More politicized brainwashing of children by the Toronto District School Board

Reading, writing, arithmetic. There was a time when primary school was created to provide the basics of education. But the people responsible for education in Toronto see another value in having a captive audience of impressionable young minds.

Napoleon Bonaparte recognized that schools could be used not only to teach, but to instill a particular set of values that was useful to his authority and made sure that a curriculum was created instilling ideological values that suited his ability to rule. That approach to education has become a routine facet of totalitarian societies ever since, being used by the Soviets and the Nazis in the last century and in dictatorships like Iran, North Korea and Cuba today.

It should be alarming to Ontarians that the ideologues who run the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)  who are determined to shift the thinking in society to their socialist goals are utilizing the same process as dictatorships to indoctrinate the children entrusted to their care.

In a democracy with a public education system, schools aren't supposed to indoctrinate children to a particular political party. However if the goal is indoctrination rather than education, then that rule doesn't apply. This accounts for the TDSB's publication of a poem titled Election Day by a Grade 1 student named Ahmed Nur from Shoreham Public School:

The poem is a paean to the New Democratic Party that seems suspiciously unlike something an unprompted 7 year old would compose independently. Even if little Ahmed has developed pre-pubescent political partisanship, it it completely inappropriate for the TDSB to publish something of that nature unless they were exhibiting students advocacy of all Canada's major political parties. Did the TDSB print other poems extolling the Liberal and Conservative parties? Of course not.

The message the TDSB want to instill in it's students is even more clearly delineated in the "Earth Hour Rap" it made available at the School Board's website, which contains lyrics such as:

But can we save the world, before all we know is gone?
These corporations are all filled with nothing but actors
Trying to take us out, break our back like chiropractors

and:

 I'm expressing my mind, it's like I'm stressing for time
Watching every second before this hour is gone
It's Al Gore and Suzuki combined into one
All I say is real, and I ain't gonna be fake.
So let me ask you, how much more can you take?

If this blatant type of indoctrination is worrisome, don't expect it to get any better. With a looming leadership race to determine the next Premier of Ontario, one of the leading candidates is Kathleen Wynne, whom the fanatically politicized Ontario Institute for Studies in Education boasts is one of its graduates. If you think things are bad now, wait until the province has an OISE Premier running the show.

While at the TDSB's "Futures" conference last spring, which promoted equity in schools by attributing the ills in the education system to "white privilege," to an audience of credulous educators, I was sitting at a table  during lunch with a group of young teachers.. One of them, a male in his early thirties', earnestly related to the group how his mission was not to teach his students what to think, but how to think.  That sort of self-serving, self-righteous pomposity typifies the thinking in Ontario's Ministry of Education and The Toronto District School Board.

Human beings are born with the innate ability to think. School exists to provide students with information that they can utilize to advance themselves and to reapply in the various circumstances they will find themselves in life. When someone at the  TDSB  says he or she wants to teach their students how to think, what they mean is they want to teach their students how to think exactly the same way as their teachers.

That's not education, it's brainwashing, and it's something the public should be doing everything in its power to prevent from happening to our children.


h/t Matthew at the Eye on a Crazy Planet Facebook group

Eye on a Crazy 2010

As 2010 draws to a conclusion, I want to thank all of you who have stopped by to read Eye on a Crazy Planet and have helped to make it a success.

To everyone who reads this blog, contributed comments, and most importantly, has discussed and spoken out about some of the issues that have come up here, we should all be proud of our contribution to public discourse.  This blog and your support have helped to frame some national discussions and in some cases we've made a real difference!

Eye on a Crazy Planet is only 6 and a half months old. It started at a time when, during the course of some research I was doing on a screenplay, I came across information that proved that conflict tourist Kevin Neish lied to Carol MacNeil in a CBC News interview about the knife-wielding "activists'' treatment of Israeli soldiers during the Mavi Marmara take-down in May. That information became the basis of a National Post story.

We also played a significant role in exposing Libby Davies, the deputy leader of the NDP, and the most outspoken anti-Israel parliamentarian, as someone who either denied Israel's very legitimacy OR was unfamiliar with basic facts about an issue which she had adopted an extremist position. Which of those positions you believe depends on whether you believe she was sincere in what she said in her video performance or in her subsequent "apology."

It was the Davies story that was a large inspiration for the creating of this blog following my alerting the mainstream media to the existence of the notorious Davies video and its significance.

There have been a lot of other issues that we've explored together, including the strange malfeasance of the leadership of some of Canada's public employees' unions, waste of public funds, the Rob Ford campaign and the slimy behaviour of some of his opponents, and the insinuation of communism and some other malevolent ideologies into Canada's university system. Recently, we helped expose what became an international story about the extent to which bigoted anti-Zionist ideology has become so rabid in the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education that scholarship has become subservient to bias there.

And we've had quite a few laughs along the way!

2010 has, in many ways, been an encouraging year for Canada. As one of the best educated, and freest countries, Canadians have shown continued support for the two mainstream political parties whose policies are really nearly identical on substantive matters, while the socialist NDP is mired in near single-digit support nationally.  There are some people who take a cynical view of the Canadian Conservative and Liberal parties having more similarities than differences. I would suggest this is something we can be optimistic about.

When reasonable, intelligent people look at an issue, they will usually arrive at similar conclusions. That is the case with our two most popular parties. Another thing in which Canadians can take a measure of comfort is the continued marginalization of radical elements which have continued to show their totalitarian leanings.

But vigilance is the price of freedom. Public service unions, that use members' dues to pay for junkets to dictatorships like Cuba, still want to surreptitiously influence the political sphere. Their allies in post-secondary educational institutions hope to do the same in that arena with as little public scrutiny as possible. There are still non-governmental agencies which draw funds from the public purse while they support foreign terrorists and act as apologists for domestic ones. Things may be going well in Canada, but those who think democracy is a failure because it hasn't placed them in power remain a threat to our freedoms.

There are a few acknowledgments I would like to make. I want to thank my fellow bloggers who have contributed their support, including our friends at Jay Currie, Moose and Squirrel, Dodo can spell, Skippy Stalin, Five Feet of Fury, Dvar Dea, Backseat Blogger, Sassywire and many others - please forgive me if I don't mention you all. Sometimes we agree and sometimes we don't, but I always respect your commitment to democracy and the democratic values of free expression and public exchange of ideas.

However a very special thank you needs to be made to Blazing Cat Fur. BCF, along with Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, is one of Canada's foremost advocates for and defenders of free speech. BCF is also responsible for alerting the public and the mainstream media to some of the goings-on and relationships between malevolent groups that are a threat to the freedoms which we enjoy and rather foolishly take for granted. He does this in most instances without taking any credit for himself.  BCF is on my list of Canadian heroes.

Additional thanks go to our friends at The Michael Coren Show and at The National Post for their support.

But mostly, my thanks go to you, for reading this blog, and particularly for those who read Eye on a Crazy Planet and look into what you've read here in order to find out more. Being informed makes us better citizens and better defenders of democracy.

I don't ask you to take my word for anything. I do ask that you find out as much information as you can about matters of public interest that mean something to you and to speak out and act on what you learn. We owe that much to ourselves.

Happy New Year !!!!

Doofus blogger appears on Michael Coren Show

Many Thanks to SdaMatt2 and Blazing Cat Fur:

The results are in! George Galloway reminds you most of...

Who does George Galloway remind Eye of a Crazy Planet readers of most?

The choices were:



Sam was 1st runner-up



2nd runner up

Spiro didn't get a single vote! Lucky Spiro!





 3rd runner up, Sir Oswald Mosley
(this would have been my choice)

And the winner is...

But wait! It wasn't Mel on his own!
To remind you of Galloway, it was Mel under the influence of a hell of a lot of..



Eye on a Crazy Planet readers overwhelmingly oppose mandatory voting laws

Some countries have mandatory voting laws and whenever we have an election in North America, someone always brings up the subject of whether we should follow the example of countries such as Australia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and about eight others that actually enforce such laws.

Canadians and Americans have so far shown no significant interest in passing mandatory voting laws. The suggestion is usually an extreme reaction by those who have some inordinate concern about the lack of voter participation.

The most recent Eye on a Crazy Planet poll shows readers are opposed to mandatory voting laws by a 2.5 to 1 ratio.

As the recent municipal election in Toronto has taught us, when the election is interesting, voters will turn out. Although even in a very contentious, controversial election such as that, there was still less than 60% voter turnout.

But the fact remains that while voting is a citizen's right in a free country, so is not voting. It's a statement, and it shouldn't require citizens to be forced by the state to inconvenience themselves by appearing at a polling station to declare their lack of interest in voting in a particular election.

There are elections in which I haven't voted. It was my way of saying "all these candidates are a bunch of jerks and I don't want to participate in any of them getting power."

And frankly, low voter participation never bothered me. Why is it that some people derive some sense of satisfaction knowing that people who have no interest and little knowledge of public affairs or current events have selected those who make the choices that will affect society at large?

We're probably better off that lots of people aren't interested enough in the political system to vote. What would happen if these people who lack either the interest, knowledge, or motivation to exercise their right to their democratic franchise were compelled to use it. Would we have better leaders, or leaders chosen by an even less informed segment of society?

As far as I'm concerned, our system is working fine. I may not agree with the outcome of every election, but I am comfortable in knowing that people are voting out of choice and not compulsion.

Poll results: If the NDP or Green party ever gets into power, buy distillery stocks

Actually, if the NDP gets into power, you might not want to buy shares in anything in Canada, since the stock market might collapse and there is a faction of that party that wants to do away with private ownership.

The most recent (highly unscientific) Eye on a Crazy Planet Poll asked "If the only two parties running in the next Canadian election were the Green Party and the NDP, how would you vote?"

The other two poll options were "don't know" and  "would stay home on election day and get drunk.'

While the Greens narrowly out-polled the NDP, both were dwarfed by the 80% of respondents who said that if those were the only choices, they'd stay home and spend election day getting plastered.