Teachers in the Toronto District School Board are being told they have to focus on the race of their students above everything else:
The Canadian education system exists exclusively to perpetuate “white supremacy” and schools must prioritize the race of their students above any other factor, reads an official guidebook distributed to all 20,000 Toronto public school teachers.
“Race matters — it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining people’s social, political, economic, and cultural experiences,” reads one of the introductory paragraphs of Facilitating Critical Conversations, a handbook produced and distributed by the Toronto District School Board.
Teachers are told that they serve an educational system “inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture” and that the very act of education is “a colonial structure that centres whiteness”.
“Therefore it must be actively decolonized,” the guide says.
Authored by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Department, the guide is one of several new policy documents telling teachers to become agents of “decolonization”.
At multiple points, teachers are told to interact with students based primarily on their “identity group”.
“Am I thinking about the various identities students may hold, whether they are part of a group, their comfort in identifying as part of this group, and articulating/coming out as part of this group,” reads one entry in a checklist of how teachers should engage in “critical conversation”.
The “critical conversation” itself is defined as a means of conditioning students that “identity and power” is inextricable, and that the world around them is chiefly defined by “structures that privilege some at the expense of others”.
“White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and communities,” it reads.
The entire document was produced to replace a 21-year-old TDSB guidebook that was previously the standard text for addressing “controversial and sensitive issues” in the classroom.
