Fear & Loathing at School

1,251 words

A war is being waged in the schools across North America. Elementary, middle, and high schools have seen a dramatic increase in violent incidents in recent years.

A Toronto area middle school generated some attention last month (May 2023) because of a letter posted on Twitter. The anonymously written plea for help was penned by a teacher at Tomken Road Middle School, which is located in Mississauga, Ontario, just west of Toronto.

The letter speaks to the appalling conditions at the school. Apparently, every day is little better than a warzone for students and teachers: There are rampant occurrences of vandalism, theft, assault, and threats. Lots of cowering is being done in the teacher’s lounge as well: Embattled teachers hide away from the maddening horde, clutching their precious teacher’s editions lest they be stolen.

The missive is a laundry list of egregious behavior that has occurred over the last year. The letter alleges that “[t]he climate of our school is one of violence, fear . . .” It further states that teachers, support staff, custodians, and students have endured “countless unsafe interactions on a daily basis.” It is essentially “a desperate call for help to make changes to our learning environment. . .”

Students “defecated on the floor. . . and rubbed their feces on the wall”; had water fights and impromptu baseball games in the halls; committed acts of vandalism, which included writing “hateful speech about teachers targeting their ethnicity”; and rampant truancy. Metal door stoppers, food, and water have been thrown into classrooms from the halls; pupils do not respect teachers’ personal space; washrooms and other areas inside the school have been rendered inaccessible because of profuse vaping and smoking; fights occur before, during, and after school, many of which are filmed and posted online; students who are too afraid to use the bathrooms end up soiling themselves; and students and staff are routinely threatened with physical violence. Staff are obliged to lock classroom doors to dissuade student vandals and thieves.

The anonymous letter prompted the Peel District School Board (PDSB) to launch an investigation. The Board’s public response, however, attempted to downplay the severity of the revelations. A spokesperson for the PDSB said that the allegations do not reflect all students and that its “restorative approach to addressing unsafe behaviors is leading to positive outcomes.” This is a frustratingly typical bureaucratic response that does nothing to address the real problem.

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Meanwhile, right next door in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the largest school board in Canada, administers approximately 235,000 students in 583 schools. The TDSB determined that between September and April 2023, a total of 323 students conducted acts of violence on school property. This was the highest total since 2018-2019, when 267 students earned the same lofty distinction.

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), a labor union that represents 83,000 teachers and other personnel, hired a research firm, Strategic Communications (Stratcom), to conduct a survey of their members in regard to workplace violence. Over 25,000 union members responded. The survey found that the number and severity of violent incidents is on the rise. Based on the personal experiences of all those surveyed,

[m]ore than three-quarters (77%) of ETFO members have personally experienced violence or witnessed violence against another staff person. This is an increase from the 70% reported in 2017. Educators working with younger students are more likely to experience violence, and the vast majority of members who work in special education have personally experienced violence or witnessed violence against another staff person (86%).

Moreover, 80% of respondents said that incidents of violence have increased since they began their careers, and 66% indicated that the severity of incidents has escalated. 80% likewise agreed with the statement that “violence is a growing problem” at their school. Approximately 72% felt that violent occurrences had increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An environment fraught with such problems is not conducive to learning. An overwhelming majority of teachers indicated that incidents, or the threat of such incidents, hindered the ability to teach properly. A majority of respondents (87%) agreed that violence had a negative impact on teaching; 83% believed that it had a deleterious effect on classroom management, and 35% had actually participated in a classroom evacuation.

A survey as useful as this is also seriously flawed. What are the underlying causes of such a sea change in behavior? The typical response is to throw money at the issue and hope it goes away. What about Ontario’s changing demographics? In the case of Tomken Road Middle School in Mississauga, which is within the Regional Municipality of Peel, the city has undergone an enormous demographic transformation. It has gone from majority white to non-white in a very short period of time. According to the Regional Municipality of Peel’s own website, of Peel’s 1.5 million people 990,345 (69%) are “racialized” individuals. The term “racialized” is being used synonymously with the label “visible minority.” “Visible minorities” are peoples other than the indigenous “who are non‑Caucasian in race or non‑white in colour.” Undoubtedly, it is a very vibrant place to live.

In White Identity, Jared Taylor gives the example of how providing the very best facilities with copious amounts of funding did nothing to improve academic performance and behavior at a racially diverse California high school. When the school opened in July 2005, it featured state-of-the-art facilities including a heated pool, ballet studio, fully-equipped chef’s kitchen, and the latest computers. As Taylor points out, despite the quality of the facilities and the division of students into five “learning communities,” the outcomes remained the same. South Los Angeles Area High School No. 1 became notorious in its administrative district for violent crimes. Fistfights in the bathrooms were so frequent that classrooms had to remain locked, students had to be escorted to the bathrooms by adult staff, and in December 2005 a lunchtime riot resulted in arrests and multiple injuries.[1]

The multicultural experiment has resulted in similar problems in other countries. In Denmark, for example, immigrant Muslims have nothing but disdain for their host country and yet fear deportation. Muslim “kids and their parents alike have very little respect for the school system and its teachers.” The newcomers hold white Danes and Danish culture in contempt. They have adopted an aggressive attitude that mimics black American gangsterism: They engage in stare-down contests, and wear gangster clothing and gold chains. School-age children engage in acts of criminality that victimize native Danes. Furthermore, the ideological Left and civic nationalists alike view these problems as a failure of integration rather than the results of irreconcilable racial or ethnic differences.[2]

I find it darkly humorous that the Journal of School Violence, a quarterly academic periodical that has been published since 2002, has not solved the problem. The journal “is a multi-disciplinary, quarterly journal that publishes peer-reviewed empirical studies related to school violence and victimization.” What could the underlying problem be?

As Greg Johnson has stated on multiple occasions, the best way to maintain peace between different peoples is through ethnonationalism — in other words, by creating “sovereign homelands for all peoples who aspire to them.”[3] The violence and chaos that is manifesting in schools across the West is an extension of ethnic and racial conflicts in the wider society. It is a direct result of “forcing different peoples to share the same territory and system of government.”[4]

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Notes

[1] Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century (Oakton, Va.: New Century Books, 2011), 250-254.

[2] Nelson Rosit, “’Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark’: Review of Holy Wrath: Among Criminal Muslims

by Nicolai Sennels,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 2018–2019), 107-118.

[3] Greg Johnson, “What’s Wrong with Cosmopolitanism?” in In Defense of Prejudice (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017), 146.

[4] Ibid.