Teaching 2010 Resistance

By Michael Smyth, The Province - October 16, 2009

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/2010wintergames/Editorial+Vancouver+te...

Looks like Vancouver school teachers have a new definition of the Three Rs: Radicals, rioting and rabble-rousing. That seems to be the teachers’ new Olympic classroom mantra after their union’s astonishing decision to hold a “Teaching 2010 Resistance” workshop at Lord Strathcona Elementary later this month.

The workshop is being presented by the Olympic Resistance Network, a radical group of anti-Olympic zealots closely monitored by the police.

The event is being promoted by the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association, a branch of the union.

The association says the workshop is a chance for teachers “to collaborate in adapting materials for elementary students” around “critically minded” Olympic themes.

Key among them: How the Olympics is a “corporate scam” that will “occupy” Vancouver and increase poverty, damage the environment, degrade stolen aboriginal land and drain the public purse to line the pockets of the rich.

A poster promoting the event shows a little girl tossing one of the Olympic mascot dolls into a garbage can.

A security wall topped by barbed wire and a police surveillance camera looms ominously in the background.

Do you recognize that little girl, by the way?

If that’s not Dora The Explorer, the beloved cartoon character, I’ll eat my press pass.

But I somehow doubt the workshop will address issues of copyright infringement.

Instead, the Olympic Resistance Network says the event is a response to “one-sided” classroom dialogue around the 2010 Olympic Games.

“We believe education means presenting balanced information,” says the the official workshop overview.

In that spirit, the organizers suggest an Olympics quiz for students with “balanced” topics such as: “The amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the Olympics: More than a small country!” and “Pesticides contained in artificial snow.”

There’s an entire “lesson plan” on the role the Olympics played in the Holocaust and “the relationship between the Olympics and the popularization of fascism.”

There’s also a colour-coded pie-chart lesson to illustrate “the Olympics’ massive misuse of public funds,” a role-playing game where students adopt “Olympic sponsors and big business” characters and a “resistance activity” where kids are encouraged to “collectively brainstorm ways of counteracting the negative effects of the Olympic Games.”

None of which seems to concern Vancouver school board chair Patti Bacchus, the first-term Vision Vancouver trustee.

“We had the education minister in one of our schools last month trotting out the Olympic mascots and launching a School Spirit program,” she complained.

“A lot of the government’s material has been boosterism. We need a more balanced approach.” Bacchus admitted, however, that she hadn’t read the “Teaching 2010 Resistance” course material, which worried Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid.

“I am concerned that elementary children could be subjected to one-sided political arguments involving anti-Olympics organizations," she said.

Bacchus, however, had no problem renting out a classroom to the Olympic Resistance Network for the Oct. 28 workshop.

“We need every dollar we can get,” she said.

And I’d say our kids need this kind of anarchistic propaganda in their classrooms like they need a hole in the head.

Though I thought Olympics CEO John Furlong probably said it best Thursday after he first heard about the Teaching Resistance initiative: “I just heard it on the news. I found it difficult to listen to. Frankly, I think our children could do a lot worse than to sit in a classroom and be taught Olympic values of respect and tolerance and fair play and how to win and how to lose and how to lead and grow up to be great citizens. I think that’s what teachers should be telling their children.”

E-mail: msmyth@theprovince.com