, the working class do not get the same protection as a marginalized class, unlike people of colour, women, or homosexuals and trans people. 

This is our current era of convenience. There is no need to get to know anyone, especially when you gain virtue points for dismissing the working class away as undesirable, racist nazis.

What’s especially concerning, is that this rot isn’t just at the top. It’s in our school system, and in our elite neighborhoods, where we are training little Justin Trudeaus to embody the double whammy of both shallowness and righteous indignation. 

Try name-dropping J.K. Rowling; if you’re in an upper-middle class, NDP/Liberal -voting area. You might be stunned by the kids' bobble-headed responses. You get a chorus of, “but, she’s a transphobe!” They don’t even bother to back up the smears.

If, as a teacher, you challenge this assumption, you can duly expect to be admonished by a few parents, and often the administration. So, you often don’t, because it isn’t worth the trouble, even though your lessons grow less and less complex, humane,  and intellectually challenging. 

So what do Ontario boards want teachers to include in their curricula? It should all be about their students' identities. Of course, some identities matter more than others. We are told to avoid novels like Lord of the Flies, since it’s “about a bunch of white kids.”

It’s worth contemplating that last sentence a bit. Career educators commonly  dismiss  classic novels, based on this shallowest, collectivist principle: because there are only white characters in the book, it must not be taught. 

I’ve heard this argument frequently enough. Amongst an awful lot of adults, it passes for wisdom. But, as with Trudeau’s dismissal of tens of thousands of protesters, it is dehumanizing and ugly. 

The characters in Golding’s book, like the truckers, are actual, complex human beings, with a compelling narrative. To reduce them to tropes isn’t merely too easy; it’s cruel. 

In education, we’re supposed to embrace complexity. How could we possibly guide students through a global pandemic, federal emergency measures, and the frightening new war in Eastern Europe, if we shallowly insist on reducing every human being to their skin colour, and, as soon as that group or individual starts non-conforming, we use the latest fashionable smear, in order to discredit their concerns?

When we view children this way, we treat them as cardboard cutouts, not actual human beings, who are all too aware that the world is frightening. We don’t help them grapple with the reality that they’ve had to mask during gym class, since even the right to breathe freely has been taken away. Or that Putin confusingly shares the slavic identity with the Ukrainian people, an understanding that eludes your typical Ontario kid, grilled that oppressors oppress based on race, gender, and sexual preference. Power isn’t always about playing the gender and race card, and when we deny kids that knowledge, they, too, will dutifully, and monstrously reduce everyone to a collectivist identity. 

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Here is another great post from Not Woke Teacher - Educators As Social Justice Activists