Danielle Smith: We Should Defund Public Schools

So, according to Danielle Smith, our public schools aren't teaching the right kind of critical thinking skills.  Apparently in her world, this is an excuse to defund the public schools entirely and turn the whole thing over to private schools.  Given that Smith is a libertarian, this latter leap of logic isn't entirely surprising - libertarian politics tends to overlook the common good entirely.

However, let's take a closer look at her argument, shall we?

In the last year, the drive to defund private schools has been picking up steam. But, maybe what we should really be talking about is how to dismantle the public education monopoly.

Imagine how surprised I was to hear that recommendation from a self-described liberal university professor named Rick Mehta. 

Who is Rick Mehta? He is the latest professor to be targeted by extreme social justice warriors on campus for being a sexist, racist, transphobic, neocolonialist bigot.

Now, you might be wondering "who the hell is Rick Mehta?".  Certainly, I had only recently heard of him myself.  Fundamentally, he's a wannabe Jordan Peterson.  He obviously holds some noxious views about topics like feminism, and periodically dances with overt racism in his commentary about Residential Schools. Holding noxious views is one thing - frankly if Dr. Mehta (I presume he holds a Ph.D.) wants to personally believe that there is no such thing as a gendered wage gap, he's free to do so.  Bringing that belief into the classroom, however, is another matter entirely.

So, let's come back to Ms. Smith's argument, and see what she is trying to say:

What has these sensitive youngsters so worked up? Well, the good professor has been teaching since 2003. But he had an epiphany, back in 2015, where he realized that if we want to solve the social issues we care so much about, we have to consider policy ideas from a broad perspective to find out what works. 

So, he conducts lectures that suggest the wage gap is not entirely to do with gender. He dares to suggest the residential school system was not horrifically bad for all 150,000 students who went through it. He quotes statistical data to show that a very small number of individuals identify as transgender and even when they do, the majority choose to stay with the gender they were born with.

Well.  Isn't this interesting. Without going to the Acadia University Calendar and figuring out which courses he actually teaches, it does seem a trifle odd for a Psychology Professor to be bringing some of these topics into the classroom - especially in undergraduate courses.  The gender wage gap might come up in a senior level psychology course discussing discrimination and its effects on mental health.  I can't imagine how denying its very existence is terribly effective as a teaching tool though.  Similarly, bringing up the statistics on frequency for transgender people is going to be largely irrelevant outside of courses related to gender and sexuality (most likely graduate level courses).  Talking about any of these in the context of public policy in class seems quite off-base in general.

He went into some detail to describe his method of providing information to his students, giving links to a broad range of sources so they can do their own independent research and come to their own conclusions. He’s so confident his methods will stand up to scrutiny, he’s posted his lectures and materials in a public Dropbox so the public can judge for themselves.

So far, Ms. Smith seems to have used better than half the space of her article establishing Dr. Mehta's bona fides as a "free speech warrior", telling us essentially that he's just trying to provoke "critical thinking" on these topics. Except she's conveniently overlooking the power differential between a professor and an undergraduate student body.  He's bringing his own personal ideas into the classroom and lecturing on them. Undergraduate students aren't stupid - they know full well that a big part of the academic game is to give the professors what they want to hear in papers and exam answers.  So, while Dr. Mehta may well be sincere in trying to promote some critical thought among his students, he's way off-base in how he's going about it.

Natasha also got in touch with me to tell me about her experience running the gauntlet through a group of angry, belligerent student protestors at a Jordan Peterson speech at Queen’s University. Talking with her, it became pretty clear that she is an advocate for social causes – one might even say a bleeding heart liberal. 

But she thought there was more to Jordan Peterson than she was reading about in the papers and attended his lecture. What particularly resonated with her was when Peterson told the crowd of 1,000 students that they feel obliged to parrot back extremely biased narratives from the perspective of their leftist professors or face getting lower grades. 

Natasha got marked down for a paper on HIV prevalence in African regions with high levels of female genital mutilation. Because she called the practice – which Wikipedia describes as “partially or totally removing the external genitalia of girls and young women for nonmedical reasons” that is “illegal in many countries” – mutilation, she was told she was being culturally insensitive. No “A” for you.

Ah ... now we come to the meat of Smith's argument.  Ms. Smith misses a critical point about academic writing: namely that even when writing a position paper on a topic, the writer is expected to keep their language as neutral as possible.  Your argument should stand on the basis of facts and evidence, not on the basis of your ability to use emotionally inflammatory language.  Second, if our good student had actually used Wikipedia as a key reference point in making their argument, the professor would also have deducted marks for using a source that is not reliable from an academic perspective.  Don't misunderstand me - Wikipedia is an excellent resource, but because it is crowdsourced, articles on Wikipedia cannot be seen as definitive works of expertise, and are thus inappropriate for university level academic papers.

The only conclusion I can draw from these two stories is the education establishment has gone completely bats. It is one thing to attempt to dismiss conservatives as bigots – that old yarn has been trotted out by progressives for decades.

Well, Ms. Smith, now you reveal your real stripes, don't you? Oh, woe the poor persecuted "conservative" speaker, they are being oppressed. But are they? I don't see anyone stopping either Peterson or Mehta from speaking their minds. Their employers have rightly expressed serious concerns and appear to be investigating those concerns.  If you want conservative voices to be heard, perhaps you might want to select those voices who aren't sounding suspiciously like they are promoting things like racism, discrimination and so on.

It is quite another matter to call Indian, first-generation-Canadian, liberal professors and self-described pro-LGBTQ feminists bigots simply because they want to hear a range of viewpoints before making up their own minds on issues. 

Mehta said he believes the problems begin in K-12 education, as school curricula across the country is being rewritten through a “social justice” lens. In his tweet on March 3, he called for the education system to be “rebuilt from the ground up.”

So, which is it, Danielle?  Is Mehta a "liberal", or is he a "conservative"?  You're twisting your language to make your point.

Then you launch into the assumed evils of introducing social justice issues into school curriculum.  Yet, don't those same principles of social justice not require a degree of critical thinking?  In some respects understanding those concepts requires greater critical thinking skills than the rather simplistic views often touted by so-called "conservative" advocates.

Arguments like "residential schools weren't bad for _all_ the students" ignore the foundational underpinnings of the program which were fundamentally racist from the start. Even if some students did benefit from the education, the price paid collectively within First Nations communities was - and remains - devastating.  Such pithy arguments are profoundly problematic, and defending them (outside of classes on rhetoric, where the principle of clear, coherent argument regardless of your personal perspective is the objective) is simply inappropriate.  Some arguments have no validity in reality.

How about we go the other way? Maybe every independent school needs to be fully funded and we need to phase out every government-run, union-controlled public school more interested in indoctrinating students than teaching them critical-thinking skills.

I find Ms. Smith's conclusion on this almost laughable. She spends the vast majority of her column trying to establish the bona fides of the people she uses as examples. Looking at Mehta, he appears to be working very hard to follow in Jordan Peterson's footsteps and make a name for himself on the radical right wing rubber chicken circuit.  Neither of whom are the kind of people who I would draw from in making an argument for dismantling our public school system because of what/how material is taught.

In fact, Ms. Smith hasn't even made an intelligible argument as to why this should be done.  All she has done is give further amplification to the voices who seem to hold difficult - if not outright offensive - views. Surely we can do better than that in our public discourse.