Toronto March for Life“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” Mark Twain
Education has usually been trumpeted by classically liberal societies as the cornerstone for a free-thinking society. John F. Kennedy rightly noted that “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.”
The greatest enemy of education, of course, is a closed mind. Much has been written about the left-leaning tendencies of secular universities. The faculty are generally portrayed as a long-haired hippie hangover from the 1960’s, still bent on indoctrinating the apathetic student bodies on why Marx is the answer and America is the enemy.
However, the encroachment of mandatory ideology upon the high school system, while revealed in the past by occurrences such as the banning of school prayer and the forcible insertion of political correctness, has not been a topic of much attention in Canada until recently. Some heads were turned when a Quebec judge ruled last week that religious parents in Quebec did not have the right to exempt their children from a mandatory course on relativism—even if they were homeschooled.
Incidentally, the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) has been displaying its “Choice” Chain project, which features signs of first-trimester aborted children, in front of high schools multiple days each week. The reactions this display garnered were a shocking testament to the refusal of those who teach our country’s youth to consider any alternative point of view.
At one high school, faculty used the intercom system to warn students not to interact with pro-lifers, and to avoid taking any information pamphlets from them. Faculty also attempted to blunt the message by falsely claiming that the photos were fake.
At all of the high schools, teachers have attempted to physically herd students away from the display and angrily approached volunteers to demand that we not talk to their students. Even a principal came out at one point to ensure his students were not exposing themselves to the pro-life point of view.
Some high schools actually called the police—and while the Calgary police officers did respect our freedom of speech, they asked us to turn our signs away from the students or move away from the school due to an “overwhelming” number of complaint calls that the photos of abortions were “too much for high school students.”
Many high school faculty apparently believe that their students are old enough to have sex, and therefore old enough to have abortions—but not old enough to see what the reality of abortion actually is.
This is not just close-mindedness. This is not just a censorship of a point of view. This is, considering that abortion kills a child and often damages the woman psychologically and even physically, the equivalent of wilful endangerment.
While high school students regularly watch an inordinate amount of gore on TV (considering the most popular TV shows currently) and flock to slasher flicks, high school faculty believe that viewing objective evidence about a procedure that could actually affect them is what should be censored.
They have proved only one thing: they are not educators. They are indoctrinators.
