JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY LYSIANE GAGNON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Our new culture of compulsive communication”

I like the expression even though it is highly inaccurate.

Tweeting is not our culture.

It represents the habit of a portion of our population, and I’m not sure that it qualifies even as a “culture” for them.

Likely they represent the same portion that has always had a compulsive problem with communication.

Young folks used to talk for hours on land-line phones, generally about nothing of any import.

The expression “verbal diarrhea” is quite old: I remember it in a university psychology course in the early 1960s.

Sadly, too many of our columnists and radio hosts suffer with a form of the same complaint: they write about trivia and passing fads and elevate them into the substance of “culture.”

Apart from Ms. Gagnon and, of course, Margaret Wente, much of our new Radio One CBC is of just this nature.
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“My younger colleagues used Wikipedia as a source for everything, were unwilling to spend time reading the texts or accessing the libraries, and I spent hours editing our written projects. The ability to write a concise, grammatically correct sentence (let alone a paragraph) seemed to be beyond the other contributors…”

I recognize the problem the writer describes, but it, in fact, has little or nothing to do with technology.

The truth is that technology is, in general, not yet in our schools, at least in any meaningful way.

We are badly behind by world standards.

It is simply amazing how many teachers do not know how to use a computer or know about good data sources on the Internet.

The problem you describe has several actual causes.

First, social promotion now sees people quickly rising to the levels of incompetence in schools.

High school grades have become a poor indicator of ability or performance.

Second, our colleges and universities are taking in students who simply should not even be in those institutions.

The institutions do this for purely monetary purposes, as when Ontario’s schools of education graduate 12,000 each year and only 7,000 get jobs (I even doubt that number).

Teachers at all levels are frequently lazy and indifferent. That’s the main explanation for “group work” despite all the blather about team work.

They only have to mark a third or quarter of the number of projects.

What you find often in assigned groups is one or two who work conscientiously and the others “ride their coat tails.”

So far as the ability to write, no demands are made by many teachers in Ontario.

The so-called literacy test is a pathetic little game, and the game allows teachers to avoid being tougher in classes about writing skills, as they once were.

Many teachers’ ability even to explain to students principles of research – such as confirming a source with another source – are often non-existent, as you see with Wikipedia (a good source but one that requires other source confirmation).

Many of our current teachers are themselves the products of this poor system, and they enter the system only to further degrade it.

It’s a sad situation, and we are wasting huge costs to no advance of education.

Your comment also confuses – as does the columnist’s piece – what really is technology.

Yes, Tweeting involves the use of a technology, but then so does answering the telephone or the doorbell.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, you have this matter entirely wrong. Jian Ghomeshi clearly did not do the required research for an effective interview. He broke the rule every good interviewer knows, that you must know your subject before you meet.

Professionals like Shelagh Rogers or Eleanor Wachtel or Don Newman would never be caught flat-footed as Ghomeshi, something one finds regularly with him. This was only the most embarrassing of many blunders and poor judgments.

He is simply the weakest host ever placed into this once venerable time-slot on CBC Radio.

And it is a very good question as to why he even interviews trashy characters like this guest. The answer is simple: he is the most visible evidence of CBC’s lowering its standards and pandering to a mass audience. Who even needs a CBC that tries to compete with trash radio?

Ghomeshi interviewed, some while back, a mother in B.C. whose young daughter was exposed to a raw pornographic magazine (“Butt”) in a store carrying young people’s clothes. It was stupidly used as part of a display.

Ghomeshi literally badgered the mother – mildly, but nevertheless definitely badgered – as though she were the villain in the piece with her complaint, going against free expression.

It wasn’t even a national story, just an embarrassing local business, so why did Ghomeshi feature it? Complete lack of judgment.

What part of children and pornography did Ghomeshi not get I asked? Well, he got his own back, in spades, from this trashy hillbilly, another interview that should never have taken place.

Ghomeshi regularly drags up trashy candidates for interview, as Gene Simmons, the former member of the rock group Kiss, known for his own crude talk.

In another interview, Ghomeshi talked to a pop singer about his girlfriend’s “hot body.” Great, morning public radio is to sound like a locker room?

I simply do not agree that Jian Ghomeshi is “a polite and gracious host.” He does not have the skills for his job, and he does not have the wide interests and sharp mind of so many CBC personalities.