The Peak

Teaching shouldn’t be indoctrination

By Eric Onderwater

Major changes to the teacher education curriculum at UBC are in the works, according to an article in the Vancouver Sun, and the biggest changes will be completely focussed on social justice and diversity issues. As quoted, “social justice and diversity issues would get unprecedented attention in nearly every course offered by the University of B.C.’s education faculty.”

For example, UBC’s associate dean of education, Rita Irwin, was quoted as saying that, “If only one class deals with it, then teacher candidates can kind of set it aside. What we’re trying to say now is that you can’t set it aside. You have to understand that it infuses everything you’re doing.” The article mentions that even courses in mathematics may end up discussing class, gender, and race.

Let’s get one thing straight: the faculty of education is responsible for training elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers for schools in British Columbia, and it wants to brainwash our future teachers by “infusing” them with social justice and diversity. Bear in mind that UBC is responsible for training teachers on how to teach students, not what the teachers teach students. That is the domain of the Ministry of Education in Victoria.

To my mind, this is profoundly disturbing. The idea that my future children may have to spend 12 years listening to brainwashed teachers expounding on the glories of left-wing social theory is deeply unsettling.

Social justice is a leftist concept that arose like a phoenix from the ashes of academic Marxism. In reality, social justice is the big, bad old wolf of Marxism all dressed up as little red riding hood’s innocent grandma in bed. It seems so right and innocent, but in reality it is only concerned with the old failed ideas of the redistribution of income and the state-controlled society.

You have to give it to them, as their ability to resurrect old ideas from the ash heap of history really is remarkable — almost as remarkable as their complete failure to think of ideas that aren’t fused like a baby to the teat of Marxism.

Now, even the supposedly apolitical faculty of teacher education has been fooled into thinking that “social justice” is apolitical and morally responsible. Never have I heard of a political or societal issue that was so important that it even had to be taught in a math class. In my elementary math classes, we actually talked about numbers.

But, who am I to talk? I’m just a relic of those terrible, evil days of inequality when the big, bad beast of capitalism ruled the earth, running roughshod over the dreams and rights of anyone other than the American white male. We know better today though, right?

The goals of social justice are reasonable and relatively good things for society to pursue. The problem comes with the solution to these problems. The solution, invariably, is government control, government programs, government activism, government whatever; the solution is always built on the idea that the state is the solution to all society’s problems. Thus, the left returns to Marxism and state control.

My point is this: regardless of its merits, social justice is a political and ideological issue, not something into which we should be indoctrinating all teachers or elementary school students. Keep it out of the classroom. Nobody should have to be infused with social justice and diversity.