OK, kiddo! Here are all the fantastically amazing posts tagged with Social justice
Social Justice Elective Case Will Go Ahead
The British Columbia Supreme Court has ruled that a pending human rights challenge regarding a cancelled, optional high school course can go ahead, despite concentrated lobbying efforts by a few parents and lobbyists.
Now, this is a strange and convoluted tale, so please grab a chair, unplug your computer, disconnect all its cables and power supply, and reposition everything next to a fireplace while I regale you with the exciting details.
It starts back in the year 2006.
Social Justice 12, an elective course that includes a unit on the rights and struggles of the GLBT community, was proposed as part of a human rights commission settlement. A ruling found that the B.C. curriculum was unfairly suppressing information beneficial to gay students, and an optional course that offered this missing information was deemed to be a nice, quick fix.
This did not sit well with the anti-gay lobby. These lobbyists became infuriated by the thought of any information about gay struggles in schools. In a concentrated effort, they called on parents to complain to the school boards. Their efforts worked, at least in one place. Officials in Abbotsford, a small city near Vancouver, panicked and cancelled Social Justice 12 just three weeks before it was scheduled to begin.
(May I re-emphasize at this point that this course was an option, available only to students who elected to take it?)
Now, Abbotsford may be small, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s small-minded. Students, having learned that their selected course was cancelled (and that they’d have to obtain credit elsewhere on very short notice to boot), complained to the schoolboard en masse. Realising the scope of their earlier decision, the board eventually decided to react to the students’ demands, but with a caveat.
Social Justice 12 would be re-introduced, but, unlike other options, each student would require parental permission to take it. Now, that’s all well and good if you’ve got a supportive family, but what about students with unsupportive parents? Particularly students whose parents had lobbied the board to turf the course in the first place, or gay students who haven’t outed themselves yet and feared a harsh reaction?
Essentially, a handful of lobbyists had still decided that no student should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to take this course. This didn’t sit well with Murray Coren, one of the community activists who helped launch the original human rights complaint in 2006. With support of students and parents, an expanded human rights complaint was launched, arguing that instating formal restrictions on the course availability undermines the settlement of the original human rights complaint.
(Hold on a second, I need to throw another log on the fire here. Poke it just a bit… Meh, good enough.)
So, a renewed human rights complaint is now pending with a good chance at success. This sent the anti-gay lobbyists into a rage. If all went as expected, students in their last year of high school would soon be able to take a course about Social Justice at their own discretion. In a pre-emptive strategy, the lobbyists appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the human rights case should be dismissed on technicalities. The complainant isn’t a parent, they cried! (Although he was once a student). The complainant doesn’t even live in Abbotsford, they wailed! (Although school curriculum is provincial jurisdiction). But the Supreme Court would hear none of it. As of last week, it was decided that the complaint will go ahead.
It’s not over for the students of Abbotsford, and certainly not of any more relevance to the grade 12 students that have already graduated or are soon to graduate, but a brand new group of students are coming, and soon, this very silly tale will get a new chapter.
So, stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to Holy Crap, What’s The Big Deal?! Also available on audiobook.
- Court won’t halt human-rights case over Social Justice 12 [Vancouver SUN]
- Social Justice 12 human rights application is ‘premature,’ court rules [Abbotsford News]
School Board Partially Caves, Offers Social Justice Course Upon Parental Permission
The Abbotsford school board has reversed its decision to yank a social justice course from its schools. The course, a grade 12 elective featuring a unit on gay rights, was nixed after anti-gay groups and vocal parents lobbied to have it pulled.
The sudden reversal is great news for all the students that had the course ripped out from under them last Autum. Their substantial outcry no doubt helped to get the course re-instated, but something is still a wee bit off.
Curiously, the course now requires written parental consent before any student is allowed to register. That means that students who wish to take the course will be barred if one of their parents objects.
Julie MacRae, superintendent of the Abbotsford school board, said that the parental permission decision was made due to “the sensitive nature of some of the course content.” An interesting stance; almost nearly partly understandable. Parents should always be in the know when it comes to what their children are learning; however, at grade 12, there’s no reason the student shouldn’t have the final say in their own education.
Still, how’s this for a solution: Any parent who objects to the social justice course must take it themselves first before they mandate their decision onto their children. Fair, no?
- Abby Board of Education allows Social Justice 12 [BC Local News]
- Abbotsford approves controversial course for Grade 12 [Vancouver SUN]
Social Justice Course Yanked By Religious Groups
Religious groups in Abbotsford, B.C. have successfully lobbied to gut a high school social justice course of all gay rights content, and even cancelled the course altogether in most of the district’s schools.
In a letter to the B.C. Ministry of Education, the Abbotsford School District ostensibly suggested that the optional course was “too challenging” for senior high school students, saying it would be “more suited for second- or third-year sociology students.” More revealing, the board said they were concerned that teachers might inject a “personal bias” in their lessons, causing students to be “more biased and less tolerant of opposing beliefs because of misinformation.”
Anti-gay lobbyists had protested the course since it’s inception, first falsely informing parents that it was a mandatory subject (it’s an elective) and later encouraging parents to sign a petition to get the course pulled. The controversy was due to content on the topics of homophobia, heterosexism, and other gay issues.
While most of Abbotsford’s schools cancelled the course before any students were able to sign up, W.J. Mouat Secondary didn’t get the memo in time and had to gut the course of gay content instead, leaving the 90 students that had signed up to take the course confused and angry.
A spokesperson for the ministry of education said that schools aren’t required to offer the course, but disagreed with Abbotsford’s assessment, saying that no other schools had a problem with the subject matter and that last year’s trials of the course were successful.
Abbotsford will reportedly replace the ministry’s course with a new, environmentally-friendly one that teaches kids how to recycle diversity books into bibles.
- Gay rights cut from studies [Edmonton Journal]
- New social justice high school course ousted from Abbotsford, B.C. [National Post]
Parents Protest New Course
Over 800 Vancouver protesters gathered this week to protest a new grade 12 course entitled “Social Justice.” The course will include a unit that focuses on gay role models, sparking fears that children province-wide will turn gay. The horror.
Murray Coren, who was granted a role as a consultant on the curriculum, was forced to state the obvious:
There was no information about gay or lesbian people [when I went to school], and having gone through that system for 13 years, it didn’t make me straight. So I don’t know how information about gay and lesbian people is going to turn anyone queer.
The protesters, for some reason, aren’t buying it, and presented a petition with over 14,000 signatures demanding that the government do the ultra ambiguous: “to defend and to preserve parental and children’s rights” and “to stop selling out to special interest groups.”
The kicker: the course is an elective.
- Protesters rally against gay and lesbian issues course [CBC News]
- Gay couple has too much say over lessons: petitioners [Vancouver Sun]
New Social Justice Course Offered
British Columbia high school students have a new elective to choose from next year! The course, entitled Social Justice Issues, covers various topics including race, ethnicity, women’s rights, and sexual orientation.
This is great news. But how do you suppose the “pro-family” scribes at LifeSite reported this?
“Government Agrees to Mandatory Homosexual Curriculum with No Opt-Out for Students or Parents!” Aaaaaaah!
Yes, that’s their actual headline. Of course it’s completely false, as the course is an elective—not mandatory. But, naturally, anything coming from a group that calls themselves “pro-family” when they’re actually crazily anti-gay is to be taken with a grain of salt. A big grain of make-believe space salt, anyway.
And to all students taking the new course next year, good for you! Never stop bettering yourselves.
