One of the Good Ones

In memory of Richard Bilkszto

Photo of Richard Bilkszto from the New York Post

I had the privilege of knowing Richard Bilkszto before his untimely passing last year. I’d been investigating Ontario public schools for a few months and was connected with Richard through a source. I thought it would just be another conversation, something helpful but not pivotal to my research.

As soon as Richard opened his Zoom camera calling in from Mexico, I knew it would be different. He was as relaxed as the tropical shirt he wore, called me “man” throughout our conversation, and spoke from the heart. 

What struck me about Richard, apart from what is now publicly known about his remarkable teaching career, was his compassion and his inability to fit into our narrow boxes of political self-identification these days. Within our first minutes of chatting, he said he empathized with children experiencing gender dysphoria in high school.

“I’ve seen trans kids get the s*** kicked out of them,” he told me at the time. “I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes, so you can’t not talk about it.”

On another occasion, when law enforcement was sent to deal with a situation at his school, he told them to treat a student with respect or kick rocks. 

“A police officer was so rude in speaking to the student. I had to actually ask to speak with them outside. And I basically said, ‘You know what? If you’re gonna talk to the student like this, you need to leave, man. You can't be rude like this.”

That was Richard. Kindness and his love of teaching cut through everything he did.

Richard mentioned he was gay in passing, but unlike the zeitgeist of our time, he didn’t dwell upon his identity or how he fit into the ever-shifting oppression hierarchy. What mattered to him were the contents of one’s thoughts, not our surface-level differences.

“I mean, you know, to me, being gay is a part of me. It’s not my identity. It’s not something I choose to put out there all the time. Like, ‘Hey, you need to listen to me because I’m gay,’” he said. “The whole canceling and not allowing for free speech, free debate, and all those types of things,” he said, trailing off, “I’m a big free speech proponent, right?”

His internal compass was aimed at free inquiry, consistently striving to speak about the topics that animate our cultural moment. In the few hours I spent interviewing Richard and the dozens of messages we traded back and forth afterward, that was the ambient vibe that shaded our conversations. That’s something we sorely miss today.

Richard often found himself moving against the prevailing currents of teaching and education. He shared his growing frustration with efforts to incorporate Critical Race Theory (CRT) into public schools, sexualized drag queen story hours with minors, and identity politics that were used to pit groups against one another in zero-sum power contests. 

Such binary thinking troubled Richard. 

When academics and teacher-activists called for “dismantling” or “decolonizing” educational spaces, he didn’t absently nod his head in agreement but wrestled with what that actually meant. 

In many cases, he was right to worry. 

Ontario’s abandonment of student resource officers in public schools made violent teaching spaces more dangerous. The province’s elimination of streaming—catered learning based on a student’s knowledge level in the name of equity—and its removal of rigorous benchmarks for coveted spots in specialized programs had predictable outcomes. Overzealous lockdowns, supported by unions, accelerated this decline. 

Consequently, the quality of publicly-funded education in Ontario has fallen to an all-time low. Richard and dozens of other teachers privately confided that, if they had the resources, they wouldn’t send their own children to the very schools they taught in. They had lost the confidence of unions that didn’t have their backs, senior administrators scared about rocking the boat, and politicians caught in the middle of a frustrated public and an ossifying institution.

When I first spoke with Richard, I didn’t realize how significant a role he would eventually play in highlighting the disarray that had captured Ontario public school education. He teased that he had something “big” potentially in the works, but I didn’t know what happened until his story made it into The National Post last August. 

I knew Richard wrestled with fears about his privacy versus publicizing his story because it went to the heart of the sacred cow many hold dearest today: challenging an equity consultant about the severity of racism in Canada compared to the United States. He was called a “weed” in need of trimming and an “ignorant white man” for simply disagreeing with the instructor.

“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this COVID disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us,” Kike Ojo-Thompson chastised him, “you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now.”

Hundreds of educational leaders in Ontario looked on without the slightest intervention. Somehow, all the anti-bullying sessions they’d surely been a part of hadn’t given them the courage to denounce this heinous personal attack. They abandoned one of their own to save their own skins.

Unfortunately, they made the right decision based on the intellectual winds of our day, however selfish it may have been—however despondent it left Richard. They chose to save themselves. 

Shortly after the encounter, Richard stopped teaching. His reputation, he feared, was destroyed. If no one spoke up for him, surely, he must have been woefully ignorant. His social circle shrank in the months following his public defenestration, and a massive hole in his heart was left where the meaning he put into the kids went.

“It’s about helping kids out,” he told me at one point. “You know, trying to support them, providing programming so that they can be successful.” 

That remained Richard’s guiding light throughout his life and even after his encounter with Ojo-Thompson: helping kids. Fostering a new generation to think independently, to question thoughtfully. To be kind. He was exactly the kind of teacher we so desperately need today.

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