Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Ryerson hosts international conference on Mad Studies
May 19 2012
Through their medical faculties, universities conferred “power and legitimacy to enforce imposed practices ranging from lobotomy, ECT insulin-coma shock, excessive drug treatments, discriminatory labels. “Now that some of us are in these elite positions within academia, it is essential to ensure we use this power and privilege to organize, to promote, research, write and engage the public about a topic that has too often in our history been interpreted through the views of medical-model academics.”
Tags: disabilities, Health, ideology, mental Health, participation, standard of living
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It’s time to unify our schools
May 11, 2012
By maintaining separate schools, we perpetuate social and religious division while undermining religious equality and our collective sense of equal citizenship… With a unified school system we could cut the bureaucratic costs in half saving millions… Our separate school system is severely anachronistic and is no longer sound policy in the context of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic Ontario. It’s time we unify the school systems in the interests of equality, civic solidarity, cost savings and basic fairness.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights, standard of living, tax
Posted in Education Delivery System | No Comments »
On student-to-faculty rations, Ontario goes from worst to even worse
April 26, 2012
Since the mid-1990s, Ontario has had the worst student-to-faculty ratio in Canada. While the number of students per full-time faculty member in other provinces hovered around 20-1, the Ontario ratio rose from 22-1 in the fall of 2000 to 27-1 by 2005-06 as the “double cohort” entered the university system… Even if universities hired as many full-time faculty as they planned in their Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (and the evidence to date suggests they have not), the ratio is now approaching 28 students for each full-time faculty member… to preserve the quality of higher education in Ontario, we need to hire new full-time faculty – and we need to start doing it now.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living, youth
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The most expensive copyright insurance policy in Canadian history
April 22, 3012
The new fees are likely to be passed along to students, who will ultimately bear the burden of the copyright arrangement with higher tuitions… Universities already pay millions of dollars for these licenses with the money flowing to database companies, publishers, and authors… it defines copying as including “posting a link or hyperlink to a digital copy”, yet linking to content can hardly be described as copying materials. Moreover, the licence comes packed with onerous restrictions such as blocking the ability to store articles in online services.
Tags: ideology, rights, standard of living, youth
Posted in Education Policy Context | No Comments »
Students should pay for the entire cost of education — later
Apr 20, 2012
… it’s cash flow that’s the issue, not the amount. So: What if, instead of paying tuition now, students could pay it later? That is, what if they were staked all or most of the money up front, and repaid it over the course of their working life? Only what if, instead of repaying principal plus interest in fixed amounts, as with conventional loans, they paid a share of their earnings? As they earned more, they’d pay more; as they earned less, they’d pay less. The model is not new. It’s sometimes called an income contingent loan, or a graduate tax. But in reality, it’s not a loan or a tax. It’s an investment.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living, youth
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Calling a cut an ‘increase’
April 5, 2012
Per student funding has in fact been in decline since the financial crisis hit in 2008-09. The budget does nothing to help. By 2014-15, OCUFA projects that public operating funding for universities will drop by 16 per cent. This is a huge loss in revenue that, if left unfilled, will damage the quality of higher education in Ontario. History tells us that institutions will attempt to fill the gap with higher tuition fees, continuing the unsustainable shift of costs onto students.
Tags: budget, standard of living, youth
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North America is out of touch with ‘Ideas Economy’
March 14, 2012
Every increase in value added in Canada will come from the Ideas Economy, and if you’re going to have an educational system that’s suited to that and prepares people, you have to train original thinkers, people who are willing to challenge authority, not follow hierarchy or teach to the test. Memorization, harmonization, standardization; these make an easier job for educational bureaucrats and teachers, but what we need to do is teach our children, and teach ourselves throughout our careers, to keep re-learning how to learn.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living, youth
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It still comes down to fixing the reserves
Mar. 14, 2012
Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But… results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else. Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.
Tags: budget, Native, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Education Delivery System, Equality Delivery System | No Comments »
Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.
March 10, 2012
To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher… “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.”
Tags: economy, globalization, participation, standard of living
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Fraser report raises questions on provincewide testing
March 04, 2012
Fraser’s report card ranked elementary schools on the basis of how well students performed on annual standardized reading, writing and math tests. Critics of Fraser’s rankings see them as a “narrow” snapshot of a school’s performance… Thomas argues that “hardships” outside of a school — such as poverty or a community with a large number of single parents — are not necessarily determinants of academic failure or success.
Tags: ideology
Posted in Education Debates | No Comments »
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