Don’t blame Tiktok for schools’ decline
Over the past couple decades, Ontario school boards have chosen experimental teaching methods over the safe and proven, embraced mandated diversity over merit and have sometimes failed to secure the safety of students and staff. It’s no wonder that students are learning less. But, because it’s easier to scapegoat than to fix oneself, these school boards are taking to the courts to pin their failings on social media, specifically Facebook/instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok
The boards — Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Peel District School Board (PDSB), Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB), and Ottawa-carleton District School Board (OCDSB) — are claiming that social media products are “negligently designed for compulsive use” and “have rewired the way children think, behave and learn, leaving educators and schools to manage the fallout,” according to a news release by their lawyers. The strength of the suit doesn’t look great; it will be difficult for the school boards to establish that they’ve been harmed, and that this harm can safely be said to have been caused by social media. In the meantime, because we know that courts take excruciatingly long to accomplish just about anything, we have plenty of time to reflect on how the schools have sabotaged the quality education they’re supposed to provide.
In math, for example, Ontario schools didn’t require students to memorize basic facts — a key element of numeracy — from 2005 to 2020. The past couple decades have seen provinces turning to the trendy “discovery math” program, and in that time, math performance has been on a steady decline. In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford intervened and reinstituted traditional math in 2020, and most new students now have to memorize their times tables up to 12.
Performance still isn’t up, no doubt because of the after-effects of lengthy (largely ineffectual) COVID closures, which deprived Ontario students of precious in-person learning and no doubt damaged their long-term academic performance. It also doesn’t help that a nonzero number of the province’s math teachers take a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) approach to math, inserting socialist and identitarian principles into classes that should be about numeracy.
Reading proficiency is another tragic victim of Ontario’s poor judgment. The province abandoned the teaching of phonics — the sounding-out of letters, syllables and words — for the inferior “whole language” model and its socalled “three-cuing system,” which encourages kids to guess words from the context. The three-cuing system led to such astonishingly poor results that in 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission inquired into the province’s language education and concluded that a return to evidence-based phonics was needed.
“The program does not pay enough attention to instruction in foundational word reading skills,” wrote the commission of the curriculum. On school boards, it found shortcomings as well: “With a few small exceptions, boards do not promote an explicit and systematic approach to phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding and word reading fluency.”
Ontario schools weren’t teaching young students how to properly sound out words. TVO would later ask, “Should Ontario bring back phonics?” The answer should be an obvious “of course.” It’s no wonder they are turning to videobased media like Tiktok as they age. Looking outside the curriculum, Ontario has worsened the classroom experience in a number of other fantastically ignorant ways.
In 2020, it ended “streaming” — the separation of students by academic performance — in Grade 9, which once offered high-performers the benefit of a focused learning environment with similar-minded peers. The reason for doing this? Discrimination. The morally righteous, privilege-aware faction of education-influencer-land complained that the racial makeup of the academically proficient classes was inadequate, leading Education Minister Stephen Lecce to end the “systemic, racist, discriminatory” practice.
Sorry, smart kids. Yet, our four litigious schools insist that it’s Snapchat and Instagram that’s disrupting the focus of the youth. In addition to all that, TDSB ended its merit-based specialty programs in schools, opting for a racially quota’d lottery system. It has put great effort into theorizing about the power and privilege in the education system and contemplating the sexual orientations of their students, rather than teaching them to read. Meanwhile it has high schools that have descended into chaos in recent years.
At PDSB, violence and rampant misbehaviour have been reported by frustrated teachers. This is the same school district famous for purging books from its shelves under the guise of “equity.” PDSB explicitly asks that “anti-racist, anti-oppressive and anti-colonial” principles are used as “foundations for classroom instructional practice.” The same school administrators who have deprived students of long-loved classics for ideological reasons are now turning around and blaming the internet for killing the drive to read.
OCDSB, meanwhile, is currently looking to hire “equity coaches,” that is, staff who are explicitly hired to support “Palestinian, Muslim, Arab or Arabic-speaking” students. It’s also the place where classrooms as young as Grade 1 are taught that “there is no such thing as boys and girls.” It would follow that a school district that can’t get basic facts straight might struggle to teach.
Nevertheless, these troubled schools will easily forget all the rakes they’ve stepped into by insisting that technology rewires the brain of children. Education director for one litigant, OCDSB, told the Ottawa Citizen in an interview that social media causes attention issues, cyberbullying problems and disrupts self-esteem.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Bullying has always existed. Chronic Instagram use certainly can harm self-esteem, but that’s a matter for the legislature to deal with, if we choose to deal with it at all. Meanwhile, evidence for harm caused by phones isn’t settled science: research by Stanford University has found that there’s no link between phone ownership and mental health in children, for example.
If phones in the classroom are disruptive, ban them. If students are being disruptive, discipline them. If some students are more academic than others, stream them. If you don’t have enough teachers, don’t spend precious salaries on DEI staff. And most of all, if your teaching methods are proven garbage, go back to the old tried and true.
This lawsuit against the social media giants will likely fail, but with any hope, it might succeed at taming the sheer hubris on display in Ontario education.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH TEACHERS, DON’T SPEND PRECIOUS SALARIES ON DEI STAFF.