Toronto school teachers to undergo bizarre social justice training on 'white fragility'

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is reportedly spending next week's professional development session learning the ins and outs of white privilege and anti-Indigenous racism.

The Toronto Sun reported that elementary school teachers will spend the morning in a collaborative education session reviewing how to sufficiently identify "biases and barriers within individual spaces" and "creating conditions for possible transformation."

Secondary teachers are to spend the majority of the day in sessions that educate educators on anti-racism and anti-discrimination based on a number of concepts drummed up by "Toronto's Urban Indigenous Education Centre and the TDSB's equity, anti-oppression and anti-racism team," the Sun noted.

Jonathan Kay posted two photos on Twitter from a Toronto teacher, which features a virtual learning space that shows six different types of racism: ahistorical racism, ideological racism, individual racism, institutional racism, cultural racism, and structural racism.

The developmental learning sessions also direct educators to a lecture by Robin DiAngelo—author of White Fragility—where she talks about whiteness and white privilege.

DiAngelo suggests that there is racism in people who claim that they do not want to live in a "sketchy neighbourhood," since that inevitably has to do with race and class in the "mind of a white person," the Sun reported.

While the social justice agenda will take up the vast majority of the training sessions, only a mere three hours will be devoted to the new math curriculum and less than three hours committed to remote learning strategies.

The educator who shared the details of the curriculum with the Sun said that it was "frustrating" to hear the "board and the teacher unions 'complain about insufficient funding' and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on days of training essentially designed to convince white teachers that they are racist."

"It is also frightening that a public school board serving people of all political views can confidently and unchecked force such radical narratives on their employees," the teacher added.