Canada's Mordor of Education

Sitting like an imposing fortress built in a style that has come to be known as Brutalist architecture, the spawning ground of the policies and curriculum that form the basis of education in Ontario looms as an evil presence on a quiet stretch of Bloor Street in Toronto's Annex neighborhood.  Inside are bitter academics and angry students who are actively trying to undermine the basic values upon which Canadian society was formed.

It's the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, or as it's known by its acronym, OISE. This faculty of the University of Toronto has been the center of controversy for years. Criticism of practices there has become more intensified since 2010, when an anti-Semitic thesis produced at OISE was condemned across party lines in the Ontario Legislature.

OISE was the home of Professor Ben Levin, the architect of a highly controversial sex education curriculum which was criticized for introducing highly sexualized content to children at an inappropriately young age. Levin was one of OISE's "stars" up until his arrest for producing child pornography and counselling the sexual abuse of a minor; charges to which he plead guilty in April of this year.

So far, much of the focus related to Levin's position at OISE has concerned his role as an advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. The question is an apt one, as Wynne has pledged to impose the same curriculum that was withdrawn by her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, after it succumbed to widespread denunciation from parents across Ontario.

Wynne, a graduate of OISE, was Education Minister while Levin was Deputy Education Minister. A Deputy Minister is the most senior civil servant in a Ministry, usually appointed directly by the Minister, and is responsible for all the day-to-day operations and ongoing strategic development. To compare respective roles in the private sector, the Deputy Minister would be the CEO, while the Minister would be the Chairman of the Board who holds final authority and sets general direction, but has little involvement in the daily running of the organization.

In effect, Kathleen Wynne, as Chair of the Board, made Ben Levin CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation charged with providing public education, and one of their top priorities was to teach children about anal sex and masturbation. As emails uncovered by a Freedom of Information request by The Rebel Media revealed, Ben Levin's direct involvement with the Ministry of Education and the Sex Ed curriculum continued until just a few weeks prior to his arrest.

However, apparently, according to Kathleen Wynne, pointing out any of that makes you "homophobic." That of itself is both ironic and homophobic, since the vast majority of pedophiles, including Levin, are heterosexual males expressing interest in young girls.

Between 1995 and 2005, covering most of the period since the last change to Ontario's Sex Ed curriculum, teen pregnancy rates in Ontario declined by an enormous 51.5 percent. It was the best result for any province in Canada, demonstrating that the current Sex Ed curriculum is working extremely well, despite Wynne's charge that it was not.

So if something is working that well, why do Wynne and the cohorts at OISE have the anxious, histrionic urge to fix it? One of the most telling aspects to the Sex Education controversy in Ontario is that many of the most ardent proponents of the new, contentious curriculum are childless. 

To understand the mindset, one needs to understand the culture and the overarching operational philosophy at OISE.

The culture there is one of people who identify primarily with their activism.

The school itself has programs that ostensibly are supposed to teach how to educate, but their actual stated goals are to create activists to promote very particular agendas in public schools. These agendas are rooted in Marxist theory and based in large measure upon Pedagogy of the Oppressed,  the seminal work by the late Brazilian Maoist educator, Paulo Friere. The instructors at OISE are in large measure made up of Marxists who deplore capitalism and despise the current federal Conservative government. They see most of the world's ills deriving from capitalism and what they refer to as "the patriarchy." To combat these perceived ills, they are determined to produce generations of students as soldiers to do battle against their ideological enemies.

Many, if not most who support Gay Rights and believe in the right to Gay marriage would be scandalized by OISE's twisted dogmas. Gay advocates and their supporters have long accepted the scientific evidence that sexual orientation is a predetermined characteristic. But at OISE, gender is not biologically pre-determined, but a choice.

OISE, the center of education policy planning for Ontario, actually wants people to celebrate and emulate people like David Stocker, who conducted a bizarre social experiment on one of his own children by raising it to be "genderless."

This is a place where they worship someone like the radical fanatic Judith Butler, a founder of "Queer Theory"  who thinks the terror group Hezbollah is a part of the "progressive left." The ranks of groups like the polemical nitwits of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid are harvested from the crops at OISE.

That is the ideological foundation from which the Ontario Sex Ed and other radical components of the curriculum was derived. They operate with the goal of conditioning children to create a world as OISE wants it, where boys can choose to be girls and vice versa, and where terrorists, should they be from non-western cultures, are automatically oppressed victims. And for OISE, the earlier the age some of the surrounding aspects of sexuality can be instilled in the psyche of children, the better. Since someone has to understand sexual function in order to understand 'the oppression of a heterosexist, gendernormative society.'

Those familiar with what goes on at OISE know that Ben Levin was far from being the most radical teacher in that institution. Incredibly, only a couple of months after Levin's arrest for child pornography and exploitation, OISE co-sponsored a symposium with a keynote speaker who came to promote the theory that adult sexual attraction to children is normal.

If there ever was a place where the lunatics are running the asylum, it is the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and that is in the most literal of terms. PhD's there have been awarded to people with severe, diagnosed mental illnesses, and many whose Doctoral theses have been barely coherent gibberish.  Armed with their OISE-provided weaponry, they then become "qualified" to disseminate their lunacy further in the guise of being "accredited experts."

In fairness, not every OISE instructor is a walking self-parody. They do have people like the brilliant Kang Lee, one of the world's leading researchers in child psychology, who is fortunate that the Institute of Child Study with which he is affiliated is separate from the main OISE campus. But far more numerous at OISE are the types like Abigail Bakan, who is the head of OISE's so-called Social Justice Education department.

Bakan is a conspiracy theorist who was a featured speaker at an al Quds Day event, the anti-Semitic 'holiday' invented by the depraved Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khomeini as a call for the destruction of Israel. That's just one example of what masquerades as "social justice" at OISE. 

Another proponent of OISE's brand of "social justice" is Sheryl Nestel, who made a preposterous claim that sounds like it could have come out of the mouth of a neo-Nazi. She alleges that Canadian Jews support Prime Minister Stephen Harper in order to maintain their place in the "racial order."

The examples of OISE's extremism are too many to enumerate in a single article. 

A Toronto blogger known as Blazing Cat Fur once received a visit from police for ironically musing that  "OISE...needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective." The tragedy is that more attention was paid to what Blazing Cat Fur wrote than the depravity at OISE which caused such a comment.  The more one knows about OISE, the more it becomes apparent that is a diseased place that infects anyone inside its Brutalist walls.

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(This post is an update and compilation of some previous blog posts at Eye on a Crazy Planet.  It's also cross posted at The Rebel.Media)