Commentary
“Blackboard Jungle” was a 1955 film about a new English teacher at a violent inner-city school in America. In Canadian classrooms today, the biggest threat to education is not student indifference or the proliferation of smartphones. Increasingly, it’s the students themselves. Violence in the classroom is rising dramatically, and while teachers’ unions insist that it’s the result of provincial budget cuts and larger class sizes, the facts tell a different story. As shocking incidents pile up across the country, it’s becoming clear that a more disturbing culprit is at work: a steady ideological transformation that has eroded discipline, dismantled hierarchies, and turned classrooms into chaos zones….