Vancouver high school students take a controversial field trip to the Kinder Morgan site
Posted May 15, 2018 10:57 pm.
Last Updated May 17, 2018 1:24 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BURNABY (NEWS 1130) – Questions are being raised about why a group of Windermere Secondary students were taken on a field trip near a Kinder Morgan site.
A now-deleted tweet by the left-leaning activist group The Council of Canadians showed a picture of the high-school students standing in front of an Indigenous watch house near Forest Grove Elementary in Burnaby.
In a statement, the Vancouver School Board says the trip was part of the leadership course curriculum and not a protest exercise. The VSB adding while “there was minimum interaction with others”, “the students did ask questions of people nearby including why they were there.”
Political commentator, Ryan Pineo, sees the trip as a public school endorsing something political.
“Teachers are there to be educators and train kids how to be thinkers, not train kids how to be activists.”
He says schools shouldn’t be taking stands in politically motivated issues.
“I just don’t think any public school should be endorsing anything during school time, at all ever that is political.”
He believes you can talk about these issues while keeping opinions out of the conversation.
“You can teach kids about politics or society without teaching them how to think and I just think this is a blatant example of teaching kids how to think.”
The Kinder Morgan site has seen protests for several months as construction was set to begin on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project.
