From kindergarten through eighth grade, I attended a private all-girls school in New York City. But today, being 41 years old, with kids of my own in school and daycare in Toronto, I cannot say I give my years in a green plaid jumper a tremendous amount of thought—apart from the school building’s tendency to serve as a backdrop to some school anxiety dreams. The past is always present.
But there it was, in The Free Press: a story about a French teacher at The Spence School, Anne Protopappas, who was apparently fired for hosting an open-discussion-style seminar for high school students about France’s anti-headscarf legislation. I did not overlap with this seemingly legendary Madame Proto, but I can attest to Spence’s strengths in French.
For reasons to do with a finishing-school-type legacy, and therefore unrelated to Canadian bilingualism, French was more popular than Spanish as a second language, a quirk of my life that indirectly led me to doing a doctorate in French, and to spending much of my coursework at New York University… discussing, in seminars, what the deal was with France and veils. (Laïcité but not just that; a compelling topic but not ours here, or not directly.)
The short version of events, as initially reported by the New York Post, is that Madame Proto, at students’ behest, started this headscarf discussion. The daughter of the school principal, also a student in that class, found this Islamophobic, and yadda yadda yadda, Madame Proto, 62, is now old, unemployable, and suing the school. It is example number lost count of someone cancelled for ‘bigotry’ who seemingly didn’t do anything worthy of that charge.
In a real twist for Spence, none of the women here—not Madame, not the kid, not the kid’s mother—are white. In the pre-online days, as I recall, Spence was always big on putting photos of the handful of non-white students in their brochures, selling a diversity you wouldn’t actually experience at a school where a Jewish-looking white Jewish kid such as yours truly was ‘The Other’. (Not in the elementary school at least. Long story.)
That the author of the piece, M.J. Koch, a Spence alum herself, is apparently the daughter of “one of the richest women in the world,” explains at least as much about what sort of a place this is as the nearly $66,000 tuition. It doesn’t just explain how I, the child of a doctor and stay-at-home mom, was considered by classmates to be a little bit tragically lower-class. It also, more pertinently, gets at the hypocrisy angle that comes up when institutions whose core role is preserving inequality claim to be all about social justice. Think Vogue going woke (which it did; visit its circa 2021 online archives), but in the education realm.
When an ex-Spence-ive private school claims to be the guardian of equity, you can point to hypocrisy. The stakes are somewhat different when you’re talking about an entity like the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Public school is free, so if a public board (or one public school, or an individual teacher) decides to go all-in on social justice or DEI or what have you, you don’t have to like it, but hypocritical it’s not.
That said. How would I have felt if my kid, who does indeed go public school in Toronto, were sent on a field trip that turned into a… something or other?
Yes, I’m talking about the fallout over a trip where some Toronto middle-schoolers (but also reportedly kids “as young as eight“) went to the Grassy Narrows River Run Rally on Sept. 18 in downtown Toronto and where… stuff happened. What stuff? Did they learn about Indigenous rights concerns and mercury contamination? Did they protest about this or something else?
The drama was amply covered by the Toronto Sun, but these stories were written in a way where I still remain at a loss as to what actually happened.
Did the protest actually dwell on the topic of Palestine—or was this a thing where there were a lot of people gathered with different agendas? Were TDSB students asked to chant anti-Israel sentiments or did they simply occupy (pardon the word choice) the same space as some people in keffiyehs, something that quite frankly is happening no matter where they go, if they leave the house?
Was a Jewish girl forced to wear a blue shirt to a protest because she, specifically, was labelled a colonizer? Were all non-Indigenous children asked this too? Were the blue shirts actually meant to represent clean water? Did any kid show up that day in a blue shirt at all?
Are shirts even manufactured in the colour blue, or is it all an optical illusion?
What actually happened at this rally remains hazy. People are saying. Parents are concerned. Snippets of video muddle more than they clarify.
The official school board statement was credited to acting education director Louise Sirisko: “TDSB received a number of concerns about this trip, in particular that issues outside of the main focus of the event were raised. We apologize for the harm that some students may have experienced as a result.”
Meanwhile, despite the non-zero chance that TDSB students were not in fact brought to a Free Palestine rally and asked to apologize for being Jewish by wearing special garb, this has not stopped people of myriad politics from opining on why it is in fact great that the youth are freeing Palestine…
…or that it’s time to boycott the public school system entirely.
There is a serious issue here over which values a public school system ought to promote as things the community generally agrees on. There’s been enough of a consensus on Pride, for example, that the handful of families aghast at the prospect can decide if they’re aghast enough to go through the hassle of alternatives—although it should be noted that the absence of Muslim students from Pride activities became enough of a trend in 2023 for at least a couple teachers across Canada to get caught scolding pupils for not showing up.
And if your reaction to promoting orange shirts on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation each Sept. 30 is to rah-rah the more violent aspects of Canada’s establishment (I have yet to meet anyone like this, but I have seen far-right social media posts, it’s a wide world) then maybe you’re not patronizing (if you could call it that) the public schools.
But even if this specific protest was not the Free Palestine rally some are making it out to be, the thought has occurred to me that if virtually every store in my area would put up a Free Palestine sign, because it’s just what nice Canadians do, then what’s to stop the local public schools from putting up signage along those lines? I don’t like dwelling on what-ifs, but this is one I keep returning to, because it doesn’t strike me as far-fetched. And it’s hard to convey, in a simple and visually appealing message, that you’d like to see a free and safe Israel and a free and safe Palestine side by side.
Regardless, if you’re boycotting the public schools because you see them as wokeness run amok, I can merely ask you this: Have you heard about what goes on at private schools?
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
