Transforming Children: Critical Theory Takes Over Canadian Schools

By Geoffrey Clarfield

This is by James Pew in C2C Journal, edited highlights.  I find James is a delight, pro West and pro Israel. 

Annie Ohana is an acclaimed educator at L.A. Matheson Secondary School in Surrey, B.C. Among the accolades that have come her way in recent years was becoming a 2023 finalist for what some bill as the “Nobel Prize for educators”: the Global Teacher Prize, awarded at the 42nd UNESCO General Conference last November. That sounds admirable indeed. Surely, the parents of one of her pupils – or anyone else reading of the award – would think, this meant Ohana proved tops at imparting the intricacies of algebra, or conveying her love of literary classics, or perhaps explaining how Einstein’s theory of relativity affected Newtonian physics.

Not exactly. Ohana is an “anti-oppression and equity curriculum specialist” who appears happiest focusing on “social justice” issues. In fact, judging by her social media posts, she can hardly even spell. Several months ago, images from the inside of Ohana’s classroom came to light, revealing her classroom clutter and pedagogical approach to have a transparently far-left political bias involving deliberate attempts to engage her students in social justice activism. Legacy media like CTV News and others portrayed the resulting public concern and pushback as bullying and attacks against Ohana. The National Post’s Jamie Sarkonak, however, pointed out the following about Ohana’s classroom: “There’s a Palestinian flag, but no Israel flag is visible. There are progress pride flags but no thin blue line flag. There are denunciations of colonialism but no posters honouring Sir John A. Macdonald or Queen Elizabeth II. There’s a Canadian flag – over which the text, ‘No pride in genocide’, is printed.”

Ohana’s own public utterances leave little doubt where she stands. The following is taken from an X post by Ohana last September, transcribed exactly as it appeared: “The Republican Psrty is  are rooted in exclusionaty White Supremacist brliefs. Their token measures will never be enough or make any kind of sense. They just want to exploit identity to push forward hate fillrd policies.” Parents (or taxpayers) mystified that young Canadians graduate from high school unable to write coherently need wonder no more.

Ohana is, unfortunately, far from unique in her approach. Teacher training programs, such as the kind offered at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), have been tilting toward left-of-liberal identity politics for years.

The OISE is a full-throated practitioner and advocate of critical social justice theory for education. At its simplest – and like its cousins in other fields, such as critical race theory – critical theory is a neo-Marxist method of analyzing society which attempts to reveal, critique and challenge its power structures, which are presumed to be oppressive, unequal and unjust. Critical theory is thus a negatively skewed radical critique of opposition to the foundational institutions of Western society, such as liberalism, the free-market economy (or capitalism), the Western Canon of literature and art, Christianity, the nuclear family, and so on.

It is worth reading in full; follow the link here.