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

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.

This week in deranged evil from the Toronto District School Board

The blog Socialist Studies is keeping an eye on the appalling abuses that routinely occur in Toronto's tax-funded public school system.

This week alone, the items include:

• One school endorsing a Holocaust-denying, 9/11 conspiracy theory promoting website and calling Canada's Prime Minister Harper a "fascist" 

• The TDSB promoting cross-dressing and gender switching to children as young as kindergarten age   More on that Here

• A high school named after the greatest opponent of Communism in the 20th Century promoting the communist totalitarian murderer Che Guevara.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg and is part of a huge file that suggests the leadership of the Toronto District School Board should be purged immediately. If the Ontario Public School System system and curriculum are not completely overhauled, these types of travesties will continue and get worse.

Communist Union Boss promises new Canadian mega-union "Unifor" will be militant

"The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) are merging to create Unifor, the largest primarily private sector union in Canada with about 300,000 members."

Gary Engler, who wrote that description quoted above from the neo-Marxist website rabble.ca,  is the vice-president of the Local 2000 of the later of those unions soon to merge into the mega-union.

He is also the co-author of something called the New Commune-ist Manifesto which is essentially an argument for communism to dominate labor and politics in our society. In other words, he's another idiot who has learned nothing from the lessons of North Korea, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and the 100 million murders and totalitarian misery that communism has inflicted on humanity since the Russian Revolution.

Canada's Parliament recently voted for union accountability in the form of Bill C-377, which was quashed by the Senate, adding to the many reasons to abolish that anachronistic, useless body of unelected patronage appointees.

Engler's description of his vision for the new Mega-Union is one that does not focus on workplace issues but one that infests the workplace with political and activist issues. That is precisely the cause of the backlash against unions that led to the House of Commons passing Bill C-377. But
someone who is still a communist in the year 2013 is not likely to be someone with the ability to process a great deal of information.

Unfortunately, Engler is far from alone in the way that union bosses think. They are, as a group, narcissists who want to dominate political thinking and shape it to their despicable manifestations of activism. That activism materializes in many reprehensible ways, be they the racist "Occupy Movement,"  the violent, mentally unbalanced cretins of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, or the terrorist-enablers of The Sea Hitler. among countless examples.

Engler wrote: "The promise of Unifor is in a rebirth of militant union activism."  The bad news is that in the short-term, militant radicalism from union fanatics may increase with the birth of "Unifor.`The good news is that if Unifor bosses behave as Engler hopes, and with the government promising to reintroduce Bill C-377,  it could be the final straw that breaks the backs of politicized unions in Canada.

Here's a shock! The idiot communists at rabble.ca are offended by Canada's proposed memorial to the victims of Communism

This is the website published by the spouse of federal NDP leader Libby Davies

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

UNESCO’s Grotesque Embrace of Che Guevara

 With an impeccable instinct for venerating murderous thugs, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has now added to its Memory of the World Register the writings of Cuba’s Ernesto “Che” Guevara. That means that the documents generated by Che during his bloody career will now be treated as historical treasures, protected and cared for with the help of UNESCO. What’s next? The teachings of Stalin and Pol Pot?

More Here

Canadian socialist party will stop using "socialism" to describe its policies

The New Democratic Party of Canada realizes that the term "socialism" has developed negative connotations over the years. The years of abysmal economic failure and eventual totalitarianism.

To combat that perception, they just voted to remove the term "socialism" from its constitution.

The policies won't change - just the way they describe them.

Now if they could just stop their members of Parliament from exposing their communist sympathies, they might be a little more convincing.



Related:

John Ivison: Socialism issue brings quick crack in NDP unity at party convention

Castro's political police organize attack against female democracy advocates

On the night of March 18th, the Cuban political police organized a mob of more than 200 people to attack a group of 50 Ladies in White in Palma Soriano who were holding their monthly meeting, dedicating it to the 10th anniversary of the Black Spring crackdown when 75 dissidents were arrested and sentenced to prison.  These actions resulted in the hospitalization of one of the Ladies in White and the violent arrests of various neighbors who came out in their defense.

More Here

h/t BCF

"We need to purge OISE and the TDSB or burn it to the ground, whichever is more effective"

For anyone at the Toronto District School Board too dim to understand, that headline is meant rhetorically.

But the following featuring Sun TV's Brian Lilley and John Robson is not:

Venezuelan government upset with Stephen Harper's "insensitive" comments about the death of their monstrous dictator

OTTAWA — Venezuela has sent a formal protest to the Canadian government for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “insensitive” remarks on the death of President Hugo Chavez.  

Harper issued a statement that offered “condolences to the people of Venezuela,” but not the family of the flamboyant 58-year-old leftist leader, who died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

A statement from a senior Venezuelan government official says a “card of protest” was sent to Ottawa after Harper expressed what he called insensitivity at a time when their country is grieving.

More at The National Post

Discussing the promotion of Communism in Toronto's public schools

More on this HERE

Toronto District School Board actively promotes communism

This is a subject that has come up over and over again.

The Toronto District School Board, whose wasteful spending and incompetence will result in a reduction in needed teaching positions, finds the money to put on expensive conferences promoting collectivism and fund policy papers and teaching guides that actually promote communism.

There is a reason that every single occasion Communists have had an opportunity to form a national government for any significant length of time, the result has been repression, totalitarianism, deprivation of basic freedoms and mass murder.

It is an inherently evil system in which the individual is devalued.

But the people running the Toronto District School Board, including Acting Director Donna Quan and Chief Academic Officer Manon Gardier, along with TDSB Chair Chris Bolton do not appear to recognize that. If they did, why aren't they doing something about the pervasive promotion of Marxist and communist ideology in the curriculum?

Reader Matt L. sent in the following information about the TDSB`s resource guide `Challenging Class Bias`which is an outright promotion of communism and a promotion of class warfare to children by our public school system:

Here they are taught to despise class enemies and that the middle and upper classes are ``agents`` of class bias:

The TDSB`s ``educators`` are promoting a vapid and patently false depiction of capitalism that appears to have been arrived at by some idiot who based their information on the subject exclusively from reading the rules for the Parker Brothers`game Monopoly:

Naturally, according to the TDSB, the wealthy should be despised and a lack of a specific wealth tax is somehow a `gift`` (or a capitalist plot):

And wasteful entitlement spending could all be paid for if we only taxed the rich more and more. Evidently, the morons running the TDSB never learned the lesson from England in the 1960`s and 70`s when that approach nearly bankrupted the country, drove the wealth out, and resulted in a backlash that brought Margaret Thatcher to power for many successive governments:

And once their young charges have been sufficiently indoctrinated, teachers are commanded to tell their students to lobby government for the politicized outcomes the TDSB communists want:

This type of education is immoral and a violation of the rights due to parents and the responsibilities educators have to their students and to society.

I`ll be discussing it further on The Arena with Michael Coren tonight.

My friend Aurel Braun discussed some of this with Ezra Levant yesterday:

Toronto District School Board adopts Glorious Leader Wynne's program to teach hatred of class enemies

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) is a radical group of often violent, foul-mouthed fanatics whose leaders advocate for class warfare. With offers of free food and clothing, they bribe mentally ill and homeless people who have little knowledge of the positions they advocate to attend their demonstrations.

They are known for their attempts at verbal and physical intimidation of politicians and citizens who disagree with their hateful agenda. OCAP frequently makes common cause with an organization of Trotskyite lunatics called No One Is Illegal which is closely linked with the violent Black Bloc.

So who better, in the questionable judgement of the commissars of the Toronto District School Board, to provide classroom instruction for Marxist-sounding ``Anti-Classism Education`` than these vicious organizations. It doesn`t take much of a look to see that the TDSB and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne`s Ministry of Education share the same goals of those groups of replacing western `neo-liberal democracy` with the socialist paradise they envision; one the class enemies are either re-educated or eliminated.

From the looks of things, Ontario is in some very deep trouble.

See link to TDSB page here

h-t Matthew at Eye on a Crazy Planet`s facebook group

Communist-promoting Toronto District School Board leaders have a learning disorder

Some people never learn.

We all know a few of them - they aren't too bright; they aren't able to process information or to draw lessons from experience the way others can. They just never quite get it.

Soon to be the TDSB's new logo

You'd figure those are the last people who you'd want teaching your children. In Toronto, it's worse than that. In Ontario's capitol, they're running the school board and are in charge of the curriculum.

Here's an example.

With the myriad examples of the behavior of Communist governments, like he brutality of the Soviet gulags whose murders and horrors closely rivaled the Nazi death camps, the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China which, designed to impose Maoist orthodoxy, claimed 30 million innocent lives, the tyranny of Castro's totalitarianism which eliminates dissenters, and with the starvation, brainwashing, and slave labor in North Korea, a rather clear pattern is evident.

Of course there are those sad, desperate ideological hold-outs who maintain that the problem isn't communism but the way in which it has been implemented.

But in every single instance that communism has ascended to national rule, the result has been repressive totalitarianism.

After the example of its causing 100 million deaths and generations that suffered debilitating repression of freedom in every aspect of their lives, you might think that anyone who isn't a complete imbecile would realize by now that communism isn't such a great idea.

Enter the pinheads of the Toronto District School Board.

TDSB Praising communism

Nurtured at the neo-Marxist ideological cesspool that is the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, TDSB senior staff have bought hook, line, and sinker into the anti-capitalist brainwashing that occurs there, and are spreading that poison to children in Toronto's public schools.

Previously embarrassed by their extolling of the murderous totalitarian Che Guevara, the TDSB's commissars, as is their pathetic pattern, still haven't learned their lesson and are repeating deplorable errors.

The TDSB is continuing to post material extolling El Salvador's Communist Party, offering uncritical lessons and questions about communism, as if it were no different than Hobbesian Equality.

from the TDSB Black Panther lesson

Other material taking a laudatory approach to the racist, violent Black Panther organization refers students to Marxist material. Because, after all, in the apparent view of the TDSB, if you can't trust totalitarian fanatics devoted to the overthrow of western democracy, who can you trust?

The examples go on and on. TDSB material with a student giving her glowing account of attending a school-sponsored excursion to protest with the violent anti-capitalist group, The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty,  or material postulating OISE-like claptrap such as that only white people can be racist and oppressive. 

With the recent demise of the TDSB's OISE-educated former Education Director, the serial plagiarist Chris Spence, the current school board leadership may think some pressure is off. The recent rise to the Premiership by OISE-educated Kathleen Wynne may have emboldened them further. 

But in the end, pressure needs to come from the regular citizens of Ontario, who themselves need an education. Because at the end of the day, the Toronto District School Board doesn't care about children, it doesn't care about parents, it only cares about its own politicized social agenda. The public needs to learn the filth that the Toronto District School Board in inflicting daily on its captive audience of impressionable children.


h/t Matthew at Eye on a Crazy Planet's facebook group

UPDATE: The TDSB caves under pressure

Communism Kills

Norman Bethune - A National Film Board of Canada documentary

This documentary about Norman Bethune was directed in 1964 for the NFB by Donald Brittain.

Many colleagues and people who knew him were interviewed.

A very interesting subject as Bethune's support for Mao Tze Dong has become a controversial matter regarding the Canadian government's involvement with a Bethune Memorial.

It is worth noting that Bethune went to help Mao well before the Chinese Communist leader became the mass murdering dictator that history remembers. Bethune was an ardent fighter against fascism and a physician whose support for socialized medicine came about at a time when the poor were denied essential medical treatment because they were unable to pay for it.

Actress Confronts Sean Penn Over His Support for Chavez: ‘You Are a Communist A**Hole!’

Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso and actor Sean Penn had a contentious exchange at Los Angeles International airport recently, in which Alonso called Penn a “communist a**hole“ and Penn called Alonso a ”pig.”

More at The Blaze

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

Using the Wizard of Oz and Sherlock Holmes to explain Occupy Toronto

Michael Coren and Richard Klagsbrun discuss the silliness of a movement that wants to replace the most successful economic system in the history of the world with a proven, abject failure



Thanks to Blazing Cat Fur and SDAMatt2 for the video