“The Lord of the Flies” has been playing out in Ontario Schools for Years

As media reports dance around the root cause

Image from Time

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher; commentator)

The headline “NO-GO ZONE” screamed from the front page of the Toronto Star on Sunday September 1st above a full-page picture of a couple of badly vandalised toilet stalls (which lacked doors). The sub-headline reads “How the school washroom has become a battleground where students fear to tread”. Except, of course, The Star never does tell you exactly how. But as a reader of this Substack, I bet you can guess.

The article starts out with an anecdote about a woman who complained that her son did not feel safe using the boy's washroom at school, which was frequented by bullies who use the space for vaping and other illicit activities. The response from school administration was to tell the student to use the “inclusive” washroom beside the school office. School administrators are well aware of the safety issues in schools, which are not by any means limited to washrooms, but are doing little to nothing about them. The truth is their hands are tied by their woke-captured superiors, who work out of palatial board offices far removed from the gritty reality of day-to-day school life. 

A school custodian reports that things have gotten much worse in the last few years. Hm… I wonder what that coincides with?

In Peel District School Board schools, you will often see rainbow coloured “safe space” signs on individual classrooms. The teachers who put up these signs usually mean well and simply see the signs as markers of inclusivity. But if you, as a teacher, feel the need to post such a sign, doesn’t that mean the rest of the school is unsafe? And as a parent, when you see that sign in your child’s classroom, you might well worry that the teacher is a Queer Theory culture warrior. And not without reason- there are plenty of them. 

From vandalism and other kinds of violence, the article meanders into the transgender issue. We're talking about washrooms and school administrators, at the behest of their school board overlords, have for a while now told kids they can use whichever washroom they want. This is causing conflict- surprise surprise! School Boards were just so gung ho to go ultra progressive they simply couldn't wait until the needed physical infrastructure was in place, and they certainly weren't going to consult with teachers or the public on the matter. Of course, government leadership was non-existent. Plenty of finger pointing though. School boards basically exist so that the government of the day has people to blame for all their asinine policies and inaction. 

Having standard boys and girls washrooms, along with one or two dedicated, single use, all-gender bathrooms is a no brainer, but that simply won't satisfy the activists pulling all the strings at the school boards (and everywhere else). They want trans people to be treated 100% AS their cross-sex identity in all situations. They will never relent until the rest of us give up on physical reality. That is never going to happen, so here we are.

Anyway, the issue of violence, drug use, and general disorderly conduct in schools is really not the result of school policies encouraging young people to question their gender identity and push them towards drugs and surgeries when they are far too young to understand the consequences to their mental and physical health. No, school violence etc. is the direct consequence of the woke aversion to any kind of consequences for violent or anti-social behaviour. 

The woke ideologues running the school boards want to disband the police and release everyone from jails. Do you think they want to take action against kids terrorising their classmates? 

The path forward to safe schools with a positive learning environment is a simple one: Get the troublemakers out. Put them somewhere else. These little thugs will not change until they can see they have to. This would be a difficult and expensive undertaking at this point because you would be looking at moving perhaps 20% of high school populations out to highly supervised and strictly monitored individual/small group learning environments (or possibly online learning) where these chronically misbehaving kids would never be out of an adult's sight for one minute. But the situation would rapidly stabilise and within a few years, 95% or more of kids would be attending regular schools again.

You see, right now, you have about 80% of kids in schools who are there to learn and just want to get along with everyone. It's the 20% that are there to wreak havoc that are the problem. But most of them would shape up in a jiffy if there were any serious consequences. While you would have to kick out 20% of the kids when this policy was first implemented, most of them would end up back at their home school behaving in a civilised manner if they had to live with the alternative I’m suggesting for a few months. And kids generally would realise the adults were actually serious about proper behaviour and would start to tow the line. In the end, you would have maybe 5% of kids attending alternative behavioural programs, where their behavioural issues could be properly addressed and they might actually learn something.

I have proof of the efficacy of this approach: When covid broke out, kids were required to wear masks at school. At first, there were quite a few kids showing up to school and refusing to mask up. They were simply sent home and told not to come back until they were ready to mask up.

The point here is not whether or not masking is a good idea, but rather that if kids are told point blank “you must do X and not do Y and Z or you will be kicked out of this school” most of them will comply.

But as long as our school system, along with all the rest of our institutions, are being directed by activists pushing Critical Theory, the solution I outlined above will not happen. That is because the race-based proportions of kids getting moved to behavioural programs would not be equal. You would probably have a high proportion of black kids, mostly boys, and a very low number of Asian kids, especially girls, getting moved, which, of course, the activists would attribute to “systemic racism” as if that makes any sense. The common denominators for violent and antisocial behaviour are demonstrably socio-cultural.  

So here we are. Violent kids will continue to terrorise other kids and vandalise school property with impunity and school boards and the Ministry of Education will point their fingers at one another while the teachers’ unions will tell you the system is underfunded and the solution is more money (while continuing to back failed woke-inspired ministry and school board policies). 

We need a conservative government to sort out this mess. Oh, I forgot- we already have one!

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Ontario's Cellphone ban 2.0 is the Real Distraction

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