In the United Kingdom, women and LGBTQ+ teachers have expressed feeling unsafe in their classrooms or school environments because of Tates influence on students.
Tate’s influence has reached classrooms in Ontario as well.
Amanda, 23, says Andrew Tate came up often when she was a substitute teacher at a middle school in Belleville, Ontario.
Amanda is completing her teacher’s candidacy, and her name has been changed in this article for privacy.
Amanda’s students aren’t allowed to have their phones with them in class so students in the combined grades seven and eight class would use their school Chromebooks to watch TikTok on break, showing Tate’s videos to each other.
According to the Pew Research Center, 97 per cent of teens report using the internet daily, and 46 per cent of teens report using the internet almost constantly.
Before addressing the issue with her class, Amanda consulted more senior teachers at her school to see whether Tate was coming up in their classrooms too.
Other teachers said that they were experiencing the same trend in their classrooms, and it was appropriate to address the issue with students.
Part of the problem, said Amanda, was that the boys sharing Tate’s videos didn’t seem to know much about Tate’s offline life. To them, Tate’s content was about learning how to be a man, and the misogyny slipped by.
At the time, Tate was detained in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking.
“I just said, do you guys know what human trafficking is?” Amanda says.
One boy asked whether Tate had sexually assaulted someone.
“I said yes, he did, and that’s why I don’t want you talking about this in the classroom,” said Amanda.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat things like that, especially with older children, because they obviously understand those things are wrong. I don’t feel like it would do anyone any favours to gloss over that or tone it down.”
– Amanda
Amanda says she would be comfortable addressing Tate’s videos with younger students, if necessary.
Under the current Ontario curriculum, students begin learning about consent in elementary school. Amanda sees the conversation about Tate as an opportunity to apply that knowledge about what consent means.
However, her approach would differ. “If it were younger kids, I’d say ‘Hey, it really hurts my feelings when you guys talk about him. It makes me feel unsafe and I know it would make your other female classmates feel unsafe.”
Luc Cousineau is a professor at the University of Waterloo. Cousineau studies how men interact online in men’s and men’s rights spaces.
Cousineau says that the classroom is one of the best spaces to address concerns and educate students about creators like Tate.
“We can have a more direct influence across a wider variety of people at school than you can by trying to, for lack of a better word, infiltrate the home,” says Cousineau.
However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
“You can’t build a program in Ottawa that’s going to work in Lethbridge,” he says. “Those communities are so different. And this is the real challenge with direct intervention; programming.”