The TDSB field trip fight shows how far we’ve come from putting children first

It’ll take a lot more than altering the 11 — or 15 or 150 — policy elements that Toronto District School Board staff have red-circled to divert teachers from manipulating their impressionable young students as political and ideological pawns.
No, that would require digging deep into a belief system that has absorbed every cockamamie strategy and intent spawned by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, evangelized too many conscience-elevated educator-cum-social-warriors and compelling the largest school board in Canada to hold its employees accountable, with disciplinary consequences, for deplorable misjudgment and freewheeling social engineering.
It is all of a piece in a culture that unfortunately has turned “progressive’’ into a dirty word, appropriated by a group of radicals in a position to shape-shift malleable minds.
Little wonder that, by the time they get to university, too many of these now-grown charges — at least on the cusp of adulthood, though the brain is still growing — lead with entitlement-first attitudes, having suckled on the teat of their own exceptionalism, laying down demands for administration, erecting campus encampments and the like to promote their raggedy agendas.
They’ve learned their gospel lessons well.
Of course the TDSB can’t be trusted to correct its overreach, smugly confident as they’ve always been that they know best — not parents and guardians, not the broader community because everybody has a stake in how kids are raised, what they’re taught. Which is why Ontario’s Education Ministry has had to step up, launching an investigation in the wake of burgeoning public outrage over a blundering school field trip earlier this month that went completely sideways.
Or did it? Because on the evidence — miles of video footage, students reporting details of their excursion to their parents and organizations such as the Elementary Teachers of Toronto doubling down on the righteousness of the undertaking — events unfolded exactly as some of the thrilled protagonists had hoped. Viewed through that “lens’’ — a trendy word so beloved of preachy pedagogical types — the segue from a rally in support of Grassy Narrows First Nation’s decades-long struggle with mercury contamination of their drinking water into an anti-Israel spectacle was just dandy.
Some of these participating students from 15 Toronto schools were elementary school kids as young as eight years old. It may be true that it’s never too early to learn about Indigenous rights and the wrongs that have been done. But none of them, regardless of age, much less Jewish kids, should have been exposed to, and urged to add their voices to, chants of “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime!’’, allegedly encouraged to wear blue on the day, marking them as “colonizers.’’
And none of them should have been corralled into a blatant anti-Israel demo masquerading as an educational experience, which could have turned violent.
It is pitiful that, during a two-hour deputation from parents and others horrified by how the rally rolled out, some of those calling in to the Zoom meeting felt it necessary to preface their remarks with “I’m not a Jew but … ’’
Some parents asserted that the participation forms they’d signed were misleading, or certainly withholding of what would take place; the TDSB was purportedly ignorant of the rally’s potentially contentious, potentially confrontational nature. Such situational unawareness is unpardonable for an event where participation had been exhorted by the repellent, radical, muckraking Palestinian Youth Movement. Even the apology the TDSB offered pivoted not on the inherent inappropriateness of the event, but a mealy-mouth sorry to some students who may have been “negatively impacted.’’
Following the deputations — one woman claimed the blowback amounted to “anti-Palestinian racism,’’ which is bollocks — and before the special meeting where the board voted to suspend attendance at any demonstrations until the province concludes its probe, trustee Alexandra Lulka Rotman laid it all on the line: the missteps, quite accurately linking the rally to soaring antisemitism in Toronto, in Canada, since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7 last year, the bloodiest attack in Israel’s history, with nearly 100 hostages still being held by the designated terrorist group, and tens of thousands of Palestinians, including innocent women and children, killed in the brutal aftermath.
“I won’t dwell on the implications of putting Jewish students in harm’s way, the humiliation of indoctrinating their peers against them, and the deep betrayal that these students were allegedly subjected to at the hands of the adults deputized by us to educate them.
“To be completely clear: The antisemitism displayed was heinous. The hurt is profound, the humiliation of children is unforgivable.’’
The board, Rotman continued, is “at a crossroads,’’ rebuilding trust with parents a matter of urgency.
“Parents in this city choose to entrust us with the thing most precious to them in this entire world … That is where the obligations of our staff begin, but it’s also where their rights to these children end. They do not get to overrule, undermine or circumvent parents in recruiting these students to their preferred brand of activism.’’
And that is what should be writ large in every schoolroom in this province.