I.  When is curriculum not curriculum?

I.1 Consistent with the Correns’ agenda, and contrary to the Ministry’s assurances about its voluntary grade 12 social justice course, Making Space, Giving Voice indicates that social justice á la Corren is to be taught, not just as an elective in grade 12, but from Kindergarten to Grade 12 throughout the curriculum.

I.2 Or does it?

I.3 In reviewing Ministry of Education policies and documents, one must reckon with the fact that it is, perhaps, the most subtle of government ministries.

I.4 Despite the language used in Making Space, Giving Voice (“teaching diversity and social justice,” “performance standards,” “expectations”), it is not part of the provincial curriculum, which is limited to what the Ministry of Education purports to define specifically in ‘learning outcomes.’⁸ Thus, it does not direct schools or teachers about what must be taught in the classroom. As its subtitles indicate, it is only a guide. From the perspective of the Ministry of Education, this is probably a convenient arrangement for several reasons.

I.5 First of all, while Making Space, Giving Voice conforms to the requirements of the Corren Agreement,⁹ the Minister can still assure parents that the curriculum is not being changed, even as her Ministry advises teachers to use lessons in other subjects to “[further] a social justice agenda.”¹⁰

I.6 Second, the document provides a licence for teachers with a particular “social justice agenda” to impose it on their students, but does not require anything of other teachers. This satisfies the Correns et al without the risk of generating opposition from colleagues who do not agree with them.

I.7 Third, since it is only a guide, it is not immediately obvious that it could have an adverse impact on denominational and independent schools, making it less likely that the Ministry of Education and the Correns will face organized opposition from that quarter.

I.8 However, while Making Space, Giving Voice is not mandatory, in the sense of being part of the prescribed curriculum, there is good reason to be concerned that it may adversely affect freedom of conscience and religion.

I.9 An appreciation of its effects requires that one take into account other Ministry documents from which it draws, such as Diversity in BC Schools: A Framework (2004) and BC Performance Standards: Social Responsibility (2001). Like these publications, Making Space, Giving Voice is a policy document. Taken together, they generate expectations, purport to establish norms, and have a cumulative effect.¹¹ This can have serious ramifications, both within the state educational system and in independent schools that rely on state support.

I.10 To the extent that independent schools are perceived to be non-compliant with the norms associated with these documents, it might be argued that they are not fulfilling the conditions of their funding. This allegation can become the basis for pressuring these schools to adopt the mandatory “queer positive” lessons sought by the Correns, and for a public campaign to withdraw state support if they resist.¹²

I.11 Within state schools (or compliant independent schools), Making Space, Giving Voice could be used as a basis for the legal and professional persecution of teachers who, in whole or in part, reject the Correns’ agenda for their students. A department head could impose it as a standard to be applied in teacher evaluations, threatening opportunities for advancement by those unwilling to inculcate approval of homosexual conduct and relationships. Activist teachers sharing the Correns’ agenda (or others) could cite Making Space, Giving Voice to pressure colleagues, department heads and administrators, and to overawe, mislead or intimidate parents who challenge them, but who are not aware of the distinction between prescribed curriculum and a teachers’ guide.

I.12 Rather than focus only on those parts of the document that are directly relevant to the provisions and intentions of the Corren Agreement, it is more instructive to take a broader approach, and then consider concerns arising from the Corren Agreement within that context.

II.  Getting the facts right

II.1 The first step in making progress towards social justice is getting the facts right, particularly when the facts are in dispute. Thus, it is disturbing to find that Making Space, Giving Voice gets facts wrong not only when they are not in dispute, but when they are publicly available and familiar to well-informed citizens. Having suggested The Crucible as a vehicle for teaching social justice in Grade 12, the guide continues:

Read the play and discuss how a lack of reason is allowed to exist. . . . What other fears do people have today that prevents [sic] them from acting in a reasonable manner? Tell the students about Maher Arar. What kind of hysteria allowed Canada to send an innocent man to Syria to be tortured?¹³

II.2 This is a serious misrepresentation of the events described in the report of Mr. Justice O’Connor. Canadian officials, including high ranking members of the RCMP, bear considerable responsibility for what happened to Mr. Arar, and particularly for the fact that earlier steps were not taken to free him. But the United States- not Canada - sent him to Syria. Further: Mr. Justice O’Connor concluded that there was “no evidence that Canadian officials participated or acquiesced in” the decisions or actions of American authorities.¹⁴ This finding has been corroborated in widely publicized statements of American Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice.¹⁵

II.3 Shortly after Rice’s statements made headlines in Canada, Vancouver Sun reporter Janet Steffenhagen questioned Shirley Bond, Minister of Education, about the reference to Arar in Making Space, Giving Voice. The Minister acknowledged that the US, not Canada, had deported Arar. But, rather than simply admitting that Making Space, Giving Voice was wrong and had to be corrected, Bond seems to have attempted to justify the misrepresentation, claiming that it was based on information that had come from “an official report into Canada’s actions.” This was patently false, since the report, as noted above, flatly contradicts Making Space, Giving Voice. Bond added that the Arar inquiry had found that “Canadian officials shared information with U.S. officials,” as if this inane observation were sufficient to explain her Ministry’s error. Ultimately, she promised that a “clarification” will be made in the guide.¹⁶

II.4 It is remarkable that Ministry experts offering guidance to teachers could be so clearly wrong about the facts of a notorious incident which are so publicly available. This brings into question their competence to direct social justice teaching about more contentious subjects, where facts are frequently in dispute or can be reliably ascertained only with difficulty. It suggests, among other things, that Making Space, Giving Voice warrants a probing and critical review. This, however, has been seriously hampered by the Ministry’s deadline for public responses.

III.  Making time for Making Space

III.1 The BC Performance Standards and Making Space, Giving Voice would impose an impossibly onerous burden on teachers were they directives rather than guides. It would be humanly impossible for a teacher with more than a few students to provide the kind of ongoing, individual, documented assessments required by the former.¹⁷ Making Space, Giving Voice poses the same kind of problem.

III.2 For example, it suggests that Biology 12 students should “investigate and discuss methods of reproductive technology such as in-vitro fertilization, sperm banks, embryo transplants, and embryo freezing,” and address the questions, “What is right? Who is right? Who decides?” - presumably from the perspectives of “diversity” and “social justice.”¹⁸

III.3 Now, it is possible - even likely - that the subject of artificial reproduction could come up in Biology 12, when the class discusses DNA replication or when students “analyse the functional inter-relationships of the structures of the. . . reproductive system.”¹⁹ In that case, a digression of some sort might be appropriate and even relevant, especially if the teacher knows that a woman who understands her own cervical mucus patterns may conceive without resort to artificial techniques.²⁰

III.4 But the “prescribed learning outcomes” for Biology 12 - the real curriculum - make no reference to reproductive technology. Moreover, to judge from the text and instruction in School District 47, the real Biology 12 curriculum is already very dense and challenging. The suggestion that students should, in addition to the required curriculum, study reproductive technology and explore social justice and “diversity” demonstrates careless indifference to instructional time constraints. It also manifests an extraordinary lack of awareness of the complexity of the proposed discussion.

III.5 Similar criticism can be levelled with respect to the authors’ suggestions for the Grade 9 science curriculum. The prescribed curriculum requires Grade 9 students to describe cell division and relate it, and the processes used in reproductive technology, to embryonic development.²¹ In other words, they should learn that reproductive techniques involve manipulation of an early embryo,²² and, presumably, be familiar with the early stages of embryonic development.

III.6 Making Space, Giving Voice suggests that, in addition, the science teacher undertake the following social justice discussions:

• stem cell research (Who might benefit? What are the ethical implications and risks of pursuing such research? What rights do the ill or disabled who might be helped by such research have?)
• reproductive technologies (What do gene selection technologies allow? What gender equality considerations are part of this debate? What should be the limits of technological intervention in natural processes?)²³

III.7 What is completely absent here is an appreciation of the baggage that comes with these topics. What are stem cells? How are they obtained? What is the difference between pluripotent and totipotent stem cells? What counts as a benefit? As a risk? A benefit to whom? A risk to whom? Are some benefits or risks more important than others? Why? Why not? Can they be ‘balanced’? If so, how? What are “rights”? Where do they come from? Are they inherent, or does the state (or community) give them? What is a human being in science? What is a human being in law? Is an embryo a human being, scientifically considered? Is an embryo a human being, legally considered? Is there a difference between a human being and a human person? What is the function of law? What is gender? Why ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex’? What is equality? Can it be measured? If so, how?

III.8 These are necessary questions, and hardly the only ones. There is nothing wrong with asking them. On the contrary: one wishes more people would ask them, ask them more often, and then diligently seek to answer them. And there is nothing wrong with drawing them to students’ attention. They ought to know that a fully human response to developments in science and technology demands more than scientific or technological knowledge or competence. They ought to know that, even if they master the prescribed Grade 9 biology curriculum, they have a lot left to learn. But it strains credulity to suggest that a Grade 9 science teacher can, in addition to teaching the prescribed curriculum, engage his 15 year old charges in an adequate exploration of social justice issues associated with stem cell research and reproductive technology.

IV.  Making room for the elephant

 IV.1 An attentive reader will have noticed that we have not yet unpacked the largest bag in the Grade 9 science social justice closet. It is the largest bag because it contains an elephant, the second encountered thus far in the League’s review of the Corren Agreement.²⁴

IV.2 Making Space, Giving Voice would have Grade 9 students consider “the ethical implications” of stem cell research.

IV.3 “Ethical implications”?

IV.4 “The ethical implications”?

IV.5 Indeed. According to the BC Performance Standards, some time in Grades 8 to 10, students are expected to develop “a sense of ethics, or “ethical sense.”²⁵ They will “exceed expectations” if they actually are “ethical.”²⁶ Grade 8-10 science students are to “demonstrate ethical behaviour,” ²⁷ and Grade 11 civics students will study “the ethics of civic decisions.”²⁸

IV.6 One cannot consider “ethical implications” without reference to ethics. And one cannot explore “the ethical implications” of an issue or “the ethics of civic decisions” without reference to a universal ethic, or, at least, a specific ethical system. But there are different systems of ethics, and they have different things to say about right and wrong. It would be absurd to expect Grade 9 science teachers to deliver a course in comparative ethics as well as the required biology curriculum.

V.  Giving voice to the experts

V.1 But, if there is no time to deal adequately with comparative ethics, and the Ministry insists that teachers are not to impose their personal ethical outlooks, whose ethic does the Ministry mean to force upon on K-12 public school students through Making Space, Giving Voice?²⁹ The Correns’?

V.2 It would be most accurate to say that the Ministry intends to impose the ethic of the anonymous experts who wrote Making Space, Giving Voice, the same experts who think that Canada sent Maher Arar to Syria. Since their recommendations, thus far considered, also seem singularly ill-suited to the facts on the ground in BC classrooms, prudent parents will demand a full accounting of their ethical views.

V.3 The School Act prohibits the teaching of “religious dogma or creed” and requires schools to be conducted on “strictly secular and non-sectarian principles.”³⁰ One may thus infer that the ethic of the experts is secular. What does this mean?

V.4 We might usefully begin by explaining what a secular ethic is not. “Secular” is not a synonym for “superior.” To say that their ethic is secular, not religious, is not another way of saying that it is better than a religious ethic, or that it is more true. A secular ethic is not more scientific than a religious ethic, since the classic ethical question, “How ought I to live?” is not a scientific question and cannot be answered by any of the disciplines of natural science. Neither secular nor religious ethics are scientific in this sense. Further, the fact that an ethic is secular does not make it more realistic than a religious ethic, for justice, solidarity, love, honesty, courage, prudence, etc. are realities that may be comprehended by both.

V.5 One must also recognize that a secular ethic may be independent of religion,³¹ but it is not faith-free, nor is it beyond the influence of faith. On the contrary: a secular ethic, like any ethic, is faith-based. It depends upon beliefs: beliefs about the human person and human society, beliefs about good and evil, and beliefs about the meaning and purpose of life. Secularists, atheists and agnostics are believers, no less than Christians, Muslims, Jews and persons of other faiths. The notion that a secular school system is “faith-free” is radically false.³²

V.6 Finally, a secular ethic is not morally neutral.³³ The words of C.S. Lewis are as applicable to the anonymous authors of Making Space, Giving Voice as they were to the school textbook he critiqued during the Second World War:

They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable. . . The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all. . . And this end must have real value in their eyes. To abstain from calling it ‘good’ and to use, instead, such predicates as ‘necessary’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘efficient’ would be a subterfuge. . . For the whole purpose of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval [of the end], and this would be either a fool’s or a villain’s undertaking unless they held that their approval was in some way valid or correct.³⁴

V.7 A claim that a secular ethic is morally neutral is not just fiction. Professor Jay Budziszewski calls it “bad faith authoritarianism . . . a dishonest way of advancing a moral view by pretending to have no moral view.”³⁵

VI.  The ethic of the experts

VI.1. The key to understanding the ethic of the experts is found in the definitions in the Glossary of Making Space, Giving Voice, beginning, first and foremost, with the definition of ‘power.’ They hold that the essence of power is the real or perceived ability to make choices and to make “significant” changes in society. They describe “people in power” as “privileged”, and assert that an imbalance of power “is one of the most common causes of social injustice.”³⁶ Most important - indeed, critical - power, in their view, is synonymous with authority.³⁷

VI.2 But this simplistic conflation of power with authority, while favoured by some political theorists and sociologists, fails to recognize an important philosophical distinction. “An authority,” states The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “is a person or group having a right to do something, including the right to demand that other people do something.”³⁸ Similarly:

By “authority” one means the quality by virtue of which persons or institutions make laws and give orders to men and expect obedience from them.³⁹

VI.3 Power, on the other hand, is merely the ability to effect some kind of result. Authority authorizes the use of power to ensure that legitimate laws, rules and directions are obeyed. Of course, when power is lacking, authority may be ineffective.

VI.4 Injustice may result from the abuse of power, as when one student bullies another. It can also be caused by an abuse of authority, exemplified by teachers or priests who take sexual advantage of those in their care. But injustice can also arise when authority is not exercised: when, for example, those in authority fail to stop bullying or sexual abuse, either because they fail or refuse to exercise their authority effectively, or because they lack the power to give it effect.

VI.5 Why are these distinctions important? And why is it significant that Making Space, Giving Voice fails to make them? After all, this is a teacher guide, not a philosophical treatise. It is meant for busy people, already pressed for time, who teach children and adolescents, not post-graduate students. Surely some simplification is in order to make their job easier.

VI.6 Well, here is what Kindergarten to Grade 12 students are to be taught about power, according to Making Space, Giving Voice, set out as a pair of equations:

power = authority
might = right

VI.7 The notion that might makes right has a long and unhappy history at the root of all sorts of injustice.⁴⁰ To use this as a principle to teach social justice is at least self-contradictory. And it seems strangely at odds with the theme of ‘oppression’ that runs through Making Space, Giving Voice.

VII.  Power: ethic or ideology?

VII.1 The explanation for this is that there is a kind of simplification at work here, but not the simplification used by good teachers to communicate essential concepts. It is the simplification identified by Hannah Arendt as characteristic of ideology.⁴¹

An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the “idea” is applied. . . The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical exposition of its “idea.” Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process - the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future - because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas. . . . Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction.⁴²

VII.2 What is behind the concept of “social justice” in Making Space, Giving Voice is less an ethic than an ideology of power. The anonymous experts believe that one can dispense with concepts like authority because the idea of power is sufficient to explain everything that needs an explanation. The essential ideological view is that social justice is to be achieved by maintaining a balance of power, ‘empowering’ the oppressed to confront and ‘push back’ their oppressors. Teach students that social justice depends upon manipulating and controlling power, and they will discover “the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future.”

VII.3 It may be argued that much of Making Space, Giving Voice is dedicated to the theme of oppression rather than power, and it is true that explicit and implicit references to power are substantially outnumbered by references to oppression. But, consistent with Arendt’s observation that ideology explains everything by reference to a single idea, Making Space, Giving Voice explains oppression in terms of power - more precisely, an imbalance of power (See Appendix “A”).

VII.4 The groundwork for the ideology of power was laid in the Career and Personal Planning Programme for grades 8 to 12 (See Appendix “B”). For almost fifteen years, working from the premise that the full development of human potential depends upon maximization of personal autonomy, CAPP has encouraged students (and teachers) to see human relationships primarily in terms of a struggle for power among persons with competing interests. Making Space, Giving Voice presumes CAPP’s view of the human person and refines and develops some of its implications. Of course, the ideology of power has not taken hold only in education, or only in British Columbia. Personal autonomy has become a dominant principle in the other key social disciplines of medicine and law.⁴³