National Post (National Edition)
Reading, writing, arithmetic ... and environmental racism
If the purpose of the public education system is to teach children how to be insufferable purveyors of crackpot theories and woke gibberish, then the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario is doing an excellent job and is worth every dollar it gets from taxpayers via teachers' union dues. The latest case in point: to mark Earth Day last month, the ETFO circulated a copy of its classroom guide for teaching on environmental issues, along with the claim that “climate change is a consequence of a colonial and capitalist system which has exploited people and the planet.”
The 62-page guide is co-written by five authors. Three of their biographies begin with an Indigenous land acknowledgment; two mention the author's commitment to fighting “environmental racism” (a phrase that appears in the document 46 times), while the other refers three separate times to her “anti-racism” work. The repetition apparently is meant to underscore the authors' extraordinary sense of virtue, but as racism is unquestionably very bad, I know of no one who, if asked, would not describe themselves as opposed to racism.
The authors introduce their teaching guide by declaring that “climate justice is racial justice,” repeating claims that we have only 12 years to act on climate change and instructing teachers that to dismantle corporate exploitation, “we will need to resist, disrupt, reposition and rebuild in partnership and allyship,” whatever that means. The purpose of the document, the authors say, is to offer lessons “from kindergarten to grade 8 to help facilitate learning of environmental racism as well as skill building of advocacy and allyship in the classroom.”
Thus in their grade one lesson plan, the authors declare environmental racism a “fundamental concept.” Environmental racism is a fundamental concept for sixyear-olds? I don't think so. Reading, writing, and mathematics are fundamental — even if teachers no longer seem to treat them that way. Note that mathematics tests from the province's education quality office found, even before the pandemic disrupted schooling, that 42 per cent of grade three students and 52 per cent of grade six students failed to meet provincial standards. The ETFO has suggested abolishing the tests; a better idea might be to forgo the environmental racism stuff and teach real subjects instead.
The grade one environmental racism lesson plan concedes that such young children “may not be developmentally ready to understand climate change issues beyond their immediate world;” therefore, the authors do not declare climate change to be a fundamental concept until ... grade two. Climate change “threatens many beloved natural spaces,” so the grade two lesson plan involves having the children write reflective journals imagining that all the world's natural wild spaces have disappeared. And so it goes, for 62 pages, with lesson plans up to grade eight.
Since it is apparently a fundamental concept, it is probably worth asking what the authors mean by “environmental racism.” The environment, after all, cannot be racist. The trees, clouds, grass, skies, shrubbery, insects, rain, snow, and so on, are all colour blind.
Or at least, they are colour blind in the real world. In the ETFO's world — I read this in the foreword to the teaching guide — the supposedly insufficient racial diversity in advertisements from parks and from retailers selling outdoor recreational gear sends “a message that nature is a White space where Black faces are out of place.”
Time for a common sense interlude. The environment is obviously not racist. The capitalist system, far from being exploitative, rests on a foundation of voluntary transactions in a competitive market — both features that protect against exploitation. Capitalism is not destroying the planet but instead making it much more habitable: it is in the relatively free economies that ordinary people enjoy the best access to clean water, abundant food, and protection from natural disasters. “The worst environmental calamity,” as economist Don Boudreaux has written, “is the absence of capitalism.” If some people are at excessive risk from environmental disasters, the remedy is to increase prosperity for all through economic freedom and real education, not the nonsense peddled by the ETFO.
Attempting to define environmental racism, the teachers' guide says at one point that “environmental racism describes how Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) experience a disproportionate share of environmental burdens (e.g., air and water pollution, proximity to chemical plants and waste sites) as well as the discriminatory systems that have perpetuated those inequities.” The authors' first example of a discriminatory system? Systemic racism in education! If that's so, we should entirely reform the education system to vastly improve it. I propose we start by dissolving the teachers' unions.