OISE Professor accused of pedophilia-related crimes to have preliminary hearing in two weeks

There hasn't been much information in the news about the upcoming trial of Ben Levin, the former Ontario Deputy Minister of Education under Kathleen Wynne who was indicted for numerous child pornography and other offenses involving minors.

But one of the detectives involved with the case confirmed for me today that Levin, who at the time of his arrest was a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), is scheduled to have a preliminary hearing starting on Wednesday, November 26 at the courthouse at 1000 Finch Avenue West in Toronto.

Levin's preliminary hearing is expected to last three days, at which time the court will hear a great deal of evidence about his alleged involvement in procuring child pornography and allegations about his arranging to commit sexual assault, as was described in his indictment. The judge at the hearing will determine if the evidence presented merits the next step of proceeding to trial.

For those familiar with the environment and culture guiding the institution where Levin was a professor, that someone of such high standing there would be in such a predicament comes as less than a total shock. OISE is the same place that, only a few short weeks after Levin's arrest, co-sponsored a symposium for teachers of young children where the keynote speaker postulated, without genuine scientific evidence, that adult sexual attraction to children is a natural phenomenon.

Considering that culture, the crimes of which Levin stand accused seem to be a natural, logical progression.

Regardless of the outcome of the Levin trial, hopefully the focus will shift to what bizarre, inappropriate dogmas are being taught at OISE. We need to be careful to determine whether that place responsible for the education of our children's educators is actually a place from which our children need protection.

Gender Politics And Radical Activism In The Math Curriculum

The use of mathematics curriculum to push ideology has been going on for some time in the Toronto District School Board.  Wrote Richard Klagsbrun (Ward 10 TDSB candidate) two years ago:

The so-called social justice aspects of the curriculum frequently reflect a subjective and highly politicized interpretation of the word “justice”. As such, the way it is approached needs a very serious review, and in my opinion a complete overhaul.

More at Socialist Studies

The travesty of the Toronto District School Board's alternative schools and other bad education developments

The father of one of my childhood best friends is a man named Murray Shukyn, who in Toronto in 1968 founded the oldest public alternative secondary school in North America, SEED.

The original concept behind alternative schools was admirable. There are students who have great potential but don't have the disposition to fit into traditional education models.

Alternative schools are smaller, with a higher staff to student ratio than the other schools in the board, and as a consequence, cost more per student to operate. The extra cost was seen as a worthwhile benefit to prevent some students from abandoning their education. The goal was to provide an excellent education through alternative means and SEED, in its early days, did that.

But things have changed both for Toronto's public schools as a whole and for the alternative schools within the School Board.

With the advent of Marxist-influenced "critical pedagogy" that has permeated the education system, alternative schools proliferated and became training centers for radical activists. The TDSB's contemporary alternative schools now often provide students with a type of education that is effectively useless for anything but a sad future pursing unmarketable grievance studies.

The Toronto District School Board's new alternative schools are places where radicals can send their children to be immersed in their own ideologies by exploiting taxpayers who provide huge subsidies to them.

In other developments in local education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which is the largest teachers college in Canada, is eliminating its Bachelor's degree program, and will only admit students to its Master's Program.

I have had more than one university professor tell me, possibly unfairly but worth noting nonetheless, that a Master's degree is in essence the consolation prize for students not smart enough to pick up a PhD. At OISE, that quip does seem to have borne itself out. However in the case of other faculties, in many instances, I know that not to be the case.

But regardless, even if it reality it may not be true, the perception is that a Master's degree does convey an implication of significant knowledge. A new study has shown that almost a third of Canadian university graduates are functionally illiterate. The garbage taught at OISE as "critical pedagogy" and spread by its graduates in the TDSB's and other school boards' curriculum is the major contributor to that tragedy. And now with their advanced degrees in hand, for which OISE graduates require neither intelligence nor research skills, more politicized polemicists will be spreading OISE's poison in the schools.

Public Education Is Failing Your Kids

With Brian Lilley on Byline last night:



Background HERE and HERE

University of Toronto professor says some classroom activism fostered by The Toronto District School Board and OISE amounts to child abuse

There are teachers in the Toronto District School Board who are subjecting children in Toronto's public schools to child abuse on a daily basis. 

It's a minority of them to be sure, but they are in the system and they operate with the blessing of the School Board and of Ontario's foremost teachers college.

The University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has posted a number of interviews with active public school teachers promoting teacher activism in the classroom. The interviews will come as a surprise to those who think the purpose of school is to teach children essential knowledge of mathematics, grammar, geography, literature and civics.

Instead of that core foundation,  these activist teachers feel they have a mandate to promote their own politics and biases to the children over whom they have been given authority.

Among OISE's exemplars of activism are Jason Kunin, a teacher at Toronto's Vaughn Road Academy, a public high school, who has used his class to promote his anti-Israel extremism. Another is David Stocker, a teacher at Toronto's Cityview Alternative School who gained considerable notoriety for his intention to raise one of his children to be "genderless," and who asserts his right to condition his students to his own brand of activism.

Manifestations of this teacher activism include the use of science classes to organize student hunger strikes and demonstrations against the Enbridge oil pipeline, and the use of math classes to convince children about the supposed ills of capitalism.

University of Toronto professor of International Relations and Political Science Aurel Braun considers much of the type of indoctrination practiced by activist teachers to be a form of child abuse.

Children in school are a captive audience, Braun notes, and the purpose of education is to provide them with a diversity of views and objective, ascertainable facts so that they have the tools to become thinking, productive citizens capable of reaching their own conclusions.

Instead, Braun, who is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University's Department of Government, suggests the daily reiteration of a particular, political outlook inflicted by activist teachers on their students is similar to the psychological conditioning that is a feature of totalitarian societies.

He compares it with the type of indoctrination for children that was conceived by Vladimir Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist leader's subsequent dictatorship in Russia.

Braun's analogy is particularly apt, since David Stocker asserts that the tools an activist teacher should use are the teachings of Paulo Friere, a Brazilian Maoist who extolled Lenin in his seminal work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In Canada, there is an explicit contract between the government and the consumers of education, those being the children who attend classes and the parents who entrust their children to the care of the state. The most basic aspect of that contract is that the school system will not abuse and inflict harm on their children.

Many take the view that continually subjecting children to politicized biases is harmful to them as it both warps their worldview and detracts from the skills and objectivity they will require to be successful later on in life.

"Of course they're biased, because all classrooms are biased" Stocker asserts by way of an excuse in one of his interviews. "This is mandated by the board. It's about Human Rights Work, and we have an ethical and moral obligation to do it and yes we're going to do it."

But frequently, what is "ethical or moral," and in certain instances what would be considered a "human right," is warped beyond all recognition by activist teachers who may use those terms as a means to deprive others of their rights.

Unequivocal human rights could involve activism against the ethnic slaughter of black Africans in Darfur, or against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. But that is not what the TDSB's activist teachers see as "moral and ethical." Instead, they compel their students to engage with groups such as OCAP and No One Is Illegal,  that advocate for class warfare and aspire to cripple Canada's economy, or those like the deceptively-named Canadian Peace Alliance, which acts as apologist for totalitarians who kill Gays and persecute ethnic and religious minorities.

It should come as little shock that OISE would be promoting such totalitarian-leaning classroom proselytizing. That institute recently appointed a professor named Abigail Bakan to head its "Social Justice" Education department. Bakan, a conspiracy theorist,  is one of the founders of the International Socialist organization and has been a speaker at antisemitic al Quds Day celebrations. The Al Quds Day activities are the brainchild of the sadistic leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Last year, a Queen's Park al Quds rally featuring Canadian Peace Alliance boss Sid Lacombe, whom Jason Kunin called to lecture to his class, was notable for inciting participants to commit a genocide of Jews in Israel.

This is the face of  classroom "Social Justice" activism that your children are forced to endure, day after day. Most teachers are too decent and too smart to subject their students to such abuse. Thankfully, plenty of those students unfortunate enough to have activist instructors realize their teachers are not particularly intelligent propagandists. However, there are many students who will readily absorb the conditioning that activist educators inflict upon them. And for the majority of students who just want to acquire credits so they can graduate and go on to what comes next, they may not emerge from public schools unscathed. Like plants growing next to a poisoned water supply, eventually, some of the toxins in which classroom activist teachers immerse their students may seep into them through the osmosis of constant exposure.

It is critical that parents become aware of what is happening to their children in public schools. Because this form of child abuse will continue to harm new generations of students until the public raises an outcry that forces a response from Ontario's Ministry of Education.



h/t Socialist Studies

Math education that doesn't add up

Some background HERE

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.

OISE pushing plagiarist-funded identity politics into public schools

Remember when you were a kid in grade school and Halloween was approaching?  The whole week before was a time of fun and anticipation. Never have I seen a kid, or even heard of one anecdotally, who wasn't happy about having a party at school, dressing up in costume and best of all, loads of free candy!

But that's not quite how they view things at the wretched Marxist cesspool of radical indoctrination for teachers called The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

According to a new document called "The Professional Learning Series for Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy" prepared at that Mordor of Education, Halloween is not that time of joy you remember from your childhood, but is "a controversial Western holiday."

You might also have the foolish notion in your head that if someone immigrates to a country, they should take it upon themselves,  and encourage their children, to adapt to their adopted society and culture.

Silly you!. By saying such a thing aloud, you've engaged in hate speech according to the Toronto District School Board. That sort of fundamental logic only applies to Islamic countries, where they will beat a woman senseless should she dare to appear in public in immodest clothing. Or maybe also in a few exceptions like Quebec, where they have felt the need to take the drastic measure of banning religious garb at work for publicly paid employees.

But in the rest of this progressive land, as so deemed by the gatekeepers of educational totalitarianism at OISE, it is Canada that must bend to the will and culture of anyone who arrives on our shores and objects to the traditions we have insensitively practiced for generations.

One of the associate teachers in the project discussed an
issue that surfaced in her school at Halloween. She
observed that many students with cultural or religious
objections to the holiday had no choice but to sit in the
library during the celebrations. She realized that this
structure was inequitable and didn’t reflect the diversity
of the school. This teacher decided to convene a group of
teachers to discuss this issue and to host a fun event for
the students who couldn’t or chose not to participate in
the controversial Western holiday

Now,  is it so bad that children who were compelled by their parents to sit out the most fun day of the school year were provided with a fun alternative?  On the surface it might seem not. But think for a moment.

What this type of policy does, is to encourage people not to adapt to Canadian culture and tradition. The outcomes of that self-defeating approach can be seen in the poisonous culture of victimology that has infected myriad aspects of our society.

That poison is actively promoted at OISE, but that shouldn't be any surprise by now. OISE, which produces the people who create school curricula in Ontario, has played midwife to innumerable imbecilic ideas birthed at that institution. It's not just the students who produce deranged theses such as one that proclaims that western feminists opposed to female genital mutilation are lascivious racists motivated by an obsession with genitalia. Even the institute's administrators are pushing depraved bigotry, like OISE professor Sheryl Nestel, who claims Canadian Jews support Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a community to "maintain its place the racial order."

What's rather curious about the new OISE paper is that it acknowledges that it was funded in part by disgraced former Toronto District School Board Director Chris Spence, who resigned his position after numerous instances of his committing plagiarism, including in his doctoral thesis, came to light.

OISE wants your kids to choose their gender regardless of their sex

The paper is filled with the predictable stupidity one comes to expect from OISE. As an institution where ideology trumps facts and doctrine overrules science, it's hardly surprising that they want to undo the sort of gender distinctions that are a natural outgrowth of the biological differences between males and females.

Possibly less of a challenge to them is to try to shame kids away from using the word "gay" in a negative context. Still, they may have a hard time with that one too. I support gay rights and gay marriage, and do not think gays should face any form of legal discrimination. But even so, it should be rather obvious that as long as 98% of the normal male population continues to find the idea of having a penis shoved in their sphincter repugnant, getting rid of the negative connotation is going to be a hard sell.

If you say "gay" as anything but a compliment or as a positive adjective,
 you're committing an OISE Hate Crime

Curiously, as these so-called Social Justice issues that OISE is pushing in public schools permeate more and and more of the curriculum in Ontario, the Minister of Education and the Toronto District School Board are in a quandary trying to figure out why their students' capabilities in mathematics have taken a corresponding nose dive.

TDSB Director Donna Quan has reportedly asked her principals to come up with ways to improve math scores in their schools and across the Board. What is curious is that they have missed the unmissable solution of focusing more on core subjects and less on the politicized, ideological bullshit coming from OISE. Then again, maybe not so curious.  Because to understand that would require a measure of basic common sense the people who run our education system have yet to demonstrate.

OISE's promotion of anti-Semitism, sympathy for terrorism and other forms of depraved idiocy

It's quite interesting that the only form of national self-determination in the world that comes in for condemnation at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) is Jewish national self-determination. That discriminatory manifestation of Jew-hate is part of the institutional culture at OISE.

The institution is a Marxist cesspool of radical fanaticism, but making matters worse is that the faculty is one of the primary guiding forces in shaping the public school curriculum in Ontario. Ben Levin, the former Ontario Deputy Education Minister who attempted to introduce curriculum changes that were criticized for its over-sexualization of young children, was on staff at OISE when he was arrested on charges of producing child pornography.

Aside from sympathy for the ideas that produce pedophiles manifested at a recent OISE conference, sympathy for terrorism, particularly when it is directed against Jews, is something else the faculty promotes.

This Friday evening, OISE's Leadership, Higher and Adult Education department is presenting a talk by Birzeit University Academic Linda Tabar about her paper, "Palestine and “The Internationals”: Tracing the Domestication of Solidarity Post-Oslo." 

Linda Tabar

Ms Tabar claims her paper will examine "the rise of the local concept of the internationals, which emerged during the second Palestinian intifada, as a way to critically explore some of the ways in which solidarity with the Palestinian struggle has been domesticated and transformed in the context of both the Oslo “peace process,” its pacification of the Palestinian liberation movement, and the neoliberal and US imperial hegemonies that have reframed transnational solidarity."

Note the concept of the "pacification" of the "Palestinian liberation movement."  Later in the facile, buzz-word filled description of her presentation, she elucidates that such pacification "is producing problematic recolonising relationships, where what happens in the name of solidarity not only reenacts white privilege, but reproduces Zionist settler colonial hierarchies and its racialised colonial order. The paper contrasts this with the militant tradition of solidarity that was created by the third world liberation movements in the 1970s."

If you think that sounds like thinly-veiled nostalgia for the good old days of Palestinian terrorist campaigns of suicide bombings and child murders against Israelis, there's good reason. In the description of a talk Ms Tabar gave on the same paper in Austria, where there is little compunction about public sympathy for Palestinian terrorism, she was more explicit about her sympathy for violent ideologies and wrote:

"I will aim to shed light on the new hegemonies that are competing to fill the political space once fully occupied by the Palestinian national liberation movement and its radical liberatory consciousness. In a period of global neoliberal capitalism, when an assemblage of NGO aid workers, human rights regime, political tourism and liberal cosmopolitanism mediate local-global encounters, I argue that liberal imperial hegemonies have redefined international solidarity in a way that conceals global structures of dominance, and threatens to replace a tradition of radical political solidarity with the Palestinian struggle that is based a shared anti-colonial, anti- racist, and anti-imperialist politics."

Ms Tabar's pro-terror talk is being presented at OISE by its Professor Sharzad Mojab, who previously has produced what could well be the most idiotic paper in the history of Canadian academia. In it, she attributed the erosion of women's rights in Muslim countries, not to the rise of Islamism and its repressive misogyny, but to western governments, which she alleges are "in concert with large charitable foundations and corporations to actively suppress and dismantle social movements, including the women’s movement."  

This sort of detestable nonsense with which OISE indoctrinates its students, who then go on to spread that poison throughout other education faculties in Canada, invites a pressing question.

Why does the leadership of the University of Toronto continue to acquiesce to what goes on at that vile institution?

OISE's Bodies at Play symposium proliferated more faddish nonsense to the school system

A floor of aged, fading, wood-panelled rooms in the University of Toronto's austere, century-and-a-half old University College seems like an incongruous choice to house something called The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. If the decision to place it there was intended to scare away any Victorian-era ghosts lingering in the Gothic structure, what has replaced them is even more terrifying. The college is now haunted by purveyors of poorly-conceived "Grievance Studies" subjects, such as "anti-oppression theory," for which post-secondary diplomas are awarded and its graduates are dispatched to public schools to proliferate.

On Saturday morning, The Centre, along with the University's politicized teachers' training faculty, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), presented a symposium on childhood education and sexuality called "Bodies at Play."

The symposium provoked a controversy for its choice of keynote speaker, James Kincaid, a professor from the University of Southern California. Kincaid has written a number of books which postulate the highly contentious idea that adult sexual attraction to children is normal, or as he expressed in his book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,"..most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise." 

Professor James R. Kincaid

The TV evangelist and president of Canada Christian College Charles McVety launched a petition and unsuccessful campaign attempting to bar Professor Kincaid's entry to Canada based on the incorrect assertion that Kincaid promoted pedophilia. However, Kincaid has never advocated for sex between adults and children, and has in fact condemned it. 

For more serious critics, the issue was not alleged pedophilia on the part of Kincaid. The rancor his hypothesis stimulated is because it is filled with erroneous, unproven assumptions that may indeed give "aid and comfort" to those who see sex between adults and children as acceptable. Making matters worse was that the conference was to be provided to public school teachers of those young children who could easily fall prey to victimizers encouraged by what they perceived as approbation from Kincaid's theories.

The choice of the speaker and subject matter were even more bizarre and problematic, in that co-presenter OISE had only recently been the subject of unwanted attention when one of its senior academics, Ben Levin, was arrested on charges of producing child pornography, for which he is yet to be tried. 

Tall, elderly, yet spry and impish, James Kincaid is affable, witty, intelligent and articulate. His ability to engage with an audience and the seeming speed with which his 45 minute speech breezed by suggests he is probably a very good professor.

All of what he said was well thought out, and most of it was rather uncontroversial. But much of it was of a nature that many would find disturbing if it was absorbed by your child's Grade 1 teacher and affected their approach to their students.

Aside from minimizing the threat of sexual abuse to children when describing the demonization of eroticizing children, he argues that the danger is exaggerated in part "to anchor the dubious notion of the nuclear family," and is "a conservative effort to maintain national unity."

Kincaid projects on society an "obsession with kids and sex," then poses the question of why do that and yet simultaneously be fixated on preserving their innocence.

He asked, "how can the sexual attraction (of adults to children) be both freakish and ubiquitous?"

The flaw in Kincaid's position became quite clear through the types of examples he provided to establish the supposed ubiquity of that attraction. Some of the examples he listed were more than a trifle creepy in that he was projecting eroticism onto popular images of children that most people would never think of in that way, and then extrapolating that erotic loading onto our entire culture.

A Professor of English Literature, Kincaid based his premise on the idea that the modern concept of the child was only invented during a period of European Romanticism and developed to its current state throughout the Victorian and contemporary periods. Based on the examples he provided as "proof" of his theories, it became obvious, to me anyway, that Kincaid's opinions on "the child" and child abuse are not derived from any evidence based in science, like biology or psychiatry, or on a wider survey of law enforcement statistics, but came almost entirely from a review of literature and popular culture. 

I had a chance to speak to Professor Kincaid over a coffee immediately after his talk and asked him if his ideas were derived primarily from a literature review. Not only did he acknowledge that they were, but he seemed genuinely pleased that someone recognized his sources.

I mentioned to him some of the aspects of biology and zoology that differentiates adults from children in the animal world, as indeed we have them in humans in the development of facial hair in males and enlarged breasts in females. In some species certain spots or markings alter, in an evolutionarily developed signal the young transmit to adults to indicate they were not ready for mating until those changes have occurred.

Professor Kincaid said he was not aware of that.

It was quite odd to hear this. It's as if someone were basing an overview of 1950's culture entirely on reading Catcher in the Rye and watching the TV shows Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy.

I liked James Kincaid. He seems like a very nice man. Many of us would find his ideas silly, wrong, and distasteful, but he comes to them from honest beliefs. The shameful aspect, if there is one, to his engagement by the organizers of the Bodies at Play symposium is not Kincaid's but theirs.

His views would be entirely appropriate at a philosophy symposium, or one for psychology or English literature. But OISE, which is notoriously pushing a hyper-sexualized curriculum, was completely irresponsible in presenting theories in a symposium for teachers that could in any way be interpreted as validating adults' sexual attraction to children.

Kincaid noted the over-inflated fear that our culture has about children being molested by strangers. He correctly noted that most sexual abuse of children comes from people they know; from relatives and friends. The one category of frequent abuser he omitted from his list was in the room.

It would take a lot of space to list the many high-profile cases of educators abusing their authority and position to sexually abuse children we have seen in the news lately. As people in the legal and law enforcement professions know well, that abuse by teachers happens far too often.

Overwhelmingly, public school teachers are deeply committed to the well-being of children and are reasonably intelligent, capable people. But the particular type of teacher that would be attracted to the Bodies at Play symposium and the faddish pedagogical nonsense which is characteristic of OISE's ideological biases is not going to be the sharpest crayons in the box, so to speak.

The conversations I heard among the teachers attending the event did nothing to dispel that concern.

No, the Bodies at Play symposium was not a "Yahoo! Let's celebrate pedophilia event" as the Bonham Centre's Director, Brenda Crossman, used as an example to dismiss the alarm of TV evangelist McVety. It was, however, another example of OISE finding a way of disseminating to the public school system more of its unscientific, inane ideologies that in the end diminish children's education and place them in harm's way.  And in some ways, that's almost as bad.

JOE WARMINGTON: Controversial pedophilia author shouldn't be allowed in Canada: Christian leader

First Charles McVety, the president of Canada Christian College, and now Sun News is focusing on the pedophilia-friendly U of T/OISE/York University symposium called Bodies at Play: Sexuality, Childhood and Classroom Life.

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education seminar featuring a keynote speaker, James Kincaid, whose writings propose the normalization of sexual attraction for children was first exposed on this blog last month. You can read the background HERE and HERE.

Dr. McVety has proposed that Canada should bar Professor Kincaid from entering Canada.

Joe Warmington at the Toronto Sun has written an article about the controversy:

Controversial author James R. Kincaid, who wrote the 1992 book, Child-Loving, The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, should be turned back at airport, says Charles McVety, a child safety advocate and president of Canada Christian College.

“Kincaid’s earlier work in Victorian literature and culture and in literary theory has yielded to publication in cultural studies, most recently in the history and current cultural practices of eroticizing children and instituting elaborate scapegoating rituals to disguise what we are doing,” states a website promoting the event.

His planned Oct. 19 address is entitled “What Is This Thing Called a Child and Why Do We Want to Teach It?” 

But it won’t happen if McVety, who is also president of the Institute for Canadian Values, has his way.

He has fired off a letter of protest to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney urging them not to allow entry of the California-based professor.

While I am pleased that the Christian leader is drawing attention to the disgraceful agenda that OISE is fostering in the school system, I disagree with the idea that someone who has never broken any laws should be barred from entering Canada for reasons detailed further in an open letter I wrote to Dr. McVety.

This isn't good: University of Toronto's pedophile-friendly symposium on "childhood" for teachers

Maybe it's just me.

I know that if I were running an Education Department that got the most attention it ever received for having one of its senior academics arrested on charges of producing child pornography just a couple of months ago, I'd think twice about holding a symposium with a keynote speaker whose work demonstrates an obsession with a supposed "erotic appeal" of children.

But this is the University of Toronto we're talking about and its major education faculty, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), is a place where just about any preposterous, moronic, self-indulgent diatribe can qualify a person for an advanced degree.

OISE's Centre for Urban Schooling is presenting, along with York University and U of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a symposium called  "BODIES AT PLAY: Sexuality, childhood and classroom life."

Some of it is comparatively benign, if comically idiotic New Age drivel of the sort an author like John Mortimer or Martin Amis might have invented to parody the self-indulgent vapidity of posturing academics. These people, who want to wear ostensible enlightenment on their sleeves, have a hodgepodge of fatuous buzz-words that routinely surface in everything they say or do. See how many you can spot in the biographical description of one of the presenters:

Louise Azzarello, B.A., B.Ed., M.A. is a media educator working from an interdisciplinary and equity framework. Her M.A. thesis, Spectacle & Discipline: Regulating Female Bodies through Dance explored the notions of body regulation in Western Theatrical Dance from a feminist social and political perspective. She has taught in a number of tdsb schools working with marginalized/racilaized youth and designing curriculum that embeds issues of equity and social justice.

However, the tone takes a more disturbing turn when looking at the works of the keynote speaker, James R. Kincaid.

As summed up by the author Mark Spilka, Kincaid's work, Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, is a mission to "persuade us that erotic child-loving is after all okay, as long as it involves other people's children and is never consummated."

It could be the reactionary prude in me, but that's really not the attitude I would like to see fostered in people entrusted with the care of innocent young children. Were I to attend the symposium, no doubt I'd learn my concerns are silly overreactions since, according to Professor Kincaid, that whole "childhood innocence" thing is just an artificial construct developed by Victorians.

Indeed, in another of his books, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Kincaid notes ''the subject of the child's sexuality and erotic appeal, along with our evasion of what we have done by bestowing those gifts, now structures our culture.''

Maybe that's true if your culture is centered at places like OISE, but not necessarily for the rest of us. 

If all this is upsetting to you, undoubtedly Professor Kincaid could explain that this is all a way of stimulating your own sexual tantalization. 

The fear that sex might corrupt them is sexually exciting for us. ''We denounce it all loudly but never have done with it,'' he writes. ''Indignation comes to seem almost like pleasure.''

OISE is a faculty whose graduates were instrumental in formulating the extremely controversial curriculum that was widely condemned for exposing highly sexualized content to young children. An attempt to introduce that curriculum by OISE professor and accused child pornographer Ben Levin, when he was Ontario's Deputy Education Minister, was withdrawn by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty following the outcry from outraged parents across the province.

That setback clearly hasn't dissuaded OISE from pursuing its deplorable agenda. They could be counting on the public having a short attention span. They may have calculated that when it comes to the way children are educated, the public really isn't paying that much attention at all.

Sadly, as we can see from their ongoing travesties that continue with impunity, on that final point, they could be right.


UPDATE: The following brief excerpt is from Professor Kincaid's book, Erotic Innocence:

We might try to manage without stark essentialist ideas of sexuality and sexual behavior, see what might be done by positing a range of erotic feelings with and toward children. Rather than assuming that such feelings exist in only two forms - not at all or out of control - perhaps we could learn something of their differences, manner of expression and effects, allowing them a complex and dynamic relativity.

It's important to be plain about this and not try to counter erotic attraction to children with nothing stronger than nostalgia and talk about how sweet children are. For one thing, nostalgia and sweetness are not antidotes to eroticism but ingredients of it; for another, they are trifles. I believe most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise.

           (from pgs 24-25)


More on this HERE

The University of Toronto inflicts a demented form of education on students at OISE

The blog Socialist Studies uncovered the new Calendar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

OISE is a neo-Marxist cesspool that does its utmost do indoctrinate its students to absorb its anti-capitalist, moral relativist propaganda. Worse still, it tries to push that indoctrination to children at the elementary school level and even younger.

This is the school that was, until recently, the home of Professor Ben Levin, the former Deputy Education Minister responsible for trying to introduce a highly sexualized curriculum for young children that was held back by former Premier Dalton McGuinty, In what many view as not entirely coincidental to the curriculum he attempted to forward, Levin was arrested recently on charges of producing and distributing child pornography.

But even worse obscenities are part of daily life at OISE. The new OISE calendar promotes Communist totalitarians and deranged, violent activist groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, a group that advocates for class warfare and has instigated riots.

OISE's new Chair of its "Social Justice Education" Department is a polemical Communist promoter of lunatic conspiracy theories by the name of Abigail Bakan. More information about her is available HERE and HERE.

More conspiracy theory lunacy from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education's new "Social Justice" Chair

If you pay attention, you'll notice a pattern to the way that concepts are frequently expressed by Marxist ideologues such as Abigail Bakan, the new "Social Justice" Department Chair at University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

A supposed maxim will be forwarded based not on verifiable facts, but on opinions rooted in antiquated, Marxist axioms. Then, to "prove" it,  few if any actual supporting facts will be offered. Instead you will hear quotations of the unsubstantiated opinions of people who share the same views as her.

For example, to prove that Israel is an "apartheid state" she may offer that Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter consider Israel is an "apartheid" state.

Forget for a moment Jimmy Carter having expressly said there is nothing resembling apartheid in Israel proper, or that Tutu holds weird, somewhat anti-Semitic views and his outlook on Israel is shaped by factors other than that nation's actual policies.

According to Ms Bakan's dysfunctional logical processes, one has to accept that that something means whatever Desmond Tutu says it means. But then, naturally, only on those occasions when Tutu's opinions align with those of Abigail Bakan and whatever the current Marxist zeitgeist allows.

If this resembles a description of the way conspiracy theorists look at everything, there's good reason for it. Abigail Bakan is a conspiracy theorist; one who makes a living promoting a fallacious, ridiculous,and malign version of global events.

In a speech she made at Lakehead University that was loaded with uniformed, paranoid assertions predicated on her own extremist ideological prejudices, she discussed, among other matters, the primary campaign of Jesse Jackson in the 1980's.

As an example of the power of the dreaded American capitalist elite, she offered that Jackson "ran for President in 1984 and 1988 and at that point his presidency (sic) was withdrawn on the grounds that the Democratic Party would likely split if they put forward a black American candidate. That the party itself couldn't tolerate that type of, just visible diversity. So racism interacts with capitalism..."

Anyone who was an adult while Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination will be aware of a very different reality than the one claimed by OISE's Social Justice Chair Bakan.

Jesse Jackson did well in early primaries and caucuses. But he was eventually defeated not by an elite who forced him out because of a racist conspiracy, but the rather straightforward fact that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis eventually trounced Jackson in open, democratic primary voting and gained enough delegates to win his party's presidential nomination. Among the other candidates Dukakis defeated for the 1988 nomination were Al Gore and Joe Biden.

The fact that the Democrats hadn't named a presidential nominee who never held elected office, such as Jackson, since 1904 when Alton Parker was defeated by Teddy Roosevelt, may have escaped her attention. Or perhaps it's a result of an inability to process information that doesn't coincide with her conspiratorial obsessions.

Whatever the reason, university students, the bulk of whom were not even born when the father of George W. Bush defeated Dukakis for the presidency and whose knowledge of American history is minimal, could easily unquestioningly accept the twisted interpretation put forward by an authority figure like Bakan.

Imagine a generation of students being guided by Abigail Bakan, who is on the editorial board of a website called The Canadian Charger that routinely publishes demented 9-11conspiracy theories.

In Ms Bakan's deranged, conspiracy riddled outlook, the election of Barack Obama was the means by which the ruling capitalist elites planed to replace racism against African Americans with "Islamophobia."  In Ms Bakan's mind, the magazine The Economist exists to provide a discourse by elites "maintaining and sustaining American and global imperialism."

Her lunatic assertions are too long to list, but you get the idea.

The world may be terrifying if one believes the idiocies fostered by Ms Bakan. But what should be even more terrifying is that the University of Toronto has given her a substantial platform to proselytize those idiocies as dogma to impressionable students.

OISE's new "Social Justice" Department Chair a speaker at Khomeinist al Quds Day & Board Member of 9-11 conspiracy-promoting website

Evidently the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)  has given up the pretense of being anything but a center of radical, anti-Western indoctrination.

Most recently, this appalling cesspool of neo-Marxist fanaticism made the news when one of its senior academics was arrested for producing child pornography. While that disgraceful distinction is revolting enough on its own, making matters worse is the fact that that same OISE academic, Professor Ben Levin, was responsible for attempting to introduce a hyper-sexualized curriculum for small children in public schools. 

That curriculum came with the blessing of OISE, a faculty of the University of Toronto, whose graduates and academics helped design that reprehensible effort to rob children of their innocence. 

If you think OISE, which is the most prominent teachers' education facility in Canada, couldn't get any worse, then think again.

Abigail Bakan speaking at a Khomeinist
CASMO al Quds Day event

This month, the institute named the new Chair for its "Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education" Department. That person is Abigail Bakan.

Ms Bakan is a Communist extremist who was a speaker at an al Quds Day event organized by the racist Khomeinist group CASMO. The Canadian Association of Shia Muslim Organizations (CASMO) is comprised of Khmomeinist fanatics who had a public relations fiasco when it became public knowledge that they were posting anti-Semitic videos made by the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. In the spirit of hatefulness that characterized the event, Bakan made the fatuous and despicably slanderous declaration that Israel "is exactly like the apartheid state of pre-1994 South Africa."

Bakan is also one of the five Editorial Board members of a 9-11 conspiracy promoting website called The Canadian Charger, whose founder and her co-Board member is Mohammed Elmasry, who infamously declared that all Jews in Israel over the age of eighteen are 'legitimate' targets for murder.

You might imagine that someone who makes common cause with anti-Semites and people who advocate the murder of homosexuals might not seem the ideal choice as a leader for "Social Justice Education." 

But then at OISE, "social justice"  isn't about justice at all.

At OISE, Social Justice is a euphemism for hateful detestation of Israel with its implied anti-Semitism of choosing the Jewish people as the one group on earth to whom they would deny national self-determination. Social Justice at OISE means advocacy for communism and totalitarian communist dictatorships, which deprive people of individual liberty. 

The department that Bakan will Chair had its only notable distinction in its former incarnation as OISE's Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Department, which has since folded into the new division.

That distinction came when one of its students and her thesis was denounced in the Ontario Legislature by the Minister of Citizenship and others for anti-Semitism.

Bakan, who was an instructor at a secretive, anti-Israel course at Queen's University, may have learned a lesson. Not about Social Justice, but about the need to spread hate with stealth.

That may fly in the basic principles of academic responsibility, but it would make it entirely consistent with what passes for Social Justice at OISE.

h/t Socialist Studies

Michael Coren on The Levin Factor

Yesterday evening, I was discussing some of the aspects of the proposed Ontario Sex Education curriculum with a friend who is a mother of a 13 year old boy. I mentioned a couple of the subjects that Kathleen Wynne and Ben Levin, her Deputy Minister of Education who was arrested on child pornography charges this week, wanted introduced.

This woman, who has immaculate credentials as a "progressive leftist," was appalled that I even mentioned the subject titles around her 13 year-old. I did it with with no further information other than the titles and mentioned far less salacious ones than Michael Coren did in his article in Today's Toronto Sun linked below.

The point is, if just describing the actual subjects scandalized a liberal-minded parent of a child two years older than the age at which Wynne and Levin wanted to teach such graphic sexual material, imagine how disturbing it would be to parents for their pre-pubescent children to get the full, hard-core indoctrination.

Michael Coren's article The Levin Factor in Today's Toronto Sun provides important facts about the agenda that Kathleen Wynne and the institution where Ben Levin was a senior academic, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), wanted to impose on public school children in Ontario.

"...tremendously unsettling is that Levin was a major player in an educational establishment that gave us 2010’s radical and extreme sex education curriculum; it was postponed due to public pressure, but Premier Wynne has promised to reintroduce it.

The sex education program in question proposed that 11-year-olds focus on gender identity, homophobia, personal satisfaction and learning about their bodies through masturbation and vaginal lubrication."

N.B. The very first time I appeared on Michael's show The Arena on the Sun News Network, almost two years ago, it was to draw attention to the deplorable approach to education being taken by OISE.

Hopefully, the one positive thing that will come from the events of this week is that people concerned about the state of affairs in education will finally take notice and push for the University of Toronto to clean house there.

OISE: The 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 values upon which Canadian society has been based for years.

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.

Ben Levin's doppelganger with Justin Trudeau

and Kathleen Wynne in June 2013

OISE has yet again become the center of a storm with this week's news that one of its most senior academics, Professor Ben Levin, was charged by police with a number of offenses related to child pornography.

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 a curriculum that was withdrawn by her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty, after it succumbed to widespread denunciation about its introducing highly sexualized material to children at an inappropriately young age.

Wynne, a graduate of OISE, was Education Minister while Levin was Deputy Education Minister. For those not familiar with the way the government and civil service work, the 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 actual 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 their top priority was to teach pre-pubescent children about homosexuality and masturbation.

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

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 largely 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.

Degrees in these types of programs, such OISE's Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice are incredibly easy to acquire and so some students enroll knowing their advanced degrees are all but guaranteed. Most are true believers who go to have their biases confirmed, but many others are intellectual featherweights who are readily susceptible to the daily indoctrination they receive in their OISE classes.

The culture there is one of people who identify primarily with their activism. It is also a place where much of the focus of that activism is shaped by the proportion of Gay students, which is enormously inflated at OISE compared to the rest of society. It is from these influences that a sexualized curriculum emerges.

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, they teach that gender is not biologically pre-determined but a choice.

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 Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are harvested from the crops at OISE.

Though homosexuality is prevalent in a small minority of the population, and as any biologist could confirm, is an anomaly from the Darwinian function of a species, which is to procreate, at OISE, they rail against "heteronormative" and "gendernormative" society which they hope to reform in their own image.

That is the idological 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, where terrorists, should they be from non-western cultures, are automatically oppressed victims. And where the sooner that is 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, for OISE it becomes imperative to expose children to sexuality at as early an age as they can.

In fact, 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, 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."

The charges against Ben Levin have not yet been proven in court. But those familiar with what goes on at OISE know that he was far from being the most radical teacher in that institution.

A Toronto blogger known as Blazing Cat Fur recently received a visit from police for ironically musing that "OISE...needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective."  The real irony there 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.



Thanks to comments at Small Dead Animals for the suggestion of the video assessment of OISE (above)

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UPDATE: As of now, Toronto Police have added two more charges related to Child Pornography that Levin will face (h/t Marvin W)

As an interesting aside, Ben Levin's brother Matthew is Canada's Ambassador to Cuba

The horrific state of Education training in Ontario

OISE professor/Kathleen Wynne advisor arrested on kiddie porn charges

Police have arrested a University of Toronto professor and member of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team on several charges, including making child pornography.

Benjamin Levin, 61, was arrested Monday and charged with two counts of distributing child pornography and one count each of making child pornography, counselling to commit an indictable offence and agreeing to or arranging for a sexual offence against a child under 16.

This disgrace, if true, is only one of the many ways that child abuse is perpetrated at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

The school that produced Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne usually just sticks to finding ways of screwing with the minds of children, but this latest development is not a great surprise, given the other goings-on there. 


OISE is the ideological fountain from which the worst practices at the Toronto District School Board spring. Blazing Cat Fur has a TDSB watch list.

UPDATE: "In a CP24 video from the recent PRIDE celebration, Levin is seen sitting beside federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Premier Kathleen Wynne and former federal Liberal interim leader Bob Rae." More here

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