HWDSB Supports One Ontario School System

 

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Civil Rights in Public Education, Inc (CRIPE) sent out an email today containing good news, very good news:

The Hamilton Wentworth District School Board has adopted a resolution calling for a single, publicly funded school system

CRIPE’s email directs readers to a Hamilton News article that gives detailed information:

Hamilton public school trustees last week voted 8-3 in support of a resolution urging Queen’s Park to create a single system in English and French, a move they say will save “millions of dollars” in administration and building costs.

That’s good news for us, but Pat Daly, the chair of Hamilton’s Catholic school board, is pissed off “‘extremely disappointed.’” Daly depends on the same old arguments for keeping the two school systems: competition between the systems is healthy, amalgamation will be too costly, and the historical argument:

“Clearly, Catholic schools in Ontario and other separate schools in the country were part of the fabric of this country since Confederation, and it’s unfortunate that the majority of trustees on their board don’t recognize or respect that.”

Of course Daly took the opportunity to praise the three trustees that voted against the resolution.  It really is time for Daly and his colleagues in the Catholic school system to stop whining. They have been using and abusing the system for too long by asking the Ontario taxpayer to pay for religion classes that indoctrinate teach Catholicism exclusively and by bragging about their so-called “religious values.”

Daly contradicts his argument that amalgamation won’t save money when he says

despite the resolution, his board will continue to work with the public board, including through a transportation consortium that shares school buses to save money.

If sharing buses saves money, how much money would sharing/combining schools, teachers and school boards save?

Let’s add our voices to the voices of the Hamilton public school trustees and sign the petition for One Publicly-Funded School System in Ontario.

Whose wife is it anyway?

White_carnationToday is Mother’s Day, the archetypical commercialized Hallmark Holiday.  (On a side note, it’s perhaps worth noting that the  founder of Mother’s day, Anna Jarvis, was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of the simple celebration she had wanted to start in 1908, and said that she “…wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control”.)

Anyway, last week, I was listening to CBC Radio’s Ontario Today phone-in discussion of suggestions for re-instituting discipline in households against the recent trend of permissive parenting.  One man called in with his account of how he corrected the behaviour of his teenage sons*.   He was disturbed at how they were using foul language and “disrespecting their mother”.  So, apparently on the advice of a family therapist, he told his wife to leave the house while he laid down the law to his sons.  The gist of his message to the boys:  “You are being rude to my wife in my house, and I will not permit it.”  According to him, this not only corrected the boys’ behaviour, but it taught them to respect their mother in particular, and women in general.

Wait, what?   The lesson I see here is that the boys are being told that they are to respect their mother because 1) she is their father’s property and 2) he is bigger and stronger than they are.  While I do agree that it is important for kids to learn to respect other people’s property, I think that properly refers to their houses and cars and bikes and books, but surely not their wives.  If the boys’ use of foul language is offensive to their mother, perhaps she should be involved in the discussion.  Otherwise, I worry that the boys are not being taught respect for women, they are being taught respect for the women’s owners.

I want kids to be taught respect for other people, regardless of gender (and of course other considerations, but that’s for a different discussion).  I don’t want boys (or girls) to be taught that females are special delicate flowers that need protecting (or at least the “nice” ones are).  I want them to learn that a person of another gender is primarily a person just like they are, and that they are to make no assumptions or distinctions solely on the basis of that gender.

* You can listen to the program here (starting around the 18:00 mark).

An Atheist Census for Canada

Initiative

Atheist Freethinkers would like a count of how many Canadians are atheists. So “Be Counted!” in Atheist Census Canada:

Please participate in our Atheist Census Canada. Having been initially launched in Quebec, our census now extends to all of Canada.

You can be counted anonymously as an atheist in Canada because Atheist Freethinkers has provided a form. There are five easy questions, so you can say, “I am an atheist!”:

  • I was born in:
  • My gender is:
  • My completed education level is:
  • First three characters of my postal code:

To ensure your confidentiality, we require only the first half of your postal code, of the form letter digit letter.

  • My email Address:

Your email address is necessary in order to confirm your participation in the census. You will receive an email message from us for that purpose. Your email address is strictly confidential. Only the one-way-encrypted address is stored in our database.

 

Be Counted! Fill out the form; say

 

Dawkins and Krauss in Toronto

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As you can see, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss are walking the streets of Toronto.  Last night, they attended the Hot Docs world premiere of The Unbelievers. Krauss was very enthusiastic about the reception the movie received in Toronto, the city where Krauss spent his childhood. After the movie, Krauss sent a Twitter @LKrauss1 message to his followers

Just finished world premiere of @unbelieversfilm. Standing ovation. Was one of the most remarkable and gratifying sights I can remember.

All lot of people want to meet and talk to Dawkins and Krauss. Yesterday, they appeared on Global News’ “The Morning Show,” and Ivan Semeniuk interviewed them for the Globe and Mail:

Semeniuk asks,

Aren’t there important things that we can all draw from religion, like a sense of community or consolation in difficult times?

 

Dawkins: We can find fellowship and community in other settings, of course. I think it’s an odd thing to encourage people to get consolation from something for which there’s no evidence. Science, of course, provides it’s own consolation – the consolation of knowing what it’s all about. This is something uplifting.

 

Krauss: People are programmed to think that reality isn’t uplifting and that it takes away from things to understand perhaps that the universe isn’t made for us. But I think what we need to do is encourage people to recognize that that doesn’t make your life less meaningful. You make the meaning in your own life.

Tomorrow, May 1, Dawkins and Krauss will be the guests of CFI Canada at a brunch in their honour. 50 lucky people will get to meet and talk to “these two giants of science.”

Tickets to the brunch and all four showings of The Unbelievers are sold out, but the Canadian Atheist website will feature reports on the brunch and the movie.

BC Religious and Secular Attitudes Poll

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The BC Humanist Association commissioned a poll of British Columbia to determine religious identity, belief in God, and views on how religion should intersect with government and education.  The results were presented today at the BC Humanist Association Annual General Meeting:

Do you practice or participate in a particular religion or faith?

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Regardless of whether you participate in a particular religion or faith, do you believe in a higher power?

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Yes: 70.4%                  No: 20.2%                   Don’t know: 9.4%

Do you agree or disagree with the following: Public education in British Columbia should . . .?

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Detailed results are available on the BC Humanist website.

Management-Speak

Oxford Dictionaries ‏on Twitter @OxfordWords alerted me to the Guardian article, “10 of the Worst Examples of Management-Speak.” I love words, but sometimes the way they are used makes me cringe. Steven Poole has the same reaction because in his article, he “drills down into the strangled vocabulary of office jargon”:

1 Going forward is the “now-venerable way of saying ‘from now on’ or ‘in future.’”

2 Drill down “Far be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of phallic machinery, but why else say ‘drill down’ when you just mean ‘look at in detail’?”

3 Action “can probably always be replaced with a more specific verb, such as ‘reply’ or ‘fulfil’, even if they sound less excitingly action-y. The less said of the mouth-full-of-pebbles construction ‘actionables’, the better.”

4 End of play “A manager who tells you to do something ‘by end of play’ – in other words, today – is trying to hypnotise you into thinking you are having fun. This is not a game of cricket.”

10 Sunset An imagistic verbing – “We’re going to sunset that project” – that sounds more humane and poetic than “cancel” or “kill.”

You can read numbers 5 to 9 can be found in the Guardian article, but I want to add one word that so many people use frequently either because they think it is correct or it sounds so much better than the word me: Myself  is a reflexive pronoun, but it is used, incorrectly, in sentences that say, “If you have any questions, you may contact my assistant or myself.”

Goodbye Ottawa Citizen Religion Experts

This is my last post on the Ottawa Citizen “Ask the Religion Experts” question.  I can’t bear to read all the answers to the latest question: “What do you think of the media telling religious organizations what they should believe, teach or do?” so I scanned a few responses.

Anglican priest Kevin Flynn says his “immediate reaction to the question is a bit dyspeptic.” Flynn and I have a reaction in common; listening to or reading the nonsense spouted by religion experts gives me indigestion and causes me to be irritable and bad tempered.

Reading Catholic priest Geoff Kerslake prattle on about “respect” makes me apoplectic. The Catholic Church has no respect for anyone, least of all for women and is constantly saying what Kerslake claims the media says

“you need to get with the program and change”

The media should ignore religious organizations except when they break the law or abuse the young and innocent or the old and dying. If the media ignored religious organizations, maybe religious organizations would go away, just shrivel up and die.

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