Better understanding of our problems today requires better understanding of our history.
Sadly, this seems to have been lost on Education Minister Bronwyn Eyre, given her comments the legislature about First Nations/treaty education in the classroom.
In her November 1 reply to the Speech from the Throne, Eyre made several eyebrow-raising observations about problems in education.
This isn’t unusual for a minister. However, it’s how she chose to frame what she clearly saw as problems in First Nations and treaty education — a curriculum started and championed by Premier Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government — that is troubling.
In her speech, Eyre explained that her Grade 8 son brought home a worksheet assignment he had copied from the classroom board.
“The following facts which were presented as fact,” Eyre told the assembly. “That Europeans and European settlers were colonialists, pillagers of the land.”
Eyre went on to explain her son asked her if it was okay to offer a perspective of his own great-grandparents. She then went on at great length to describe the entrepreneurial, hardworking nature of her own Norwegian and Ukrainian grandparents who also experienced.
Now, there are several of you who might say there is nothing wrong with what Eyre said. Unfortunately, there is all much wrong with what happened here.
For starters, there is every reason to believe that Eyre simply got it wrong.
A Saskatoon blogger went to the trouble of going through the actually curriculum material (in this case, curriculum delivered in French because Eyre’s son is in French immersion) and found that inflammatory words like “pillage” and “colonist” were in neither the French nor English version.
Eyre simply did not do her own homework before raising the issue in the legislature.
The curriculum does encourage students to examine perspectives from both the First Nations’ and settlers’ perspective, but schools are supposed to encourage kids to look at issues from different perspectives.
And if we are to ever going to start getting along better with First Nations people, we have to start seeing things from their historical perspective, as well.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily prove that Eyre was wrong. It might be possible that this is an over-zealous teacher who took liberties with terms and language.
But if that was the case that was a matter for Eyre to discuss with the teacher, privately as a parent. It isn’t an issue for the floor of the Assembly.
Moreover, at least two media outlets and a blogger were in contact with the parent of another child in the class. That child’s notes — also taken from the blackboard — offered no sign of inflammatory language injected by the teacher.
At this point, the reasonable thing for a minister to do is say there is no problem with the curriculum and that she made a mistake.
It’s a reasonable mistake for someone whose first language isn’t French — especially, someone clearly wearing her parent goggles.
And given how angry and insulted First Nations people were by her remarks, it would seem Eyre’s next reasonable course of action would be an apology to First Nations people for slighting them in the need for this curriculum.
Instead, Eyre issued a statement saying that Treaty education will remain as part of the curriculum, that she wouldn’t comment on another student’s interpretation of the lesson and that she was apologizing to her so and wouldn’t discuss his matter further.
That falls well short of an apology for what NDP education critic Carla Beck said eroded trust and “showed some really poor judgment.”
Obviously, a prideful minister is trying to save face.
But given that way she has wrongly stirred up anger by pointing to a non-existent anti-settler bias in this curriculum, that’s no excuse.
Eyre needs to apologize.
