The Antisocial Socialist

It was recently Remembrance Day here in so-called Canada, and schools across the country must grapple with some inherent contradictions. Remembrance Day may have started as a whole anti-war, never again sort of vibe commemoration but as the bloody fist emerged from the velvet glove, it became a celebration of war and militarism. Canadian values, as seen in the foolhardy invasion of Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with *checks notes* the Taliban, or the brutal torture and murder of a Somali teenager, the continuous violence enacted on Indigenous peoples, or the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Haiti, are reframed as a valiant, noble fight for peace, freedom, and security. Generations of schoolchildren must memorize and monotonously recite "In Flanders Fields." Military recruiters are frequently brought in to sell war as an exciting adventure for broke students searching for a way to pay for tuition.

At the same time, schools must grapple with a mandate to be as inclusive and inoffensive as possible, celebrating diversity and multiculturalism and definitely not causing any "harm." As many students in any given school are likely to have experienced the trauma of war firsthand, the beleaguered teachers and students forced to organize the Dreaded Remembrance Day Assembly must at least nominally talk about peace. It is especially awkward this year, as our government and corporations continue to arm a rogue state that is committing a genocide that gets livestreamed to the kids on their phones.

This leads to some weird aesthetic decisions. My favourite was when a gung-ho recruiter straight out of a 60s-era Vietnam movie talked about the noble and thrilling mission in Afghanistan (to an audience that included Afghan refugees–that was before we barred them from coming in the country), and encouraged the kids to sign up to get blown up by an IED. This speech was followed by an absolutely brutal rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine." With lyrics. You know, the lyrics that are essentially "No Gods, No Masters," but somehow less cool? That one.

This year, one Ottawa school tried its best. Sir Robert Borden High School, located in an area with a large Arab population, played "Haza Salam." You can read the English translation in that video—it's pretty general and inoffensive. And prettier, musically, than "Imagine." I bet you can guess what happened next!

That's right! Triggered by having to hear Arabic, because the entire language is antisemitic now, some of the worst people—the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the soon-to-be last democratically elected Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Poilievre. and Lisa MacLeod, an MPP who cut funding to autistic children in a decision so unpopular that she had to immediately be shuffled off elsewhere—started shrieking their lungs out. Naturally, the principal of the school, who presumably doesn't want to organize the Remembrance Day assembly by himself next year, stood behind the hardworking students and educational professi—ahahaha just kidding he totally threw them under the bus and apologized to these braying fascists. I'm fairly certain this is in violation of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board's own human rights policy, but we all know this doesn't apply to Muslims or Arabs (and especially not to Palestinians). 

This kind of thing is increasingly common in schools, which have always been bastions of white supremacy but have been given tacit permission through the re-election of the Orange Man and the media coronation of our own Trumplet, Poliievre, who gets to be appointed Prime Minister without us even needing to have an election about it. The lip service to diversity and inclusion and belonging lasts only so long as it can be done away with, revealing the rot beneath. Get ready for a firehose of stories like this, as the authoritarian personalities who worm their way to the top are at last allowed to stop pretending that they think all children are equally human.

Stephen Lecce, who forced another student to fuck a goat and has likely done so himself, announced new mandatory curriculum about the Holodomor. You can watch the whole press conference here if you want, or just skip to 6:20 for what I'm going to talk about.

Now, to get this out of the way, I don't think it's a bad thing to teach about the Holodomor. I've been on the education bus that he's talking about, and...it's fine? It's, as far as I can tell, a relatively factual exhibition on the atrocity. But obviously a guy like Lecce has an agenda beyond teaching kids about a genocide that happened 90 years ago and it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with propaganda: specifically ensuring that Ontario institutes a Florida-style anti-communist propaganda curriculum.
 
For some context: It has come to my attention that Ontario schoolchildren learn nothing about Nazi atrocities or the Holocaust in high school. This is fascinating to me because I learned a fair bit about it when I was in school, and we met with a survivor and learned about why and how this genocide happened. In general, we learned more about the war than the reasons for the war, but we did have clear education around why the Nazis were bad. Today's kids do not have that. I know this, because the subjects that I teach intersect quite frequently with this part of history and the kids profess ignorance of even basic facts. If this was just a post-covid thing it would make sense, since most of the current students I teach played video games through Grade 10 history, but this is a trend I've noticed ever since playing Call of Duty (the main way students learned about WWII before) became less popular. I asked some of my history teacher friends about what is taught, and apparently it's like. Optional. The justification is that we're a lot farther from WWII now than we were when we were all growing up, which is a baffling justification but there you have it.

Another bit of context: Edgelord teenagers draw swastikas more often than they draw hammers and sickles.

High school students only have one semester of mandatory history, in Grade 10. It focuses largely on Canadian contributions to [insert historical event here]. Weirdly, the Spanish Civil War, which we were forbidden to investigate when I was in high school, does get a mention. But the reason why they don't learn anything about the Holocaust is because what they learn is around the contributions of Canadian soldiers and the effect of the war on the home front. In that framing, it makes much more sense to talk about the Spanish Civil War, where at least Canadians fought (although they were blacklisted as "premature anti-fascists" when they returned home), vs. the Holodomor, which really just involved the USSR and Ukraine. I guess you could argue, as Lecce does in this video, that this is the reason why we have such a large Ukrainian-Canadian population, except that this is factually untrue. Also we interned Ukrainian immigrants in camps during and after WWI, which I think he neglects to mention when he refers to Canada as "the greatest country in the world" (citation needed). 

There are a lot of genocides to cover in that one semester, including many that were perpetrated by settler-Canadians against Indigenous peoples. Those ones are important to cover because they form the basis of the Canadian settler-colonialist extractive state from which we (excluding Indigenous people) all benefit, and which threatens to destroy all life on earth through the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. Others, like the Holocaust, are really important to cover because they're an obvious template for how genocides work—first through marginalization and dehumanization, then through extermination. And also because Canada's contribution to the Shoah is important to learn about, including the "none is too many" doctrine and the rejection of the MS St. Louis, where anti-semitic government policy led directly to the murders of Jewish refugees. We just didn't have very much to do with the Holodomor, and while it's important, it's not more important than King Leopold's genocide of the Congolese (1.3-13 million dead in 32 years), or Winston Churchill's engineered famine in Bangladesh (2.1–3 million dead in one year), or the genocide of the Armenians that continues to be carried out with the complicity of major world powers. The Holodomor is only special because it was perpetrated by communists, and far-right extremists like Lecce are determined to brand all left-wing ideologies as "extremist Marxist-Leninism." I can guarantee he's never read either Marx or Lenin, incidentally.

He also engages in some truly bizarre sophistry around Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Putin is not a communist. Present-day Russia is not communist and hasn't been since Lecce was five years old. Russia's imperialist ambitions towards Ukraine both pre-date and post-date its experiments with state communism.

The good news here, if there is in fact any good news, is that Lecce has very little to do with the curriculum-writing process in Ontario. I'm not actually sure that he knows how it works. Curriculum is written on a cycle of years—one of my subject areas was last updated in 2006, one in 2009, one in 2010, and one in 2019. Education ministers can certainly interfere with curriculum development, as they did when they cancelled the updating of several subject areas to include consultation with Indigenous peoples in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. But it's just as likely that they will declare a change, and then it will take so long to change that the next government in power wants a different thing. So I doubt Lecce will get a chance to implement his PragerU-style curriculum where Putin is a socialist and only Russia has ever done a genocide.

But it's still unsettling because it is really the first time I've seen an Ontario government declare that it is mandatory to educate against a particular ideology. I am in no way a fan of Stalin, but brainwashing children into a particular political opinion is what the opponents of public education claim that we're doing. I suspect that if you teach kids about Stalin and what he did very few of them are going to come out thinking that Stalin is cool and good, but it's also not very useful to learn about Stalin in isolation when, say, Hitler and Churchill committed similar atrocities for vastly different ideological reasons.

Far more extreme versions of this are happening elsewhere, and of course Florida begun literally incorporating PragerU content in its "education" system. Given the understandable sympathy that most Canadians feel for today's Ukrainian refugees, Lecce displays a very low form of cunning in using them as a shield for his indoctrination agenda, which has nothing to do with supporting Ukrainian victims of Russian imperialist aggressions and everything to do with instituting a climate of fear around any unpopular opinion by declaring it "communist."

Dear every journalist who writes an article on this subject:

No, Grade 11 English courses do not typically do Shakespeare. They're definitely not doing Dickens anymore. This is not the 1950s. This is not even the 1990s. I'd say if you did a straw poll you'll find a lot of schools where they are now debating swapping out Hunger Games for Indigenous authors.

I know everyone is all upset or amused, depending on your political persuasion, by some other big news right now, but I kinda had to share this before I forgot.

There is a thing called the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund. The name alone needs some unpacking, especially if you live somewhere other than so-called Canada. Who are these names, you might ask? Not two people who ever met, that's for sure. Gord Downie was the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, who died rather tragically from cancer. Chanie Wenjack was a young Anishinaabe boy who, like many Indigenous children of his generation, was kidnapped and sent to residential school, where he was the victim of genocidal abuse. At 12 years old, he ran away and died of starvation and exposure.

Downie, in the last years of his life, was moved and horrified by Chanie's story. He set out to do something, and that something was a concept album and graphic novel about Chanie's life and death called The Secret Path. After his death the fund was established to educate and build awareness about residential schools. I'm reasonably sure that the proceeds didn't go to benefit Downie personally.

I've listened to a number of Indigenous people talk about this, and as you can imagine there are many different opinions. Most voices I've heard think that Downie absolutely had good intentions, but many are a little suspicious of this fund and also of the idea that this boy's story should have to be told by a wealthy white man in order for anyone to feel a certain way about it. I will not weigh in on it as I'm not Indigenous but I was sort of ambivalent. I don't use these sorts of materials in my classroom because I would prefer to highlight the work of Indigenous creators, many of whom have lived experience with residential schools and generational trauma.

All of this is to say that the fund sent around educational packages to schools this week. There was some good stuff in them, actually, including David A. Robertson's On the Trapline. And then I found these:



Is it me or is it in poor taste that your branded swag for your fund that is literally named after a child who froze to death is...gloves? Kind of thin gloves???

Because I think it's gross, actually.

They say "do something" on them.

I don't blame Gord Downie for this, btw. By all accounts he was a decent guy. I want to believe he wouldn't have approved of this.

This is why the kids say reconciliation is dead.

The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board courageously voted to keep masking mandates and protect children until April 15, and Toronto and Toronto Catholic District School Boards meekly asked if Ford and his Goatfucker flunky might hold off a few more weeks before conducting their province-wide experiment on innocent kids.

Ford's response was predictable. While he spent most of his high school years outside dealing hash, and the Goatfucker attended a pay-to-play private school, they have decided that elected school boards will no longer have autonomy to protect the students in their care. This contravenes the advice of their own science table, doctors, and even Sick Kids (a corrupt institution that bears no small amount of responsibility for our current mess). It is anti-science, anti-democratic, and anti-human. One can only conclude that they want kids to die.

An interesting legal conundrum will be whether the kids who end up with their health, and potentially futures, curtailed by this decision will be able to launch a class action lawsuit. Given the poor settlements afforded to residential school survivors, I doubt it will make up for the trauma, but if I were a lawyer I'd be looking into this.

The Ford Regime has said that rapid antigen testing is unnecessary in public schools, where the children of plebes and unimportant people go. But it's available for the children of the elite in private schools. Funny how these tests are able to not only detect covid but also detect how much your parents make.

Also I somehow missed that the company that makes the tests is called the Creative Destruction Lab. WTF?

Private schools were also able to lower class sizes and improve ventilation. Some even have plexiglass installed between desks. Part of the reason I'm so pessimistic about us ever getting out of this covid mess is that the wealthy and powerful always manage to buy their way out of the dangers and inconveniences.

Schools and childcare centres recorded 614 cases of COVID-19 today. That's 26.3% of all provincial cases for today (March 30, 2021).

In honour of this fact, I'd like to share a poem I wrote with y'all. It's not a very good poem and neither is our situation.

It's Okay
Schools are safe
and if they're not safe
that's okay
because kids don't get covid
and if they do
that's okay
because it's not that serious
and they don't spread it
and if it's serious
and if they spread it
that's okay
because they got it from the teacher
and if there's a lot of cases
that's okay
because we changed the definition of outbreak
keep moving the goalposts
and it will always be okay





While the rest of the developed world is getting vaccinated, Ontario is building more field hospitals, and a secret memo that got leaked informs us that the situation is fine, since they have the capacity to handle all the death and illness that is about to be unleashed by the deliberate political decision to let the virus run rampant.

 We all know there are people with very low executive function.

This is most of my students. They're smart as hell, but when it comes to things like remembering to bring a pen and pencil to class, they just can't, and if they're given a form to get signed at home, that form will inevitably end its life, crumpled, shredded, and unsigned, in the pocket dimension at the bottom of their backpack. They know the material but can't write the test. Etc.

There are people with very low executive function, who have developed workarounds.

This is me, and most of my closest friends. I can't make it out of bed in the morning, so I set my alarm two hours early to start waking me up. I can't remember anything so I keep three separate to-do lists. I can't motivate myself through any means beyond raging anxiety, so either I do a task immediately, or I procrastinate forever. I somehow manage to exist, but every day is a struggle.

Presumably, there are people with the normal amount of executive function, and they go around unbothered by life and everything is fine.

But I would posit the existence of a fourth class of people, and these are people with too much executive function to the point where it is detrimental to both their lives and society as a whole. These are people for whom executive functions are an end unto themselves. As long as boxes are generated and checked, and everyone is very busy, work is getting done and progress is being made. These are people for whom rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic seems like a good and feasible plan, because you are taking action and doing things.

I would posit that very early in life, and in many careers, an unhealthy level of executive function is rewarded. This is mostly the key to success in school, far more important than intellectual capability. And in white collar work, looking busy while accomplishing nothing is a useful skill. But I would also say that these are the sorts of people who end up promoted above their level of competence— school boards and governments are full of them. Everyone who has ever suffered through a PowerPoint explaining the new educational jargon through Venn diagrams has encountered this sort of person.

They are the sort who tend to be particularly impressed if you add "smart" or "enhanced" before a word but don't actually change anything.

Right now, they are making decisions that would better fall to people with perhaps lower capacity for navigating institutions and systems, but higher levels of intelligence, wisdom, and empathy. Life and death decisions.

I could be talking out of my ass. It has been known to happen. I'm pretty sure if I were a higher functioning sort, I could brand this into a PowerPoint somehow and make a decent living as an educational consultant, and I wouldn't have to go back into a plague box next week.

Ont. doctor suggests cancelling March Break to prevent another COVID-19 spike

The vast majority of public health professionals bowed to political pressure to reopen schools, despite having no clue as to the long-term health impacts of covid on children. They demonstrated a homicidal variant of expertise creep, believing because they understood (poorly) epidemiology, they were experts on what went on in a school building, all the time refusing to listen to the actual experts.

Worse, they arrogantly refused to admit that they were wrong, opening schools was dangerous and irresponsible, and it is even more dangerous and irresponsible to do so now, with Turbo Covid and vastly higher rates of infection in the mix.

And now they want to take away our fucking March Break.

They could just stop non-essential travel. You want your kid in school, you don't get that vacation to Florida. Instead they want to take away our one week (which I will be using to catch up on the extra workload they've heaped on us) because the general public can't fucking follow rules.

These people are going to be the death of me. Possibly literally.

Feeling the need to note this for posterity, as my memory isn't good but it's better than that of any public official in office.

From August to September, the threshold for declaring an epidemic in a school was two infections in the same building.

In November, 12 students infected in one school is not considered an outbreak. Nor 9 students and 4 teachers. There is no threshold for declaring an outbreak. Outbreaks cannot happen in schools, because schools are safe and kids need to be in schools for their mental health.