Archive for the ‘Education Debates’ Category
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Time to eliminate publicly funded Catholic schooling in Ontario
Apart from the ongoing inequity of letting a powerful religious group have unequal benefit of the law in one of our most important government services, shaping children’s minds, the time for a change is now more than ever… In 1999, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared Ontario’s practice of funding Catholic education to the exclusion of other religions discriminatory. The UN’s power is limited to persuasion. Nothing changed.
Tags: budget, ideology, jurisdiction, rights, youth
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Georgian College Cancels Diploma in Homeopathy – and CBC News Violates all Journalistic Standards
Georgian College cancelled their new three-year diploma program for homeopathy after intense and aggressive attacks from a handful of medical doctors and ‘scientists’ representing special interest groups. The fact that a college can be bullied into cancelling an educational program by a handful of individuals is already very sad but it is even sadder that the CBC, our national news agency, engaged in such misinformed, biased and manipulative reporting…
Tags: disabilities, Health, ideology, multiculturalism, pharmaceutical
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The Catholic funding debate needs to be schooled by facts
… this exposes the ridiculousness in 2018 of maintaining four distinct publicly funded school systems in Ontario – English public, English Catholic, French public and French Catholic. Most school boards are dysfunctional enough, embroiled as they are in petty politics, without giving trustees any added incentive to dream up ways of stealing students from rival boards. Not that any politician will touch this issue with a 10-foot pole.
Tags: budget, ideology, jurisdiction, youth
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Ontario university strategic mandate agreements: a train wreck waiting to happen
Where the plan goes off-track is with the system-wide metrics used to assess research excellence and impact: 1) Tri-council funding (total and share by council); 2) number of papers (total and per full-time faculty); and 3) number of citations (total and per paper). A tabulation of our worth as scholars is simply not possible through narrowly conceived, quantified metrics that merely total up research grants, peer-reviewed publications and citations. Such an approach perversely de-incentivises time-consuming research, community-based research, Indigenous research, innovative lines of inquiry and alternative forms of scholarship. It effectively displaces research that “matters” with research that “counts” and puts a premium on doing simply what counts as fast as possible.
Tags: ideology, jurisdiction
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School guidance counsellors ‘stretched’ amid rising mental health needs
“Principals are saying ‘we’ve got a crisis here in terms of the mental health piece, and we don’t have enough staff to address it, either through psychologists and social workers or through guidance’” … With only half the schools able to regularly access a psychologist and a shortage of school social workers, “the role of guidance counsellors may be stretched to fill the gaps,” says the report.
Tags: budget, mental Health, youth
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Sensing a moment, Canadian scientists swing for the fences
Research advocates say a growing economy at home and political turmoil elsewhere has handed Canada a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get back on par with other developed countries in its science investments… Canada’s scientific enterprise needs a long-term infusion of stable funding to keep younger researchers in the profession and set the stage for the kinds of major breakthroughs that are decades in the making.
Tags: budget, globalization, jurisdiction, participation, standard of living
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No compromise in free speech debate
Compromised free speech is simply the negation of the right itself, and so an impossible concession… social justice advocates, are not interested in free speech as it is conventionally understood. Rather, they are engaged in a revolution to tear-down established hierarchies… Many universities no longer view the pursuit of truth as their primary goal; instead, the social justice goal of protecting victim groups has become the priority.
Tags: ideology, multiculturalism, participation, rights
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No, postmodernism at universities isn’t a vile, cancerous doctrine
Right-wing postmodernism flourishes by bulldozing dissent. The current occupant of the White House, and those leading rhetorical crusades in his shadow, are just late-model versions of real intellectual rot… Universities are always easy targets… We insist that when people utter falsehoods and nonsense, or behave intolerably, they will be challenged, on the facts, with reasons and arguments. It’s indoctrination, sure – into critical thinking.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights
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The idea of the radical, leftist university is a misleading caricature
The combination of growing economic imperatives with new conditions of visibility has made administrators more sensitive than ever to public relations, consumer evaluations and program reputations… These trends have ensured that Canadian universities remain largely conservative organizations. Even as they seek to promote tolerance… administrators… have responded through bureaucratic measures that can sometimes be excessively arbitrary and autocratic.
Tags: ideology, rights
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Here’s the gender gap that matters
“Men have increasingly become the second sex in higher education,” … What’s clear from these trends is that educational inequality has worked its way up from elementary school, and is now solidly entrenched at all levels of attainment. This, in an age when higher education and cognitive skills are more important than ever… Higher education has become so feminized that it’s hard to see how it can be re-engineered to appeal to men.
Tags: featured, participation, women
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