Athée Canadien
Education
New poll finds Ontarians support elimination of Catholic schools.
May 18th
The Forum Research survey also found more than half of Ontario residents — 53 per cent — oppose the public funding of Catholic schools with 40 per cent supportive and 6 per cent unsure.
As the issue of gay-straight alliances dominates debate around new anti-bullying legislation, the poll concluded people are accepting of the anti-homophobia clubs designed to promote tolerance.
Fifty-one per cent agreed that students in publicly funded Catholic schools should be allowed to form clubs under that sometimes contentious name with 28 per cent opposed and 21 per cent undecided.
The GSA issue is big if we can make good use of it. Atheist groups CFI:Canada and the Canadian Secular Alliance cosponsored a rally last weekend yet I found it annoying that all of the focus has been on forcing the Catholic schools to accept GSAs rather than acknowledging the real problem that Catholic schools are funded in the first place.
But since the government is proposing laws that reduce the influence of Catholic beliefs within the separate schools, having the public wonder why we’re keeping the two systems apart is a valid end game. Why attack separate schools on moral or anti-religious grounds when simple economics might do the trick?
via Toronto Star
No more prayer at Sask. high school
Apr 26th
The school in Middle Lake, near Humboldt, is planning for this year’s graduation and one student suggested that they no longer have someone say grace prior to the dinner.
According to Ange Nantau, her son Jake does not follow a religion and suggested, instead of grace, that they have a moment of silence before the graduation meal.
Nantau said not long after Jake made the suggestion, her son was the target of vandalism.
Good news. University prayers are dropping like flies around the country so it’s time we spread the godless love to high schools. Are high school prayers common? I don’t remember any back in my day and I lived in a super conservative WASPy town.
Nantau said the controversy, and the reaction, have only reinforced her son’s view of organized religions.
“It’s part of why my son chose to be an atheist,” she said. “He has gone to school with kids who profess to be Christians and then their behaviour does not show that outside of school, outside of their church.”
Unfortunately, this kid is getting the crash course on religious hypocrisy but maybe it’s for the best. It’s the same kind of stupid that will follow him around for the rest of his life.
via CBC
The Lord’s Prayer Would Stop Bullying?
Apr 2nd
I am always floored by the moral superiority some religious people seem to feel and wear so proudly. Sometimes I can ignore it but as a teacher when people try to bring that superiority into schools I get very defensive.
In Nova Scotia our government is cutting education left, right, and center with little concern for our children. These cuts have included not setting up a real council to attack and solve the issue of bullying despite the fact that bullying is becoming a province (and country) wide epidemic. The debate over this issue has obviously been intense. Many editorials have been written to The Chronicle Herald but one of them stood out for me:
Criminalize bullying
Re: Education Minster Ramona Jennex, who does not wish to have “another layer of bureaucracy” to deal with the bullying issue. I agree with the mother whose teenage daughter committed suicide about one year ago, who would like to see bullying made a criminal offence in its own standing.
Why should the innocent be forced to come to such a drastic turn of events, and the bullies sit back with smug smiles on their guilty faces?
Ms. Jennex, I beseech you to prevail on Parliament to put the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments back in the classrooms to give the students a decent code of moral ethics which could be read every morning. Their removal was the start of this chaos on school properties.
Evelyn Hayden, Digby
Ontario School Board Bans the Distribution of Gideon Bibles
Mar 26th
With the ongoing the fight against the Catholic school boards in Ontario I was glad to see that we now have one less public school board to battle with.
The Bluewater District School Board in southern Ontario has voted to ban the distribution of Gideon Bibles to grade 5 students.
I’m sure to some this seems small but to me this is a huge victory. I didn’t even know this kind of stuff was still going on in our country so I was all at once shocked and relieved.
“It is an atheist thing and they’re doing harm to the children,” Dorothy Adams, a former social worker in Hanover, Ont., said Wednesday.
In the face of this kind of ignorance the reasonable people of the Bluewater board had to fly. So kudos to them for making this decision and keeping our public schools secular.
Educating Science
Mar 25th
How would you explain what a flame is, to an 11 year old?
That is the question actor Alan Alda is asking. Why? Because he really wants to understand… what a flame is. One of the big problems in science education is the balance between making an explanation simple enough for ‘normal’ people to understand, while still conveying accurate information.
People with expertise in an area, often hit the wall of ‘common sense’ when trying to provide an explanation. Of course, when you are an expert in something, your sense with regards to that thing, is anything but common.
The Question of Homeschooling
Mar 16th
The GSA(Gay Straight Alliance) issue has been big lately with regards to catholic schools in Ontario. The catholic boards are funded with tax money, and that being the case, they are obligated to teach to certain standards… and of course not violate people’s rights in the process.
Thing is, the GSA issue centers around bullying. Obviously, this is a serious issue in schools. But at what point do we get to tell parents what they can teach their kids, especially when the parents home-school. I may not agree with parents teaching their kids that gay sex is a sin, but I’m also not supportive of the level of big government required to prevent this… seriously, banning this would be unenforceable.
So, I’m not a fan of homeschooling, I think you lose a lot… but I think people should be allowed to raise their children within the scope of freedom of religion.
Redford was asked whether she was OK with home-schoolers teaching children that homosexuality is a sin.
“Parents are allowed to educate their children in whatever model of school they would like to and if they have particular views with respect to a number of issues and choose to educate their children at home as a result of that, they are entitled to do that,” she responded.
STill not sure what I think of this.
George Jonas Is “Appalled”
Mar 1st
Mass is conducted inside Saint Joseph’s Oratory basilica in Montreal. ROGERIO BARBOSA/AFP/Getty Images Picture accompanying NP article "George Jonas: Supreme Court puts the final nail in the coffin of religious freedom" 28/02/12
If “One picture is worth ten thousand words,” then George Jonas didn’t need 800 plus words to support his thesis that “Canada is turning into a theocracy with its own jealous God: The smug, self-worshipping state.” In an article in the National Post, Jonas criticizes the Supreme Court of Canada for its ruling that
it’s okay for Quebec’s education minister to compel believers to describe God to their children, not as they see him, but as non-believers do. It does no injury to their Charter guarantee of religious freedom.
Substitute the word Catholics for the word believers in the passage above to identify the believers Jonas is defending.
Jonas, who claims to be neither Catholic nor religious, does claim to know and understand the Judeo-Christian God:
God isn’t ecumenical. He spells out exactly what he is, in Exodus 20: 4-5. “You shall not make yourself an idol,” he tells prospective worshippers, “for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”
Jonas goes on to claim a familiarity with Judeo-Christian bibles:
Jealousy isn’t the only thing religion is about, but it’s certainly one thing. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” is the second commandment in the Hebrew bible. In the Christian bible, it’s the first.
Jonas’s argument is flawed. He fails to mention that jealousy is not a particularly attractive characteristic: jealousy is one of the seven deadly sins.
Jonas asks,
“What exactly is religious freedom, if it isn’t teaching God to your children as you see him?”
However, the Supreme Court of Canada did not say that parents can’t teach God to their children; the Supreme Court ruled that Quebec’s provincial education ministry does not have to tailor its religious instruction in elementary and secondary schools to meet the requirements of individual parents.
Jonas is “appalled”:
that Canada is turning into a theocracy with its own jealous God: The smug, self-worshipping state. Lower-court judges are its acolytes; high-court judges its bishops.
No George Jonas, I’m appalled, appalled that you would compare high-court judges to bishops. Let me remind you that it is bishops, and in particular Ontario Catholic bishops, who think Catholic rights trump Canadian rights and freedoms.
Alberta introduces new bill to create secular schools in Morinville
Feb 23rd
Education minister Thomas Lukaszuk announces changes that will give parents a secular option for their kids in Morinville, Alberta.
The Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division would lose its “public” status and instead become a separate school district in St. Albert, Morinville and Legal under a new name — Greater St. Albert Roman Catholic Separate School District.
That change would create the untenable situation of having two separate systems operating in St. Albert, so Lukaszuk is calling for St. Albert Protestant Schools to lose its separate status and instead become the city’s public school system. His proposal suggests the new name St. Albert Public School District.
Replacing Protestant boards with a secular system is a good step forward. I’m not sure if this counts as a total win since the Catholics still keep their schools and if the proposal goes ahead there will still be two systems operating in the same small town leading to inefficient and expensive education. And why are the Protestant schools are getting the ax and not the Catholic’s? (There is precedence- the Protestant system in Ontario was largely dissolved into the public system it has today.)
Whatever the reasons, quoting an education minister calling for religious schools to lose its separate status and become a public system is good rhetoric I’d like to see repeated across the province-and the country.
Tough economic times
Dec 2nd
Dan Gardner pushes the case for the elimination of separate schools in Ontario.
On its face, this is absurd. Ask a thousand organizational consultants to create a thousand models for administering education and no one would suggest anything remotely like what Ontario has now.
So the obvious question is this: How much money could we save if we replaced four school systems with one?
I don’t know the answer. In part, that’s because the one school system could take many different forms and savings would vary from one to another. But it’s also because this is a question the province’s political class won’t touch with a remotely controlled bomb-sniffing robot, and so almost no one has attempted to crunch the numbers.
One person who did have a look is Gilles Arpin, a longtime French public school trustee. Arpin assumes that amalgamating school boards, and cutting their overall number to 36, would produce significantly reduced administrative costs. And because schools are, collectively, well below capacity, amalgamation would permit the closure of 10 per cent of elementary schools and five per cent of secondary schools. Net savings to the taxpayer: $1.425 billion a year.
The economic arguments are often overlooked in our battle against separate schools since most activists believe the moral case is strong enough. Yet in an era of deficit-running, governments will be more likely to consider the money issues when looking for the service cuts and duplicated, overlapping school boards and bus routes are a prime example of extra gravy that can be eliminated.
I’ve looked at the numbers Gilles Arpin proposes back when it was presented at the One School System conference last May and while I think the methodology makes too many assumptions to convince elected officials, it’s a good start and can be used to provoke further studies by any politician is looking for a wedge issue.
Debating secularism at the school level
Nov 24th
The Toronto school that hosts Muslim prayers doesn’t budge. A community meeting was recently held:
The meeting of about 40 to 50 people was meant as a community discussion, but some attendees were eager to talk about an anonymously printed pamphlet titled “Segregation in Toronto Public Schools” – a reference to the practice of separating boys and girls during prayer sessions.
Gender segregation did indeed dom-inate the two-hour meeting. One middle-aged woman said she was an alumnus of Valley Park and still kept up with Muslim, Jewish and Christian friends from her school days. “I want everybody to grow up together. I want accommodation, but I want those girls up front,” she said.
An older English woman who identified herself as an unwilling veteran of countless school-imposed Lord’s Prayers agreed. “I can’t stand by and watch girls be segregated in a public environment,” she said.
I guess it’s good to see people talking about it. Unfortunately, Canada’s implied separation of church and state isn’t something that can be debated at the school level. Regardless of what parents think, hosting religious services in a public school violates our implied secular clauses, equity laws, and provincial policies which means the board has no choice but to stop the prayers. Let the kids go to their mosques on their own time and dime.
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