Minister Pulls Toronto School Guidebook That Calls Education System ‘Colonial,’ Centred on ‘Whiteness’

The Toronto District School Board logo is seen on a sign in front of a high school in Toronto, in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

A teaching resource for “challenging oppression” in the Toronto District School Board that describes white supremacy as a “structural reality” in classrooms and calls for the “decolonization” of schools has been removed as a teaching resource at the insistence of the education ministry.

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) document issued to all teachers across Ontario’s largest school board has been labelled as “divisive” by Education Minister Stephen Lecce.

Titled “Facilitating Critical Conversations,” the guidebook says it serves to “empower educators” when discussing “core beliefs” with students such as the importance of white supremacy being “dismantled” in the classroom.

Authored by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Department, the document describes schooling in North America as being “inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture.” That dominant culture is described as white, middle-upper class, male, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and neuro-typical.

“Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized,” the document reads.

The ministry of education reportedly contacted the TDSB earlier this week to ask that the guidebook be withdrawn from circulation.

“Schools are a place for learning life and job skills, above all else,” Mr. Lecce said in a statement to media. “Time after time, our government has brought in legislation to prepare our students for the real world.”

“My message to school boards is clear: there is no place for divisive ideologies—every action they take should prioritize and support academic achievement,” he said.

TDSB spokesman Ryan Bird told The Epoch Times in an email the guide has been “temporarily removed” from the board’s internal website due to concerns about “some of the language used.”

He said a review of the document would be completed “with an eye to better aligning it” with the Education Act and Ontario Human Rights Code “while maintaining our commitments to achievement, well-being, human rights, and equity for all.”

Mr. Bird said the guide was developed after “years of requests” to address the “complex” issue of human rights with the board’s schools.

Guide Centred on ‘Decolonization’

The newly-released resource was one of several TDSB policy guidelines encouraging the school board’s 20,000 teachers to become agents of “decolonization.”

It instructed educators to interact with students based primarily on their “identity group.”

It also suggested teaching students to “engage with learning resources and the world in a way that notices, names and responds to manifestations of oppression such as colonialism, white supremacy, racism, anti-indigenous racism, anti-black racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, and heteronormativity.”

The document encouraged educators to “deepen their own critical consciousness” so they could better understand forms of oppression such as “settler colonialism” as well as be aware of their own personal “privileges” and “biases.” Doing so, the report said, would enable them to better address “issues of oppression” in the classroom.

The guide said using “anti-oppressive framework in the selection of learning resources” was key to preparing for critical conversation. When choosing learning materials or engaging in class discussion, the guide recommended teachers use instruction strategies that consider different learning styles and cultural backgrounds.

“How am I connecting this issue to historical and present-day contexts in ways that directly name systems of oppression (e.g., white supremacy, settler colonialism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, etc.)?” the teaching prompt said.

“In what ways do I highlight the oppressive beliefs, practices, and structures that frame the issue and/or content?”

The new guidebook was to serve as a replacement for a 21-year-old TDSB document that was previously used to deal with “controversial and sensitive issues” in the classroom.

The school board has published multiple reports that focus on the school system as being centred on “whiteness.” The reports always boast similar buzz words such as “oppression,” “privilege,” and “colonialism.”

Nationwide Teaching

The TDSB is not the only school board in Canada to focus on so-called white supremacy in the classroom.

A recent in-depth report by The Epoch Times found that oppression ideology is being taught to schoolchildren across the country. Some parents told The Epoch Times their children have come home distraught after such lessons because a wedge has been driven between the children, dividing them into two groups: the white oppressors and non-white oppressed.

It has left some children feeling “attacked” and “shamed” because of their whiteness, one parent said.

Parents also detailed the effects of the teachings on non-white students.

“I’ve had parents of an indigenous student and an Indo-Canadian student reach out to me and talk about how their kid was taught this pedagogy of the oppressed,” Jeff Park, executive director of the Alberta Parents’ Union, told The Epoch Times. “They had never thought of themselves as oppressed before, and it was traumatizing to them to have to think about their classmates as oppressors and think about themselves as oppressed.”

Many Canadian parents have increasingly voiced concerns over gender and sexuality teachings in schools, and rumblings over critical race theory (CRT) are growing as well, Mr. Park said.

Tara MacIsaac contributed to this report.