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The takeover of the educational realm was best described and critiqued by political centrist Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University social psychology professor and co-founder of the Heterodox Academy, which promotes open inquiry.

Social justice advocates are quite rightly focused on racial and gender equality, Haidt said in a 2016 speech. It’s essential to have their input and advocacy, but not to the extent of them dominating other independent fields, such as education.

For hundreds of years the search for truth has been the sacred value of education but that’s now changing, Haidt said. “What is now sacred is victims. Victims become sacred, and sacred means no trade-offs, no criticisms.”

When certain ideas, such as equity and diversity, and certain groups, such as some racial minorities and the LGBTQ community, become sacred, we lose the ability to have intelligent discussions that could lead to insights that will actually address problems, Haidt said.

Flawed, imperfect or wrong-headed ideas go unchallenged, distorting the search for truth at the heart of education. Orthodox thinking abounds. A culture of grievance flourishes. Students become intellectually fragile, overreacting to small slights, demanding safe spaces and shutting down opposing viewpoints.

“What this means is that students hold their beliefs very, very strongly but they don’t know how to support them,” Haidt said. “You find this when you get into a debate with students about social justice or the concepts, they often cannot explain what they mean because they have not been challenged.”

Of course, not everyone will agree with my interpretation of this document. It has so far only been glimpsed at public meetings. But there will be a more varied and public debate on them and other curriculum documents when Alberta Education publishes them online in the fall.

I look forward to that wider debate, but for now can only suggest this curriculum needs to be completely reworked by apolitical subject experts in history and geography, or at least by experts with wide viewpoint diversity. Maybe then someone, anyone, will point out when things have gone badly off kilter.

In the end, we need a curriculum that will help produce citizens with a deep, broad knowledge and understanding of human societies and the physical world, not intolerant zealots weaponized by social justice ideals.