A University of New Brunswick education professor is questioning why Grade 4 students were given an assignment that had them making life-or-death choices about fictional characters based solely on race and ethnicity.

Alan Sears, an education professor who specializes in diversity in education, said he doesn't know why students at École Mont-Carmel in Ste-Marie-de-Kent would be handed such an assignment, even in a social studies course.

'One of the problems with this particular activity is that people got worried about the morality of asking children who lives and who dies.'— Alan Sears, education professor

"I actually don't understand what this activity would have to do with understanding ethnic groups anyway," Sears said.

"There is nothing built into that that would help one understand the diversity in the province because in fact, the other groups live here as well."

The assignment for Grade 4 students at the southeast New Brunswick school was based on the notion that the planet was about to explode.

The students had three spaces in a rocket ship and they had to decide which person they would save among the following: an Acadian francophone, a Chinese person, a black African, an English person and an aboriginal person.

Then they were asked if it was a difficult decision and how the people who were left behind would have felt.

A mother of a 10-year-old girl adopted from Ethiopia a year and a half ago said her daughter felt the project was "terrifying." Jessie Lomax complained to the school's principal, who defended the assignment and said it was part of the curriculum.

Education minister stopped assignment

After learning about the exercise, Education Minister Kelly Lamrock on Wednesday ordered it stopped. The specific project was not on the department's curriculum, he said.

Schools are required to teach children about cultural diversity but it is up to teachers to find appropriate materials to cover the subject.

Sears said at one time, such a task would not be out of the ordinary in a New Brunswick classroom. In the 1970s, there was a movement called "values education," he said, and similar scenarios were used, often including bomb shelters or lifeboats instead of a rocket ship.

Those fictitious situations did not usually have an ethnic component, he said, and schools started phasing them out as questions about their morality began surfacing.

"One of the problems with this particular activity is that people got worried about the morality of asking children who lives and who dies," he said.

This assignment was given to Grade 4 students at École Mont-Carmel in Ste-Marie-de-Kent, N.B. (Submitted)