Addressing 'big brother' answers to global hate, division, prejudice, wars and human survival

What does no politics in the classroom mean? Ford government’s directive has created fear and confusion, say parents and teachers

 Nathan Bawaan Staff Reporter Toronto Star, July 27, 2025

A temporary ban on students sharing their family’s culture in class. A parent-organized Pride event moved outside school hours. Teachers afraid to answer students’ questions around the Israel-Hamas war.

Over the past academic year, Toronto parents and teachers say activities and discussions that would typically be normal to have in the classroom have suddenly become a source of fear and confusion — and they pin the blame on an edict dropped by the Ontario government last September.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, then-education minister Jill Dunlop issued a memo to Ontario school boards to keep “political biases” out of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

“Nothing is neutral,” said Carl James, a professor and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora at York University. “The curriculum cannot be seen as outside of providing and producing a way of seeing things.”

The Star has previously reported on incidents when the TDSB has used the ministry’s directive to block certain field trips and movie screenings, and censor parts of high school yearbooks.

These cases involved matters related to Palestine — along with activities and discussions around Israel and Tibet — reflecting broader concerns the province’s directive has largely been used to shut down conversations on the topic

A temporary ban on students sharing their family’s culture in class. A parent-organized Pride event moved outside school hours. Teachers afraid to answer students’ questions around the Israel-Hamas war.

Over the past academic year, Toronto parents and teachers say activities and discussions that would typically be normal to have in the classroom have suddenly become a source of fear and confusion — and they pin the blame on an edict dropped by the Ontario government last September.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, then-education minister Jill Dunlop issued a memo to Ontario school boards to keep “political biases” out  of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

-

So far, this piece has been lifted without editing from today’s edition of the Toronto Star.

Readers of this space will already know where the next few sentences and paragraphs are likely to point. There are so many levels on which this scribe is incensed. Fortunately, I submitted my formal resignation from the Ontario school board for which I worked for some 14 years, plus four additional years while I was on a requested leave of absence, while I worked in a community college and then attended graduate school. I would in this climate be unable, unwilling even to sign another contract with any school board in Ontario. If I did, I would be living on very thin ice if I were subjected to the political constraints of any memo from the provincial government that attempted to police the language, attitudes, even the biases and prejudices that I encountered from my students. Notwithstanding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as the horrendous terrorist attack of October 7, and the ensuring genocide on the part of Israel, not to mention the deployment of food and water and health care as weapons of war by Israel, and also notwithstanding the tidal wave of white religious supremacy and nationalism that has driven across the United States, to the exclusion of anything hinting of D.E.I., I think there are a few basic considerations for teachers, parents, and especially politicians that might be worth considering in this moment,

·      First, teachers, principals and school boards should never be asking the provincial government for guidance in the manner in which conversations are ‘permitted in their classrooms. of the classroom to ensure these spaces remain “safe, inclusive and welcoming for all students and staff.”

 

·      Second, teachers, themselves, are expected to maintain an environment of personal respect, dignity, and tolerance, even in the face of intense differences of opinion, about whatever subject that emerges. And should that test beg for outside ‘help,’ then the teaching moment that test contains has already been lost

 

·      Third, as in the matter of ‘banning books,’ censorship is, as history has proven repeatedly for centuries, the quickest and most assured path to make radioactive, and thereby even more seductive, dangerous, explosive and magnetic, whatever is considered worthy or, and worse, demanding to be banned.

 

·      Fourth, those parents who are concerned about racism, bigotry, prejudice and hate, and their concern is anything but frivolous, whether Arab/Palestinian or Jewish, whether Tibetan or Chinese, whether Pakistani or Indian, whether Canadian indigenous/ Metis or Inuit, or Caucasian, whether Roman Catholic or Muslim, Protestant or Muslim, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Ukrainian or Russian…the moment at which such sparks of hate erupt, it is clearly the moment for a ‘time-out’ and some very strict and disciplined, controlled and professional maturity…’

Here is a hypothetical piece of pedagogical rhetoric:

this is where the conversation has to take the same turn in the road as we expect of those leaders who are unable or unwilling to make such a turn….to see, to listen, to seriously consider, both the specific words you ae using, as well as the direct import those words are having in this very moment on your classmates. I am no geopolitical political scientist, nor am I the therapist for your families nor for your ethnicity. I am not the armed police who have the dreaded role of breaking up the violent protests on campuses like Columbia, Harvard, and even the University of Toronto and Concordia in Montreal. And even my layman’s grasp of history does not entitle me to hate any single group. I am only an (English) teacher, and I have no intention of putting my physical safety in danger simply in order to continue to do my job. The conflicts that are raging every hour on every screen around the world have roots that reach back centuries. And the tsunami of hate, in which we are all now anonymously able to indulge on social media, is no excuse for what we are witnessing on the battlefields.

The wars that are raging, on so many fronts, including those primarily based on racism, religious and sexual bigotry are going to continue, likely until they spend themselves into exhaustion….and none of us in here have any idea when that might be.

Let’s agree that this island of ‘sanity’ and civility and personal respect and tolerance, and even perhaps learning about the depth of righteous indignity of various victims of history, (and to some degree aren’t we all?) so that we come to better understand not only with our brains, but with our hearts, and with the sun-setting of some of our biased fears, an understanding of what it is going to take for us all to survive on this planet…..and currently leaders, irrespective of which ‘side’ you might be on, have no respect for, consideration of and policies to enhance the protection of this planet…..and that is not a statement from any kind of specialist in environmental policy or practice.

Let’s spend less time echoing the hate of the almost exclusively male leaders and more time listening to the voices of people like Greta Thunberg, and Malala Yousufzai….and to men like Garry Kasparov, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny….

That last sentence will sound like propaganda to some of your parents: however, please, for me, explain, that those names are names of people who care about freedom, human rights, protection of the shared global environment, and the many threats to us all.

If some of those names are unfamiliar to you, perhaps it is time for you to make their acquaintance…..in the interests of a different kind of conversation to which I am committed in here, and to which I invite and even implore each of you to join.

Enough with big brother, asked to rescue those whose biases themselves are seeking legal and government protection and then pretending, unsuccessfully (how else could they be?) to answer to questions that need to be addressed in each classroom.

There is no single issue, on the planet, that disturbs everyone, for which everyone on the planet does not have a share of responsibility in alleviating, ameliorating and our time is very short.