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

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.

Take the case of “Cassie,” a new teacher who was attacked in her art classroom by a student wielding scissors. Her supposed crime? Initiating a discussion about how oppression isn’t always a fixed hierarchy. Her attacker, from a politically active family, accused her of racism. Cassie suffered seven large bruises on her back and was diagnosed with PTSD—and then, remarkably, became the focus of a school board investigation for allegedly promoting colonialism. Her classroom was placed under surveillance. The student, meanwhile, was back in class.

Cassie’s story is no outlier. Reports of teachers being physically assaulted are skyrocketing. In Hamilton, Ontario, more than 4,300 violent incidents were reported in the 2022–23 school year. Photos released by a local union show smashed furniture, and workers with deep bruises and faces marked by scratches and blood. “I just had a member that went to the hospital the other day after being kicked in the head by a student,” union president Susan Lucek told the Hamilton Spectator.

In Toronto, physical assaults and weapons-related charges in schools have more than doubled in just five years. The same pattern holds throughout the country, with recent reports of rising violence in New Brunswick, P.E.I., Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

It’s not a resource problem. In Ontario, school spending is at an all-time high—$29 billion this year alone—with one teacher for every 15 students. Across Canada, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending jumped 50 percent between 1998 and 2022, the latest year for which numbers are available. The claim that violence stems from austerity simply doesn’t hold up.

What has changed is something harder to quantify but much more powerful: The authority of teachers has been dismantled by fashionable ideologies. Practices like “de-streaming” eliminate advanced classes in the name of equity, forcing teachers to manage students of widely different abilities and commitment. Meanwhile, theories like “unschooling” encourage children to treat teachers as peers. The result: a breakdown of structure and respect.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, concepts like critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were adopted wholesale by school boards. But these ideologies sort students and teachers into binary groups: victim or oppressor. As John Hilton-O’Brien of Parents for Choice in Education notes, students quickly learn to claim victim status to evade discipline. Some even feel justified in using violence. “One of the key precepts of CRT is that force is an acceptable means of fighting injustice,” Hilton-O’Brien explains. Students who identify as oppressed are told that their anger is righteous, even heroic.

Teachers, far from being empowered to restore order, have been taught to doubt their own legitimacy. Many now hesitate to discipline students for fear of being branded as racist or bigoted. Others have been pushed to promote political ideologies rather than maintain educational standards. The classroom has become an ideological battleground, and teachers—ironically, often its most enthusiastic combatants—are now its chief casualties.

Even when violence occurs, discipline is often nonexistent. “Students can assault a teacher and be back in the classroom the next day,” Hilton-O’Brien notes. Teachers are left to fend for themselves. The system doesn’t protect them. In some cases, it even targets them. Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto principal, died by suicide after alleged harassment during a DEI training session when he chose to speak out. His case became a symbol of how educators can be punished for questioning ideological orthodoxy.

Instead of confronting the ideological rot, teachers’ organizations continue to double down, rejecting measures that might help stem the violence. The B.C. Teachers’ Federation wants police banned from schools. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation supports repealing Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which currently allows reasonable physical restraint to protect students and teachers. Repealing it without a replacement would strip teachers of the last legal protection they have to stop violent outbursts.

All this is driving parents away. In Alberta, one-quarter of families have either left the public system or are trying to. Charter schools like the Calgary Classical Academy are flourishing, with waitlists that stretch for years.

We know what works. Respect for authority. Clear discipline. A curriculum focused on knowledge, not grievance. We had it for decades. But many teachers, administrators and unions abandoned it for a new gospel of systemic blame and perpetual outrage. And now they are reaping the whirlwind.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.

Brock Eldon is Associate Editor at C2C Journal. Since earning his B.A. and M.A. from Western University in London, Ontario, he has taught and designed curriculum in Canada, South Korea, China and Vietnam. He lives in Owen Sound, Ontario with his wife and daughter.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.