Rex Murphy: Cutting honours programs and keeping smart kids down proves the silliness of ‘inclusivity’

NP

A classroom sits empty at the Eric Hamber Secondary School in Vancouver on March 23, 2020. The Vancouver School Board is eliminating honours programs for math and science, and has already ended honours English, claiming the honours programs create inequities among students. PHOTO BY JONATHAN HAYWARD/THE CANADIAN PRESS

The Vancouver School Board is cutting all sports programs and all sports competitions because, the school district says, «they do not comply with the equity and inclusion goal of ensuring that all students can participate in every aspect of the curriculum». For the same reason they will also end all coaching services for those students who show special skills at hockey, track and field, wrestling and ping pong. «Sports competitions are an especial plague,» said one staff member who demanded to be kept anonymous since everyone would think is a total moron, «because in every one of them two or three participants always end up in the winner’s circle, while others are either left in shame at the back of the pack, or worse still have to sit them out in the bleachers cheering on their ‘superiors. » No honours instruction, I trust, is needed to see that all the above is my own little fiction, possibly tainted by a tint of irony, but its inspiration is palpably all too true and real.

They’ve chopped the math and science honour courses to increase inclusivity. Increase inclusivity by subtraction of what is to be offered. By the logic on offer here, this enlightened board should also be tossing overboard all courses that attend to students who have more difficulty learning than others. This same collection of woke-a-crats was way ahead of the game on English studies.

They chopped the honours English program five years ago. You don’t chop English instruction without cost or inviting shame. It is time to topple these plastic icons of diversity, inclusivity and equity which are now intoned as charms and spells over every new senseless decree of the woke directorates, to immunize them against any criticism, any call for discussion or debate, and to brand critics as racist or phobic or supremacist. I wonder if the parents of some bright, eager and industrious youngsters in Vancouver, kids with an early passion for numbers, or blessed by nature or God with a yearning to learn the deepest they can learn of the cosmos and its laws, if those parents now feel that the VSB has cauterized their kids’ opportunity to develop and expand that passion and that yearning to the very best they can.

The children of other nations, and particularly the children of poorer nations with far less funded classrooms, are not shunting their brightest and best off to some sidecar of mediocrity, under the plastic, vile rationalizations that come with the invocation of diversity, inclusion and equity. If a young Wayne Gretzky were attending a Vancouver school today they’d make him wear a knapsack of cinder blocks while on hockey practice lest he «outperform» other kids and make them feel «excluded.» If Ramanujan were there they’d take him out of math class and send him to the gym.

Source: Rex Murphy | NP 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *