The Peel District School Board Practices Speech Control

And the ultimate aim is thought control

Image from Belt Magazine

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher; commentator)

Staff and students at PDSB schools are limited with regard to what they can say. Cross the line and you’ll find yourself subject to discipline. That applies whether you are a student or staff member. In principle, there is nothing wrong with that. Staff are supposed to behave professionally and respectfully with the intent to educate kids and demonstrate, by example, how to behave in Canadian society. Students are supposed to strive towards the goal of appropriate behaviour through encouragement for positive behaviour and consequences for negative behaviour.

But what happens when staff and students are forbidden to express certain ideas, or even forbidden to say or write certain words, regardless of the context? When this happens, we move from enforcing appropriate and respectful decorum into the realm of indoctrination and thought control.

There are many, many examples of ideas, beliefs, and perspectives that are simply not allowed in schools these days as a result of the capture of the system by Critical Theory (AKA wokeism). This ideological system underpinning how kids are taught even forbids speaking the truth if it is deemed to “cause harm”. That is why you can’t say “not everything that happened in the Indian Residential Schools was bad”, “no bodies have thus far been found at the Kamloops IRS”, “Asian kids are, as a group, better students than blacks”, or “sex is biological, binary and determined by your body’s reproductive system”. It has been said that the first casualty of war is the truth, and this aphorism certainly applies to the culture wars which we have been enduring in our institutions with unprecedented intensity over the last few years.

It has in fact come to the point that simply uttering a particular word, regardless of the context, under any circumstances, is now forbidden. Check out this poster, found plastered in classrooms and libraries all over the PDSB:

The N-Word, in case you didn’t know or are not sure, is the word “nigger”. This is a racial slur when used by a non-black person and directed towards a black person. Like any such slur, it is inappropriate to use the word in that way. This is a no-brainer. Anyone doing so should face discipline. But according to the graphic, the word can never be said in a “learning environment” (nor, by the way, are teachers ever allowed to write it down) under any circumstances, regardless of the context. This does not make sense. This means that in a school, a teacher is not allowed to

1. Call a black person a “nigger”, even if the teacher is themselves black, the person being called that is black, and it is a private conversation.

2. Use the word for the purpose of discussing the word itself, for example saying “it is wrong to call a black person a ‘nigger’ if you are not black yourself”.

3. Document a conversation, for example “Tom called Dwayne a ‘nigger’ which instigated the fight”.

4. Read text from literature which includes the word “nigger”, for example To Kill a Mockingbird, or Huckleberry Finn, or even state the name of a book with “nigger” in the title, such as White Niggers of America.

5. Read any kind of pedagogical or historical material that contains the word “nigger”.

6. Play any video clips, movies, documentaries etc. that include the word “nigger”.

This policy of word policing is teaching students that linguistic accuracy can be sacrificed any time someone claims they could potentially be harmed. Whereas earlier generations were told “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me”, this has been jettisoned completely in favour of a position of fragility and helplessness. Author and podcaster Coleman Hughes, who is black/Hispanic, was recently asked how he would feel if a white person called him a “nigger”. He replied that his reaction would be to ”think that the person was a fucking idiot”.

We do not want black people being called “niggers” in school by non-blacks, just as we don’t want anyone being addressed by racist epithets. But when it gets to the point that a teacher cannot quote a student who used the word in an incident report, this speech policing has clearly gone way too far, and has in fact created a worse environment for several reasons, such as

1. It has elevated the word “nigger” above all other racial epithets and serves to present black people as somehow more fragile and more oppressed than others. The implication is that blacks must be treated with kid gloves lest they be “harmed”.

2. It perpetuates the myth that blacks have been treated more poorly than other minority groups in Canada, and that their many accomplishments and contributions to Canada have been ignored or suppressed due to racism throughout the history of the country when, in reality, there simply were very, very few blacks in Canada until the end of the 20th century, so thus they did not play much of a role prior to that.

3. Outright prohibition on the use of a word, especially a very commonly used word in popular culture, utterly fails to teach students the importance of context. The ability to know what is appropriate and what is not, based on the context is a crucial skill kids need to learn if they are to be successful in life.

Just to show how far this de-contextualized word policing has gone, there are now documented cases of people facing serious discipline in academia and workplaces for using words which sound too much like “nigger”, for example “niggard” or its adverb form “niggardly”, which has nothing whatsoever to do with black people or race at all.

If any word is used in a way that is intended to cause offence, or reasonably should have been known to cause offence, then that is cause for discipline, if a word is not used in that way, then it isn’t. And saying “given fiscal realities, we will have to adopt a niggardly approach to capital allocations this quarter” should not get you fired.

Regarding the above graphic itself, you can see that it was not produced by the PDSB but rather Turner Consulting Group. TCG is notorious for racially and culturally fragmenting organizations and encouraging group-based identity grievances. Typically, they arrive at a worksite or place of learning by the invitation of managers keen to virtue signal, not because racism has been identified as a serious problem by the workers or students. Aware no real racism exists, TCG MO includes a variety of strategies to convince people that the environment is, in fact, toxically racist, such as inciting a climate of group-based identity rancor by hypersensitizing racialized people to minor “racist” actions, statements, or behaviours (which they call “microaggressions”) which would previously have been considered innocuous and just brushed off. This practice of generating, then monetizing racial and ethnic animosity and distrust is truly insidious.

Linguistic accuracy matters. Facts matter. Context matters. Intentions matter. You won’t hear those things said very often at the PDSB, and you certainly won’t hear them from the Turner Consulting Group. Both organizations are dedicated to promoting the woke worldview of competing identity groups. Controlling what people say, and thus how they think, is a key element of their strategy to achieving that goal.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Teachers Long to Retire as the System Collapses

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