Blackboard Jungle 2025: What’s Driving the Epidemic of School Violence in Canada?

Blackboard Jungle 2025: What’s Driving the Epidemic of School Violence in Canada?
A school bus heads toward a school in Montreal on Oct. 24, 2024. The Canadian Press/Christinne Muschi
Brock Eldon
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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.
Brock Eldon
Brock Eldon
Author
Brock Eldon teaches Foundations in Literature at RMIT University in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature at King’s University College at Western in London, Ontario, and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His debut non-fiction novella, “Ground Zero in the Culture War,” appeared in C2C Journal.