Teaching Kids that Capitalism is Bad and that Facts Don't Matter

Here's some background on that Queen's University course I discussed with Brian

Why you MUST READ one of the most awful books ever written

It's one of the most poorly-written books ever published, at least if the most commonly used English translation is anything to go by. The late Brazilian Maoist Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is filled with trite, jargony, Marxist proselytising, and could be easily dismissed as yet another demented, anti-Capitalist manifesto, but for the fact that it is compulsory reading in teachers colleges throughout North America.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997)

If you were to learn that the textbook which is considered the seminal basis of education philosophy, affecting the teaching of children throughout every year of their public schooling, tries to instill admiration for a vicious mass murderer who invented the political concentration camp, you might find it just a touch odd.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was personally responsible for the abuse and murder of hundreds of thousands of people following the Bolshevik Revolution. He had his political rivals and opponents imprisoned, tortured and often murdered. His brutality set the stage for the horrific brutality of his successor, Josef Stalin, who was responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. Lenin's political ideology was the basis for that of Mao Zedong, who was the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world.

While for those of us who aren't sociopaths, such a person might not be considered the best role model to use for teaching youngsters, here's what Freire had to say in the book that your kid's teacher was forced to absorb:

...the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character. Thus the road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust. And, as Lenin "pointed out, the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression.

So when Freire discuses oppression and "the oppressed," his notion of oppression is capitalism and an education system that produced people like Robert Graves, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, Thomas Sowell, Jonas Salk, and T.E. Lawrence. Freire's means of addressing this "oppression" is to adopt the ideology of a ruthless totalitarian who casually had people executed because their political outlook differed from his.

Friere's oppressive

hero of "the oppressed"

It sounds insane and evil. But Pedagogy of the Oppressed, considered the basis of Critical Pedagogy, is treated like liturgical canon at places like the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which describes itself as the largest and most influential teachers college in Canada. In fact, OISE was the at the forefront of infusing Friere's theories into educational practice in the 1970's and 80's. That might account for the regular stream of deranged, idiotic, and perverse theses and teaching approaches coming from that institution. That of itself would be troublesome enough, but OISE sees its mission as transforming public education into one of its own image. It teaches the teachers leaving its doors that beyond educators, they should be activists in the classroom.

Their goal is no less than to create a generation of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries by manipulating them in the classroom from the moment they enter school. Or, as Freire himself put it:

Lenin's famous statement: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor adtivism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.

The Toronto District School Board encourages students and teachers to read this book, and other bizarre tracts, to better understand issues of race, gender, sexuality and class.

Though it will be a tedious experience, you too should force yourself to read Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in order to understand the vile ideas behind the dangerous turn that public education is taking.

"Incompetence is the worst form of corruption." With Kathleen Wynne's government, it's one of many types you'll get

Kathleen Wynne's new appointee as Education Minister is a stooge put in place to rubber stamp the agenda Ontario's current Premier wanted when she held that Ministerial portfolio.

The reprehensible Sex Ed curriculum that sexualizes young children which was shepparded by Wynne's chosen Deputy, the accused child pornographer Ben Levin, was only a part of the plan to introduce social engineering into the way children are taught.

Liz Sandals, Ontario's Minister of Education, has admitted she hasn't and likely won't read the curriculum she will sign off on. From the way she comes across, it sounds like she wouldn't understand it even if she did read it.

Background on what is happening in Ontario's schools HERE and HERE and HERE

Racist tribalism and indoctrination are now part of the TDSB curriculum

Racism still does exist. Yes, despite ongoing efforts in North America to eradicate antiquated bigotries that lead people to prejudge and discriminate on the basis of pigmentation and ethnicity, racism still happens.

Fortunately, there's a lot less of it and racists are generally reviled and marginalized.

Unless they happen to be running your local School Board or planning the curriculum for your Education Department. In that case, they are paid to promote a new form of racism that masquerades as "social justice."

A lot of people who throw around that term "social justice" as a goal and a mindset are the same people who admire a racist, totalitarian mass-murderer.  These same people talk about producing "critical thinkers," in the education system but that term too is deceptive. "Critical thinking" for them means to think exactly as they do without dissent.

With the aid of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, whose programs are essentially a collection of neo-Marxist ideologies, the Toronto District School Board has a plan in place to promulgate their insidious brand of "social justice" in public schools to produce conformist "critical thinkers."

Together they developed an ominous-sounding guide called Equity Continuum: Action for Critical Transformation in Schools and Classrooms which is designed to be a tool for "focused interventions" in school communities.

The TBSB's goals may not be the same as white supremacists, but the methods are similar.

Those interventions involve making schools promote Marxist-influenced, tribal identity-politics that separate children by race, religion, skin-color and sexual orientation.

Not so long ago, school clubs were for facilitating the playing of chess, or for rocketry, drama, etc. Their membership was determined by common interest. Now, rather than treating children as individuals, they are grouped by race into such TDSB promoted programs as an "Afrocentric" school or as the Equity Continuum Guide calls for, providing space for "identity groups."

In other words, your school is promoting the separation of students into racial tribes.

Categorizing people by race has had deplorable outcomes throughout history. It is no surprise therefore, with the revisionist history that is now taught in Ontario's schools, that history is a subject from which the Ministry of Education and Toronto School Board's heads have learned nothing.






h/t Matthew L.

Toronto District School Board's top officials tacitly acknowledge Marxism pervades the curriculum

In a meeting room at Central Technical School a couple of Tuesdays ago, about two dozen representatives from most of the schools in Toronto's downtown Ward 10 sat in an inward facing circle with their attention focused on Toronto District School Board Acting Director Donna Quan.

To Quan's left sat TDSB Chair Chris Bolton and to her right, the area School Superintendent as the  Acting Director delivered a presentation on findings from the recent census of the Board's students.

Entering the meeting while it was in progress, I was eyeballed suspiciously by both Mr. Bolton and Ms Quan. It could have been my generally unsavory appearance, or possibly they were familiar with some of my interviews on the Sun News Network in which I had made rather critical remarks about the attempts at social engineering and promotion of Marxist theory infused into the Board's curriculum.

The Census, compiled during the 2011-2012 school years, covered basic data such as ages, family incomes, et cetera, to questions that would normally be found on a psychological evaluation, such as "How comfortable do you feel discussing problems with your teachers or other adults?" and questions about their anxieties.

As Ms Quan discussed the results of the census, it quickly became apparent that the problem with the data is that it is wide open to a variety of interpretations and could be used to "prove" any presupposition one wants.

For instance, a great deal of effort went into categorizing data based on race. On the whole, certain racial groups have a better academic performance than others. But I pointed out to Ms Quan that there is an overlap between race and culture, two independent factors which are frequently conflated. There's no evidence that skin pigmentation has anything to do with academic performance, but factors such as a cultural emphasis on the importance of education and achievement and maintaining cohesive family structure do affect scholastic outcomes.

Responding to my inquiry about whether the census collected data about national and cultural origin  so that could be contrasted with race-based data, she said it was. However nowhere in the resulting public report can that data be found as of now.

My concern is that the TDSB will ascribe differences in performance based on the race-based data they collected to "white privilege." Indeed Ms Quan spoke at a TDSB conference last year in which  the keynote speaker, a race-huckster named Tim Wise, attributed all the inequities in the school system to just that,  and was met with a rousing ovation from that almost all-white audience of teachers. The problem with Wise's pitch, which the TDSB has swallowed hook, line, and sinker, is that the children of second and third generation East Asian immigrants do better in school than white students, which renders the "white privilege" argument preposterous.

A great deal of the census was devoted to what they called "emotional and social well-being." and it is in this area in particular where the data could be construed in any number of ways.

Of concern to the TDSB officials was that a large number of high school students did not feel comfortable speaking with an adult about their problems. They thought this was unusual and a significant problem.  I pointed out that it's totally natural for teenagers to feel alienated from adults and it is not limited to Toronto in 2013. Anyone familiar with literature, from the Classical era to our own, would know that this has been a human characteristic for pretty much the entirety of recorded history. If youth felt ease in communicating with adults, Tom Brown's School Days could have been a haiku instead a of classic novel.

The absurdity of over-analyzing the TDSB's finding that a large number of teenagers often feel anxiety should be self-evident, but unfortunately was not to the Board's officials. High school kids are going through puberty and discovering their sexuality. They are at an age where they feel the need to assert independence but are more conscious of having their freedoms constrained by their parents. Coupling all that with exams plus the other varied pressures of being a teen, a young person would have to be abnormal not to feel anxiety on a regular basis. Think of all the John Hughes movies that wouldn't make any sense if that premise weren't true.

from THIS TDSB lesson plan

Another statistic rife for misinterpretation was that a high number of TDSB students feel worried about the future.

From the School Board's perspective, the cause was Canada's changing social environment and economic factors. There are, however, alternate explanations and I offered one.

In previous years, the curriculum had more of a nationalistic tone. It promoted Canada as a noble nation that could take pride in its past,  its military history and victories, and conveyed a sense of optimism that those traditions would continue and improve.  But today, as I pointed out, the Board's students are receive lessons fraught with anti-oppression and critical race theory, which teaches that we have been and are a nation of oppressive racists, and that cultural Marxism, which is inherently pessimistic,  permeates the curriculum. So with a an onslaught of pessimism in the classroom, it's hardly surprising we're producing a generation of students fearful about the future.

After saying all that, I looked around the room, waiting for blow-back, mainly about the assertion of cultural Marxism informing the TDSB curriculum. I was ready to back it up with a litany of evidence that demonstrates the truth of that statement, but I had expected at least the School Board officials to challenge me. After all, if someone had accused the TDSB of promoting another totalitarian ideology, for example, cultural fascism,  I would have demanded examples.

But no one batted an eyelid. Not any of the parent representatives, not the TDSB Chair, not the Acting Director. No one.

The only comment came from the area Superintendent who observed that no single factor necessarily explains the phenomenon they were discussing and in that I agreed. But no one denied we are conditioning our students with Marxist ideology.

We have arrived at a stage where a thought system that prioritizes collectivism over individuality as the basis for instructing our children is uncontroversial. It was a shock to me, if no one else at the meeting.

The blame for the poison in the schools cannot be laid solely at the feet of the TDSB. The province's Ministry of Education is responsible for approving the curriculum and things have only gotten worse under the Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne.

Every time Marxism has been implemented, it has resulted in some form of totalitarianism. That we have an Education Ministry run by people incapable of learning that lesson from history should be a cause of worry to every parent in Ontario.

It was mildly encouraging that a few representatives from the Ward's schools urged the TDSB officials to put more focus on core subjects. Rather than spending so much class time on trying to produce a particular type of "global person" they should be producing students who are competent at math, reading and history.

Unfortunately, with the low turnout at meetings about school policies populated with plenty of apathetic observers, trends in the education system likely will continue their downward spiral. At least until enough parents begin to take notice and speak out against it.

Islamists upset with topless feminists of Femen

The values of Islam and those of the western world are in many ways in stark conflict with each other.

It explains a lot of why contemporary Islamists and Marxists often make common cause. Both have disdain for individual rights and freedoms, no respect for free speech (other than their own), and of course there's the whole 'killing people who don't agree with you' thing, of which those two totalitarian ideologies have long and storied histories.

In fairness, Islam isn't the only religion to have gone through such a phase. Christianity was much the same during the Middle Ages. But of concern is the fact that Islamists today are behaving the way The Inquisition did five hundred years ago.

If criticism of the totalitarian aspects of Islam is "Islamophobia", then Islamophobia is going to be a growth industry. But like Nazism and Marxism, Islamism is going to have its advocates. What makes Islamists particularly disgusting is the way they claim to be victims when they are criticized for seeking out and victimizing innocent people.

A "Muslim feminist," if that isn't too much of an oxymoron to grasp, has written a condemnation of the theatrical and rather ridiculous feminist group Femen. There is much to criticize Femen about in the idiotic way they behave during their protests, but the issues they address are legitimate concerns about women's rights. And nowhere are women's rights given less status than in countries ruled by Islamic law.

Hajer Nali's article Femen's Islam-Bashing Disregards Muslim Feminism in Women's Enews makes the disingenuous apologies for Islamism under the guise of "Muslim feminism" all the more apparent. Tunisian Islamists have called for the death of Tunisian Femen activist Amina Tyler for posting a topless picture of herself with "My body in mine, nobody's honor" written on her torso. What stood out in Nali's article about this was her comment, "Extremists called for her to be stoned to death, which is condemnable."   

Those last three words are indicative of Islamists' perfidy; "which is condemnible." In civilized countries, we don't need to make a special point that it is wrong to want to stone a women to death, particularly just for posting a topless picture of herself with a slogan asserting her own rights.

Why would Ms Nali feel compelled to add that, especially in a western publication?

Did she want to reinforce that, unlike other Muslim feminists who thought it was fine to stone Amina Tyler to death for her topless statement, she didn't agree with that sentiment? Was it to instruct those of us, or perhaps her co-religionists, who want to kill Tyler that we should not? Or was it an insincere but perfunctory nod to western, liberal sensibilities?

What is more of concern is that in a publication in a country where Sharia Law is practiced, "which is condemnible"  would likely be replaced by ":which is demanded by the honor of Islam, and should be carried out immediately."

That is something we should be afraid of, and we should do everything in our power to prevent from spreading over here.

Radical Education: The University of Toronto's promotion of 9-11 conspiracy theories and sympathy for Taliban terrorists

"Critical Thinking" as a term suggests the ability to objectively analyze and critique data. But as a methodology taught at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)  it takes on an entirely different, sinister meaning worthy of a creation of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984.

Turning logic on its head, the Marxist-influenced faculty teaches that Critical Thinking means to assume that American foreign policy is always in the wrong, that Western mainstream media is deceptive for the purpose of serving the government, that history is taught to further the aims of an oppressive patriarchy, and that the public, with the exception of those who are taught OISE's brand of Critical Thinking, are a mass of brainwashed dupes.

OISE's message - media is part of the conspiracy

In other words, at the University of Toronto's cultish ideological incubator for pedagogy throughout Canada, a "Critical Thinker" is someone who uncritically thinks exactly what they are told to at OISE.

That practice takes on an appalling twist at OISE's Centre for Media and Culture in Education. With the pretext of teaching "Critical Media Literacy" OISE is attempting to cast doubt that the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington were perpetrated by Muslim terrorists and that the Taliban was actually sheltering the al Qaida terror organization.

OISE Lesson

The word "allegedly" is something media must use when reporting on a crime before the courts that has not been proven. Its use in other contexts is generally for the purpose of casting doubt on the veracity of a report.  That word makes a number of appearances in OISE's Critical Media Literacy in Times of War lesson.

According to OISE, the al Qaida terrorist network "allegedly" carried out the 9-11 attacks,  "it was in Afghanistan that bin Laden..allegedly organized al Qiada and established training camps," and it was in Afghanistan where the Bush Administration "claimed" al Qaida was based.

From OISE lesson

All these terms, in the lesson, are not-so-subtle suggestions that the allegations of lunatic 9-11 conspiracy theorists are correct. Those being that the 9-11 attacks were planned by people inside the US government, and Zionists as a pretext for war.

Rather than being an educational institute, OISE is a centre of indoctrination. How else to describe a school that promotes and encourages Marxism,  an ideology that inevitably results in totalitarianism and has led to decades of repression and tens of millions of political murders?

This sort of sympathy for the Taliban is common at U of T's OISE. One of the Marxist professors at the Institution that produces people who devise school curricula throughout Canada recently produced a paper that attributed the cause of women's oppression in Afghanistan not to the Taliban or the harsh form of Islam it represents, but to a conspiracy among western governments, corporations and NGO's.

OISE's professors are academics of the most anti-intellectual kind. They are a type, to use a description provided by Emma Teitel in Macleans,  who speak "another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they (use aren't) shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they (are) used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality... "

Toronto blogger Blazing Cat Fur received a visit from the police last week because he sarcastically mused OISE needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective.

I have another idea. The spoiled, overpaid, dense OISE staff who are so sympathetic to the Taliban should be sent to live with those fanatics for a year. That dose of living outside their self-indulgent academic bubble might not do them so much good, but it would certainly benefit the students they would otherwise poison for that year.

Liberals inflict an OISE asshole on Ontario as Premier

The way a person speaks, their vocabulary, and their cultural practices will tell you, in very general terms, something about them. Even certain aspects about their physical appearance, such as whether they are unkempt or well-groomed, if their clothes are neat and expensive or not, can lead to natural and not unreasonable inferences.

But one thing that anyone of sound intellect in a modern civilization has come to realize is that you can't make rational judgments about an individual based solely on their skin color. Pigmentation will tell you nothing about a person's intelligence, affluence, education, cultural practices, religion, or anything else of substance. 

The only people who think they really know something about another person based on their skin color are racists, and racists are not only stupid, but they tend to be assholes.

So, who are the racists in North American? There are a few moronic troglodytes who represent the classic notion of the racist - the handful of imbecilic neo-Nazis who try to mitigate their pathetic failures of lives by attempting to bolster themselves with the hare-brained idea of collective racial superiority. Those are the obvious assholes. 

Unfortunately, there is a vastly more pervasive form of racism that has infected our society with the imprimatur of respectable educational and political institutions, such as the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). It's an insidious racism rooted in political dogma that places everything in delusive terms of perceived power structures and relationships. This racism deems that no matter how wealthy, how influential, how powerful and informed you are, if you aren't white, you are oppressed, racialized and a victim. This same racism postulates that no matter how enlightened, egalitarian and fair you may be, or no matter how impoverished and subjugated,  if you are Caucasian, you are an oppressor and a beneficiary of "white privilege."

This belief system is predicated on the idea that racism is practiced in society. Indeed it is, but only by assholes. This OISE racism postulates that all white people are racists due to their having been born with a particular skin pigmentation. That counsel is itself racist and it means that OISE is teaching its students to be assholes. In that one aspect they have been uniquely successful and even more so now that Kathleen Wynne, the new Premier of Ontario, appointed by the Liberal Party elite, is a product of OISE racism. 

OISE racism is practiced by idiots and is fueled with the pompous sanctimony common to fanatics who think they have a right to suppress any speech or thought that does not conform to their notion of a "better world."

OISE racism has been in place in Ontario's schools for some time now. It was promoted by outgoing Premier Dalton McGuinty's Education Minister Laurel Broten. It was infused in Toronto's schools through the plagiarizing OISE grad, disgraced former Toronto District School Board Education Director, Chris Spence.

As Ontario's new Premier Wynne prepares to completely capitulate to the province's over-privileged, entitled teachers' unions, that impending loss in what should have been a victory for Ontario's taxpayers can also be traced to the neo-Marxist idiocy indoctrinated in students at OISE. Wynne received her MEd in  OISE's Adult Education and Counselling Psychology program, which despite its innocuous-sounding name, is one of the most radical, politicized departments in that hyper-politicized institution. The program boasts such faculty luminaries as Shahrzad Mojab, who has bizarrely concluded that oppression of women in Afghanistan is caused not by Islamist fanaticism, but an evil western, capitalist conspiracy.

Wynne, who is a promoter of the sexist, oppressive mosqueteria at Toronto's Valley Park Middle School was never elected to lead the province by the voters of Ontario. She was put in place by Ontario Liberal Party delegates, who appear to have judged that the way to victory is to give the party`s helm to someone who can out NDP the NDP. That will make the new Premier`s former teachers at OISE happy, since they are more devoted to infusing their ideological totalitarianism in society than they are to a particular political party. As the province gets to see what OISE assholes do when power is handed to them, perhaps Ontario`s Liberal party will find the biggest largesse they have dispensed is not to Wynne, but her political rivals in the Progressive Conservatives.  But until that happens, the erosion of rights in Ontario will continue to take a nasty slide.

Good news everyone! Canadian school kids are now getting Marxist indoctrination in Math class

More on this here

special thanks to SdaMatt2a for the video

One student's year of oppression and brainwashing at OISE

I began my year at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education - University of Toronto] with my mind open and ready to learn, with no previously conceived notions about the political atmosphere of teachers college; I had simply heard that, in general, it was often boring and easy. However, my experience at OISE was anything but boring. In fact, it left me feeling angry, deflated and, most of all, deeply saddened about the direction in which Canada is headed. Initially, I was entirely shocked by the blatantly obvious political agenda. On the first day I noticed that my classroom wall had a poster listing the main Canadian political parties. It then listed each party’s supposed track record with major Canadian issues, such as health care and education. Unbelievably, the poster went on to proclaim, that, as future teachers, we should be sure to “Vote NDP”.

...Needless to say, the year passed by at a dreadfully slow pace. I found myself sitting through classes on how to get hetero-normative language out of the schools, reading countless documents that had been reviewed for “equity”, and reading mandatory Marxist and feminist literature. I was urged to attend equity/diversity workshops, and asked to volunteer in Gender Construction workshops that were mandatory for gr. 10 students, where issues like “straight supremacy” would be discussed by curious 15 year olds.

At one point, a classmate asked the professor: “So, are we supposed to be activists, or teachers?” and the professor promptly replied, “Can the two really be separated?”

Read it all HERE

Fiscal conservatives are the modern day Robin Hoods

Before its demise, while walking through the muddy turf at the grimy Occupy Toronto compound not so long ago, amid the accosting cacophony of signage, one could spot the inevitable placard calling for a "Robin Hood" tax. The call for a special tax on the higher income earners is a routine feature of demonstrations by anti-Capitalist, anti-Globalization activists, and the the notion of it betrays their misconception of economics and history. The premise behind a Robin Hood tax runs completely opposite to everything the outlaws of Sherwood Forest represented.

Steal from the rich and give to the poor was the mission statement that enshrined the Merry Men and their leader as heroes in popular culture. But who were the rich in the medieval Europe? It was the nobility, who were also the government. And what was the source of the wealth accumulated by the aristocracy at the time of the Plantagenet kings? It was taxes that the government forcibly extracted from the poor. Robin Hood retook the money that the government took away to be spent on items that fulfilled their own agenda, and returned it to the people, who could use it to feed and serve the needs of the private citizenry.

So who is it now that wants to stop the government's ability to force you to give them money, for which they account rather poorly and regularly squander? It's not the defunct Occupy Movement, or the tax-hungry New Democratic Party. They want to hand more money to the government and use that as a conduit to claim more of it for themselves. It's not the civil service unions, who want to raise taxes so that more of them can remain secure at the expense of the rest of the public.

Today's Robin Hoods are fiscal conservatives who, like their legendary predecessor, want to keep money out of the hands of inept bureaucracies and restore it to the hands of the people. Fiscal conservatives, like Robin Hood, believe that money belongs to those who worked for it in the first place so they can choose how to use it for themselves.

Medieval anti-Government Fiscal Conservative

The anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movement's profound ignorance is evidenced by their wanting to replace a system that has provided the most  freedoms and prosperity in the history of mankind with a proven failure. The Marxist-based one they prefer has,  every single instance it has been used at the governmental level, resulted in totalitarian dictatorships and national squalor. If you to do something inefficiently and incompetently with the worst possible outcome, there's generally no better way of accomplishing that than to hand the job over to government. That is precisely what the anti-capitalist backers of the failed Occupy Movement want to do.

The only resemblance the anti-Capitalists in the Occupy Movement had with Robin Hood and his Merry Band was that they lived in outdoor encampments. But that's where the similarity ends. In reality, they, and the political actors like those in the NDP who support higher taxes, are acting as proxies for our Sheriff of Nottinghams and King Johns who want your money for their own selfish purposes.

Hugo Chavez in hospital for kidney failure

Aw...Chavez' health condition made him have to indefinitely postpone a meeting with his bestest buddy, Iran's insane president Ahmadinejad.

I assume Oliver Stone is arranging for flowers to be delivered as you read this.

Educating our children to commit civilizational suicide

Even within academia, outside of the field of Education, relatively few people have heard of Paulo Freire. But if you live in a Western country, Freire, an education theorist who died in 1997 at the age of 75, has had a remarkable influence on your life and culture.

Most parents have little idea of what their children are learning. "How was school? Fine. What did you learn today? Nothing" is a refrain that has been passed from child to parent for generations.

But the guiding ideology that Freire founded which has taken hold of our educational system would alarm most parents if they knew its implications.

Paulo Freire

Freire is the founding father of an approach called Critical Pedagogy, which is the current basis of education in most western democracies. Only a scattering of practitioners of the system that evolved out of Friere's seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is required reading at teachers colleges, realize that it is rooted in Marxist and Maoist totalitarianism. While ostensibly encouraging equality, it is designed to stifle dissent and condition students to have a uniform understanding of the world while deceiving them into believing they are "critical thinkers."

Not all of this is the fault of Freire, but rests largely with those who have taken up the mantle of Critical Pedagogy. One has only to look at the website of Peter McLaren, a UCLA professor who is described as "one of the architects of Critical Pedagogy" to realize its influences. After getting past the "Che Lives" welcome screen, the visitor is inundated with Marxist, pro-Castro, anti-Capitalist propaganda.

The goals of Critical Pedagogy, as its advocates see it, are to make the classroom more egalitarian, to understand that all students have the ability to share knowledge and teach, just as teachers need to learn form their students, and that the world is fraught with oppression which schools have a duty to advocate against. In theory, these goals don't seem unreasonable. So what is it about Critical Pedagogy that makes it so destructive?

The approach taken by educators who see themselves as Friere's followers is to divide the world into a binary, Manichean equation, where societies, individuals, racial groups and cultures all are either oppressor or oppressed. Once categorized you are, if an oppressor, always wrong, and if oppressed, then always justified in what you do. What makes that facile equation particularly pernicious in education is that it classifies Canada and other Western democracies as oppressor states that are inherently racist, wrong and in need of radical re-invention.

In essence, that translates into our country, culture and civilization being denigrated in the public school system. Children in our elementary schools being taught that we live in a grossly inequitable society and highlights racial and class difference, and by practicing bigotry in the cause of reform, attributes blame to oppressor classes and races. This manifests itself in the Toronto District School  Board in ways such as documents that allege that only while people can be racist. It also accounts for TDSB schools allowing only Muslim prayer during school time, since Muslims fall into the oppressed class in the macrocosm of Critical Pedagogy.

An example of a subtle way these ideas are being communicated to our children is the way that Middle Schools approach the issue of the domestic internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War 2.

Children in Grade 7 learn about the discriminatory, racist policy of the Canadian governments to place all citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps when Japan was at war with the Allies including Canada. This policy was applied to all Canadians of Japanese ancestry, but relatively few German and Italian Canadians, with whose ancestral countries of origin Canada was also at war. Clearly the singling out of Japanese Canadians was based on racism and deserves condemnation.

But Grade 7 students are taught about this before they are taught about the practices in the rest of the world at the time. There were few if any countries in the world then that did not practice similarly racist policies. What Canada did to its Japanese citizens pales in comparison to Japanese treatment of non-Japanese in countries they invaded like China where massive murders, rapes and extermination occurred, or in The Philippines, or in Korea, where the Imperial Army abducted tens of thousands of women to be used as brothel slaves for Emperor Hirohito's soldiers.

Canadian school children are now first taught about Natives as a monolithic group. Whereas the reality was that there were many tribes, many of whom practiced warfare against each other long before the arrival of European settlers. Native tribes frequently allied themselves with one group of Europeans to attempt to conquer different tribes that had formed treaties with other Europeans. It is only after the British (and Americans) had effectively taken control of North America that they exploited former enemy and ally alike. Though Europeans are presented as singularly culpable, different Native tribes participated in each other's defeat, and it was only in the last 150 years that they eventually succumbed to an enemy whose technological advantages made them better at warfare.

It is appropriate that schools teach about Britain's and Canada's abhorrent treatment of the Native population. But they also learn that at first with virtually no context. The message that these and other examples provides is that Canada's history and the culture that was built upon it is inherently unjust and is something of which to be ashamed.

It is not as if all of the teachers in our public education system are neo-Marxist ideologues. Very few are; most are unionized professionals who are doing a job and are provided a curriculum with which to do it, for which they receive a regular paycheck and summers off.

But the people who design the curriculum and the policies employed by the TDSB seem to have an agenda, but one they don't seem very willing to talk about in public. The Dean of the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) refused an interview request to discuss the applications of Critical Pedagogy in their teaching approach. When asked by email, "Do you support or oppose the use of school facilities for religious services during school hours in TDSB schools?" TDSB Chair Chris Bolton responded, “Siddiqui said it all in The Star.” When asked to clarify if he takes the same position that Haroon Siddiqui takes in his column, he answered, “yes.”  In his Star column, Siddiqui expresses support for Islamic prayer in TDSB schools that requires gender apartheid and segregation of menstruating girls.

Ward 21 Trustee Shaun Chen took a different position when he said, "I believe we need to have a second look at what is appropriate and ensure clear guidelines for all schools across the system to follow."

How and what our children are taught has a tremendous effect on the way that Canadian society and culture will be shaped. We all have an interest in public education, we all pay for it and we all all have the right to know about it. In addition to clear guidelines, Canadians deserve transparency in a critical component of a system that determines the future of our nation.

Updated Aug 22

Toronto District School Board presents a racist view of racism

Click the link below to see the latest example of bigoted indoctrination courtesy of the idiocy of Critical Pedagogy, an educational approach pushed by OISE and other "education professionals."

Your children are being indoctrinated at the elementary school level by an approach developed by Paulo Freire, a devotee of one of history's biggest mass murderers - Mao Zedong


Blazing Cat Fur: Toronto District School Board Teaches That Only White People Are Racist

Michael Moore New Documentary: Imperialism is Killing Chavez - from The People's Cube

Caracas, Venezuela -- Michael Moore has announced his latest explosive documentary: Hugo Chavez, Martyr to Socialized Medicine 

 ...When the symptoms worsened for the embattled President of Venezuela, this true advocate of socialized medicine went to get treatment in Cuba. The island's Chief Surgeon Rafael Bernardo explains: "When we first operated on President Chavez we'd thought he had an abscessed Wish Bone - a misdiagnosis caused by the criminal Yankee war of imperialism and the inhuman blockade of Cuba. After several unsuccessful operations on a Funny Bone, his Spare Ribs, and Water on the Knee we realized Chavez had cancer of the Bread Basket." 

Second opinion from Iran:  Chavez's illness caused by Jews

The People Cube's columnist Dr. Leonid Fuku reports from Tehran:

A selected group of doctors, approved by the Guardian Council of Iran, have offered their professional second opinion on the ailing Venezuelan President's condition:

DIAGNOSIS: The stress and anxiety from seeing the suffering of righteous Muslims at the hands of Zionist occupiers, have led to Chavez's spontaneous expulsion of blood from the rectum as a sign of solidarity with the murdered mujaheddin.

Read the rest at The People's Cube

Too Funny for Words: The Marxist boneheads at rabble.ca blame Vancouver riots on Capitalism

You can't make this kind of stuff up..well, at least not unless you have brain damage:

Final trashing of downtown Vancouver is a manifestation of what has become the normal popular response to contemporary capitalism's behaviour. In this instance, the corporate media hype around the playoffs, NHL manipulation of the series, local on-site liquor vendors' fuelling of the crowd, and the assuredly pre-ordained defeat of the Canucks led to the ensuing post-defeat looting of the high-end chain stores and the trashing of cop cars. As we have seen increasingly across the globe, this event was simply a local manifestation of frustration and anger generated by contemporary capitalism as practiced and lived in this outpost of empire.

Fanaticism and radicals - LIve from Montreal

You can watch the People's Commission Network conference through live video streaming by clicking the play button below:

UPDATE: the live coverage is over and they're broatcasting something about agriculture and food

Marxist Activist Radio Goes Off the Air: CRTC revokes CKLN's broadcast license

From the Canadian Radio Television Commission website:

OTTAWA-GATINEAU, January 28, 2011 —The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today revoked the licence of CKLN-FM, a community-based campus radio station located at Ryerson University. The licence holder, CKLN Radio Inc., was found to have been in breach of numerous regulations and conditions of licence. It was unable to convince the Commission that it could operate the station in a compliant manner going forward.    

“Holding a broadcasting licence is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and regulatory obligations,” said Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC. “CKLN Radio was given several warnings and opportunities to come into compliance. Each time, it demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to address our concerns. Taking away its licence is the only appropriate course of action in this case.”    

The Commission began investigating CKLN-FM in July 2009 after receiving numerous complaints about the station’s governance structure, day-to-day management and operations, programming and ability to remain on air. At the time, the station experienced significant infighting and the volunteers, staff and management were locked out of the studio premises by the building manager. During the seven-month lockout, CKLN-FM broadcast an intermittent loop of programming without any ongoing community involvement or oversight by the licensee.    

Once it resumed normal operations, CKLN Radio Inc. lacked any significant quality-control mechanism for its programming and there was little involvement from the Ryerson University student body despite its status as a campus radio station. It was also unable to meet some of the basic requirements of all licence holders, which include the submission of audible on-air tapes, program log and other records, and complete annual returns.   

Today’s decision follows a proceeding that included a public hearing, which was held on December 8 and 9, 2010.

NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies' spouse's website insults the memory of fallen Toronto Police Sgt. Ryan Russell

Rabble.ca is the radical neo-Marxist website funded by unions like CUPE and CUPW and by the NDP- linked Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. It was founded by Judy Rebick and its current publisher is Kim Elliott, the spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies.

Rabble has a public discussion forum called babble, which is closely monitored and users are frequently banned for what they deem inappropriate comments. "Inappropriate" by their standards is anything that defends the Canadian Conservative Party,The United States of America, Israel or any other conventional institution or utters any criticism of unions.

What is considered appropriate, and is actively encouraged, are vicious attacks on the police. Shockingly, this even went so far as to insult the memory of Toronto Police Sergeant Ryan Russell on the day he was being mourned by most of the city in whose service he gave his life.

They include one from a regular rabble/babble contributor called "NoDiffrencePartyPooper" who claims, amid insulting the police as "Gestapo" and "fascist" that he regrets the death of Sergeant Ryan "as much as the next person."

Sure. If the "next person" is a rabble contributor or Charles Manson. But not if the next person is a decent human being.

You can read some of the even more disgusting comments they made below, with links. Included are those by a moderator called Maysie, who criticizes one person for writing positive things about the police and Sergeant Russell but has no problem with his being insulted on the day his family buried him. 

"Here in Toronto, we have been immersed in a media celebration of everything good about our police, after one of them was killed. The coverage has been wall to wall, relentless and reverential. I have no doubt that this is partially intended to wash away the rather more distaff memories of the fascistic police palookas' gestapo tactics during the G20. I regret the officer's death as much as the next person but this story has been a good deal more prominent and profile than it would ordinarily be.. Police are the muscle and hired guns of the state, something the recent media coverage doesn't cover." 

"it appears to me that a berserk person was rampaging through town in a stolen snow plough being chased by police, when an officer decided to end the situation by planting himself in the path of the snow plough. Do I have that right? And 10,000 cops have swarmed in Toronto to celebrate that inspired attempt at traffic control?"

From babble moderator Maysie: "Here on babble .. many of us have a negative view of the police, not only as armed agents of the state tasked with the legitimated use of violence and threat of violence against anyone they choose, but who are given special rights above the rest of us, whether at work or otherwise. ..The police will brutalize whoever they choose to, with relative impunity."  

"the death of Ryan Russell was essentially a traffic accident."

"In Toronto thousands of gang members are meeting to show solidarity with one of their own. This is the first fatality in that force in many years but they need to send a message to the population that they stand together against the rabble. In the meantime real workers suffer fatalities far more often than members of our privileged institutional gangs. Notice that the corporate bosses in Canada kill more workers than other comparable jurisdictions but the police will never protect us against those crimes. Workers are collateral damage in the corporate world. The police are holy warriors needed to control the population on behalf of those corporate murderers."

More from moderator Maysie :"I should have advised you that posting pro-police propaganda, while not against the rules, is simply not a good idea in a progressive forum such as babble."

 
I wonder what New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton has to say about all of this?

University of Toronto academics (and Linda McQuaig) angered by $35 million dollar donation

One would think that when an entrepreneur and philanthropist donates $35 million dollars to a public university for the purpose of establishing a top caliber school of Global Affairs, there would be cheering from people ostensibly interested in improving education and enhancing the debate about international issues.

But at the University of Toronto, it appears there are some staff members and their acolytes who are deeply troubled at the prospect of students being given a well-rounded education that strays from their "approved doctrines."

Peter Munk is the founder of Barrick Gold is one of Toronto's foremost philanthropists. His $35 million dollar donation to the University of Toronto to establish the Munk School of Global Affairs was intended to give U of T a program that could rival those at Stanford and Oxford universities. The purpose is to facilitate the experience and knowledge of students who can think critically and enable to them to engage with a variety of ideas and perspectives in order to contribute to addressing compelling world issues.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, as recent experience at U of T demonstrates, there are some academics at that institution who do not appear to be able to differentiate between critical thought and indoctrination. Their own views suggest that they are afraid that any thought that disputes their own should be suppressed and they object to Munk's donation to the university, ostensibly on the grounds that this is part of the "corporatization" of academia and that Munk may have "influence" on the curriculum.

It must be appalling for professors like Paul Hamel and John Valleau, and someone with the absence of a moral compass such as Linda McQuaig to think that anything other than Marxist perspective could inform political theory at U of T. The Munk School of Global Affairs is headed by Janice Gross Stein, who is as fair-minded and non-ideological as one could hope for in a teacher.

To give an indication of Munk's commitment to the open exchange of ideas, you only need look as far as the Munk Debates series he sponsors.

The Munk Debates have brought together people of diametrically opposing views to provide public exchange of ideas in which people can balance proposals and engage in something OISE students aren't exposed to: critical thought. The debates have been on subjects such as The Canadian vs US health care systems, whether religion is a force for good, climate change, humanitarian aid and more. Participants have included people with such varied outlooks as Stephen Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mia Farrow, Tony Blair, John Bolton, Gareth Evans and so on.

At the Blair/Hitchens debate, I met some Munk School students and they were thoughtful, balanced, intelligent people who were open to a variety of ideas.

Which is exactly what seems to bother McQuaig and the opponents of the donation and the Munk School of Global Affairs. Under the guise of wanting "critical thought," they seemingly want students to be able to have one type of thought and to be critical of anything that digresses from it. That could be called many things, but "critical thought" it ain't.

There are a lot of things I could write to make fun of the ideologues opposed Munk's donation and to ideas that contradict theirs. But nothing does the job better than this piece of news: The Toronto Star's blogger, Antonia Zerbisias, who without explanation backed out of being a featured speaker at the mini-hate fest earlier this week, is going to enthusiastically attend a full day of anti-Munk protest this Saturday.