JOHN CHUCKMAN

AN EXTENSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I am not a Conservative, but already it is apparent that Kathleen Wynne, the new Liberal leader, is a disaster as premier.

She has exactly Dalton McGuinty’s smarmy instincts and political ethics.

One of the only worthwhile things done in his decade as the most irresponsible and inept premier in memory was his reminding the teachers of the fact that they are employees of the public at a time of fiscal difficulty.

This woman has wiped out the effort entirely.

And just look at her other acts over so brief a time as premier.

The investigation she launched into the cancer-drug scandal was genuinely McGuintyesque, a way to delay and put-off while appearing to do something. Any good private investigator could have got to the bottom of the matter in 3 days.

Her recent initiative on wind farms represents virtually no change from McGuinty’s high-handed ways. In Britain, for example, the government is giving local municipalities a veto over them.

Wynne has done nothing of substance about McGuinty’s several scandals of mismanagement.

No changes at e-Health beyond McGuinty’s last appointment resigning and getting a Golden Handshake for solving nothing at the troubled agency.

No changes in our forgotten air-ambulance scandal.

Her recent change in teacher education requirements are leftover initiatives of McGuinty.

The cutting of places in education colleges was something which should have been done years ago. It’s just basic housekeeping never kept up with, not reform.

The new two-year requirement for graduates is backward. Many other jurisdictions have realized that “teachers’ colleges” are ineffective. Putting well-educated and motivated young people – or indeed, not-so-young – into class rooms is what we need. Learn-by-doing under, say, two years of mentoring by experienced teachers is the reform we need.

Teachers’ colleges are staffed by teachers who dropped out of the classroom, who promote unscientific, and even plainly silly, theories about how things are done, and who use language which calls a spade a manually-operated excavating machine. Any intelligent young person will learn how their skills best serve teaching during a couple of years practicing, not the 80 days now proposed for teachers’ colleges and certainly not the present standard of 40 days.

Hasn’t our government learned anything about education? The previous director of TDSB was hired by people who clearly did not know what they were doing. He was likely awarded his doctorate by an education faculty who also did not know what it was doing.

Ontario schools are by no measure outstanding. Our public education is a leader in nothing. We don’t even compare to the world’s most successful systems. The computer hasn’t yet been integrated with many teachers unable to use them and our schools not supplying them to all students, a longstanding practice in a number of jurisdictions.

But this government can tell young people if they just spend more time in education faculties and waste more resources, adding costs and debt, they’ll be able to do a better job. Nonsense.

If “found money” – money supposedly suddenly discovered in declining enrollments – went anywhere, except applied to the deficit where it genuinely belonged, it should have gone towards obtaining computers for our students, but then we still have many teachers who cannot use a computer. Many jurisdictions put lap-tops into each student’s hands, but not Ontario, bastion of teachers’ union interests and second-rate education.

I’m going to vote Conservative for the first time in my life at the next provincial election, and I’m not even attracted to the leader, Mr. Hudak. A decade of McGuinty was enough, and Wynne shows every promise of being even worse.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ERIN ANDERSSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I truly do not know why anyone writes anything about bullying anymore, except for personal publicity or reward or just taking credit for being on the side of the angels.

Almost all of the stuff purchased at considerable expense and robotically disseminated by the school boards is of that nature.

This piece of pulp fiction by Erin Andersson is just one more large serving of the same unhelpful stuff. It is filled with arguable assertions and incorrect statements which reflect the dogmas of the Church of True Believers in Public School Ethics.

“Zero-tolerance policies on fighting, as cases in Canada have shown, do not solve the problem either, often leading to punishment without investigation, and little follow-up.”

An absolutely false assertion: zero-tolerance on violence was an excellent policy whose effects would make our schools safer places and benefit society in the long term.

It was dropped for one reason only: a disproportionate number of those treated under the policy came from a particular ethnic group, the false assumption for dropping it being that the policy was unfairly employed.

Dropping the policy made teachers and innocent students immediately more vulnerable to the small percentage of people who are violent.

“Research consistently shows that bullying is linked to depression, poor school performance and anxiety, for both victim and perpetrator.”

Here is the classic use of “research says” to bolster a pathetic argument. Of course bullying is related to mental problems, but then so are almost all forms of crime. Tests have repeatedly shown that prison populations are full of people with serious mental and emotional problem.

So do we stop arresting and imprisoning people for crimes? Of course not.

And just so, violence and bullying in schools.

“When left unchecked, bullies can destroy lives…”

Another insipid bromide. Of course violence destroys lives. Isn’t that the very meaning of violence?

The problem in our schools is easily understood, but not so easily corrected: no one is responsible for anything. No one even wants to assume responsibility. Acts of bullying occur every day in plain sight and are ignored. Teachers and principals and superintendents are afraid of parents who are themselves bullies.

So they set no enforceable standards and speak with the kind of psycho-babble terms and meaningless educationese with which this article is replete.

When a robber assaults you in your home or store, you want the police, and you want the courts to dispense justice. And that is just what the victims of true bullies want, only they do not get it, learning from their painful experience that there is no justice nor agreed-upon way of behaving in society. That is a mighty poor lesson to be teaching.

I think if we are not prepared to do what it takes to protect students from bullies, we should just shut up. It truly is tiresome to read useless, thoughtless stuff like this article.