Join me, Adam Giambrone and others for a free movie and a talk about Social Justice in Education

UPDATE - There have been a couple of cancellations and some new people joining us for the post-film discussion:

Remember Thursday November 14 in the Auditorium at Central Technical School (at the Corner of Bathurst & Harbord Streets) in Toronto, you'll get to join former City Councillor and current NOW Magazine columnist Adam Giambrone, as well as Paul Koidis, Associate Dean of at the School of Media, Art and Design at Durham College and me for a fantastic movie and what promises to be a very interesting discussion about Social Justice and Activism in the education system.

It starts promptly at 6:30 PM, so be sure to be there early!

Ontario Elementary School Teachers' Union endorses OISE's pro-Communist, pro-class warfare calendar

The blog Socialist Studies reports that the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario  is pushing the `Social Justice` Calendar produced by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

The so-called Social Justice they are pushing includes celebrating the totalitarian mass-murderers Che Guevara and violent, mentally-unbalanced thugs operating within deranged activist groups that promote the concept of class warfare, like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and No One is Illegal.

More about `Social Justice`at OISE in the video below:

Glorious Leader Kim Jong Wynne imposes Gender Studies on school kids

Meet your new Grade 1 Gender Studies teacher

Ontario's OISE Premier is about to inflict more depraved weirdness on public schools

See this LINK

More clues to what Glorious Leader Wynne has in store for your children here

This image of the Ontario People's noble future stolen redistributed from capitalist wrecker  Blazing Cat Fur

An Open Letter to Toronto District School Board Chair Bolton and Director Spence regarding the Board's Strategy Consultations

Dear Trustee Bolton and Director Spence:

I am the Co-Chair of the Parents’/School Council at Central Technical School in Toronto, which as you know is one of the largest high schools in the city with a student population of over 1900.

Regarding the current consultations conducted by the TDSB for the K-12 Strategy for the coming years, there is an issue of very serious concern about which I would like to offer my comments.

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. 

There are inappropriate attempts in the TDSB to integrate so-called social justice aspects into subjects like Math, where questions such as “Calculate how 5 global social issues could be solved if the US military budget were applied to them” are posed to children in their mid-teens. The obvious implication is that military budgets and the military in democratic countries like the US and Canada somehow detract from the resolution of social problems. What are not addressed are the catastrophic results that would occur if democracies did not have the means to protect themselves. Anyone who is familiar with European history between the World Wars understands the horrendous consequences of Britain and France’s decision to decommission most of its naval capabilities after WW1. One can have reasonable debates about such matters, but the clear purpose of questions of the nature in the example provided is to indoctrinate to a particular type of thinking. And frankly, the people at OISE (The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) who have designed such questions have nowhere near the knowledge in geo-political affairs or history required to understand them thoroughly.

That is reflected further in the way the TDSB teaches about such issues as the internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War 2. It is right and proper this be taught.  But it is taught in middle school to students who are not instructed about the causes and history of the Second World War. Nor, as in innumerable such examples, are they yet provided with reasonable context, such as the treatment of minorities by Imperial Japan prior to and during the war. The result is an implication that Canada is and was a particularly and unusually racist country for its time when that is historically untrue.

In fact, the TDSB’s providing politicized indoctrination under the guise of social justice is becoming pervasive through the system. I was at the TDSB Futures conference earlier this year where Director Spence delivered an address. One of the keynote speakers was Tim Wise, who blamed the inequities in the education system on “white privilege.” That fatuous reasoning left absent the fact that inequities in education in Canada transcend racial divisions and far more often than not are independent of them. More alarming, Mr. Wise, with the apparent approbation of the TDSB, said that education needs to focus less on the individual and more on the collective, including collective racial identities.

                                                                                                                          

This flouts everything opponents of racism have been fighting for many years. As a society, we have been working towards achieving a color-blind world that deals with individuals as such and not as part of separate collectives differentiated by ‘race’ or ‘color.’

It is deeply disturbing that, while with the best of motives, the TDSB, has been working to counter such progress through its use of ill-advised trends put forward by politicized activists in the education system and in politicized programs in institutions like OISE.

These are but a very few of many examples currently occurring within the TDSB.

These questions are designed through programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which has programs that specifically advocate for teachers to be activists against neo-liberalism (i.e. free-market, liberal democracies) in schools. These same people frequently advocate for solidarity with Communist Cuba. It should not be necessary to point out how disturbing it is that our children’s’ curriculum are in many instances designed by people who advocate against a system  that has produced the freest, most prosperous societies in the world’s history in favor of a repressive, totalitarian society that imprisons dissenters. Yet because of its recurrence in the TDSB, such admonitions are regrettably necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

Honest people can disagree about ideas and we should always strive for improvement. People have a right to hold different opinions on how to approach the matters discussed above. Unfortunately, the term “critical thinking” which is so often used by TDSB personnel in describing the approach they want to instil actually means trying to create a “group think” that is critical of our democratic foundations while promoting ideologies that are antithetical to them.

Social justice for someone who admires Che Guevara has a very different meaning for those of us who believe in free speech and parliamentary democracy.  People have the right to share their views with their children on their own time, but not to attempt to indoctrinate the children in Toronto’s public school system with them. 

Some of the fault for the concerns I have delineated rests squarely with the Ontario Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the Province’s curriculum. But much of it also rests with the TDSB.

With the challenges facing our children, who will grow up in a world undergoing a technological revolution, the limited time they spend in schools should focus on giving them the tools they need for success in such a world. This is the focus on which I hope the TDSB will concentrate going forward.

Sincerely,

Richard Klagsbrun

The Elephant in the Classroom

On the basis of legal decisions and relatively recent traditions, Christianity and the Bible in particular are informatis non grata in Canadian schools. The reasoning behind Christianophobia derives from equity policies that strive to remove preferences accorded to what are seen as dominant, privileged forces. People familiar with the system understand that "equity" policies are not designed to create equality. If that were the case than the word Christmas would not be banned from December school "Holiday Concerts" while  celebration of Hanukkah, Eid, Diwali, and a variety on non-Christian holidays are classroom topics. Equality would not prohibit Christian school prayer while allowing school cafeterias to be converted to gender segregated mosques during class time.

So in practical terms, the goal of school Equity policies is clearly not to remove all religion from school, but to take Christianity, the dominant religious force in Canada since the nation's inception, down a peg or two while trying to raise the beliefs of oppressed minorities. At least minorities who are viewed as being in the oppressed class within the framework of the oppressor/oppressed binary equation by which radicalized education policy makers view the world.

But here's the problem with taking the Bible out of schools: you can't really understand anything about western civilization, be it history, literature, politics or culture, without a reasonable familiarity with the Old and New Testaments. Writers like Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Twain, C.S. Lewis, even Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood cannot be fully understood without familiarity with the Bible. European, and by extension, Canadian and American history, as well as the conquest of New Spain cannot be understood without knowing the religious conflicts that drove events forward, based on differing interpretations of the Bible.

The value system and to a great extent the legal system upon which Canada was founded is based on principles and ideas expressed in the King James translation of the Bible.

But school children are not allowed to be taught that all-important key to knowledge in public schools for fear that they may actually believe what they read.

If only the texts in university courses that produce education policy makers were scrutinized as closely. If they were, we might not have the idiocy that prevails in school boards throughout this land.



Thanks to SDAMatt for the video

A Trillion Dollar Industry with Zero Accountability

That's how the US educational system has been described by American education reformer Geoffrey Canada in a discussion following the new documentary Waiting for Superman.

David Guggenheim and Participant Media, the director and production company responsible for An Inconvenient Truth, will be releasing a movie next month about how America's schools are robbing a generation of children of the opportunity to receive an education that enables them to compete in the global marketplace.

The public school system in the US was the zenith of world education two generations ago, but has fallen to one of the lowest standards in the post-industrial world. Virtually no state in the union has better than 40% of its students who have achieved grade-level reading and math skills. In the District of Columbia, it's a dismal 12%.

There are a variety of reasons for the failure but one of the culprits that Waiting for Superman focuses on is the Teachers Union.

The tenure system in US public schools virtually guarantees that teachers cannot be fired. No matter how incompetent or uninterested a teacher may be in their job, they can't be removed, and class after class, year after year, students will receive an inferior education from that teacher.

Waiting for Superman follows 5 families who are trying to get their children into charter schools, which use public money, but don't have to follow the rules and formulas proscribed by the Public School system. Geoffrey Canada, who is featured in the documentary, has started up many of these charter schools that ensure high standards of teaching and provide students with structure and discipline. The results of Geoffrey Canada's teaching methods have been spectacular.


Geoffrey Canada has spoken on 60 Minutes about how as a child he cried when he learned Superman wasn't real. His sorrow was because of the lost hope in a superhero who could arrive and ensure that justice is done.

America's wait for a Superman to save the public education system may be a long one, but at least reformers like Geoffrey Canada, though without a cape, are out there saving one school at a time.