Last week the Toronto District School Board decided to approve a new school in which the “knowledge and experiences of peoples of African descent [will be] an integral feature of the teaching and learning environment.” The school, which will be funded by taxpayers, has been proposed as one way of curbing the alarming drop out rates among the city’s black students – one study suggests that as many as four out of every ten black students fail to graduate from high school.
The decision has been met with a chorus of disapproval from radio talk show hosts and editorial writers across Canada. These have generally branded the idea of a separate school as a form of ‘segregation’ and argued that it directly contradicts modern Canada’s steadfast refusal to yield to easy ethnic, cultural and religious divisions. Many critics are adamant that public money should not be used to undermine a wider sense of national identity, and they warn that the precedent could encourage further fractures within the country’s large immigrant population – half of Toronto’s 5.5 million residents are foreign born. Some have also questioned the idea that black students are being failed by the school system at all. A BBC report quotes a former university professor with experience of youth outreach and employment programmes saying that in one particularly problematic working-class neighbourhood, “Out of the 100 or so families I worked with
