What Bad Teachers Can't Be Fired: Union Power

Margaret Wente has a column in today's Globe and Mail, which identifies the problem with the Canadian public education system as the teacher's unions, as I argued in a post the other day.  She offers no solutions: apparently the obvious cannot be said out loud in the mainstream media yet.  But the fact remains that no significant improvement to the public school system will be possible until the teacher's unions are broken. 

She writes:

Bad teachers are well defended by their unions, which makes it so hard to get rid of them that powerless school administrators generally give up. Instead, they try to get the bad eggs to move on – a process widely known as “passing the trash.” The regulators are captives of the unions, too. The OCT is dominated by former union executives who caucus together before meetings to hammer out the party line. In theory, their job is to serve the public. In reality, they serve their own.

The Star’s embarrassing revelations prompted the OCT to hire a distinguished retired judge, Patrick LeSage, to tell it how to reform itself. His sensible suggestions, released last week, are a laundry list of the obvious: Disclose the names of all teachers found guilty of misconduct, hold formal public hearings for the most serious cases and revoke the licences of teachers found guilty of sexual misconduct. He also recommended that more non-teachers should sit on the panels that hear misconduct cases.

But these measures don’t go far enough. So long as the unions are allowed to dominate the regulator, “no procedural overhaul, no matter how ingenious or rigorous, is likely to lead to increased effectiveness or public confidence,” writes Doretta Wilson of the Society for Quality Education.

 Why she cannot draw the obvious conclusion is that left-wing ideology is so powerful in this country that we cannot even talk about the necessary steps we need to take to promote educational reform.  This is a sad commentary on late modern Canada.

Cross-posted at The Bayview Review

Satan Gives Commencement Addrss at St. Sincerus

In the wake of Georgetown University's decision to invite Kathleen Sibellius (best known as the persecutor of Catholic and Evangelicals, as well as other faith communities,) to speak at its Commencement Ceremony recently, the Catholic Phoenix decided that mockery would be the most appropriate response. 

So it announced that St. Sincerus University, the 84th largest Catholic university in the US, has invited Satan to be its Commencement speaker.  (Today's liberal Catholic universities do not make satire easy.)

In a move already denounced by Catholic bishops & other leading religious conservatives, St. Sincerus University, the nation’s 84^th largest Catholic university, has invited Satan to deliver its commencement speech later this month. Also known as the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, &, more popularly, the Devil, Satan is a divisive figure among Catholics & other Christians. Several Catholic universities have upset religious conservatives in recent years by inviting controversial figures to deliver commencement speeches, as when the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s largest Catholic University, invited President Barack Obama, who supports a woman’s right to abortion, in 2009. The invitation to Satan by SSU president Fr. Thad Despereaux comes at a time when many Catholics are highly critical of the Obama administration’s attempts to reform health care, which some claim would force Catholic institutions to violate their Church’s teachings by providing contraceptives as part of their health insurance plans. Fr. Despereaux, in comments made to the Daily Sham, SSU’s student newspaper, said that having Satan on campus gives bold witness to a central Catholic principle that God can be found in all things. “The continuing politicization of the faith indicates just how important it is for us to build bridges,” Fr. Despereaux said. “Our whole mission as a university is to bring people together. Satan is badly misunderstood by many people, & we hope to show our graduates that stereotypes, & the hatred they engender, have no place on a Catholic campus. As Catholics we are to hate hate.”

On-campus reactions at SSU have been favorable, as faculty & students alike have applauded the university’s open-mindedness in issuing the invitation. Dr. Sophia Greengrass, Director of the university’s Wiccan Institute, called the invitation a brave attempt to promote the university’s academic integrity in the face of “fascist attempts by the male hierarchy to impose its limited & limiting dogmas,” . . .

 Read the rest here.

Now, Dr. Satan's speech is up.  Here is the beginning. 

Thank you. (loud applause) Thank you all very much. Thank you, Fr. Despereaux. Please, folks (continued applause), please be seated. A little restraint every now & then. . . (laughter).
Seriously, this is quite an honor for me. I can’t say an unexpected honor, as this invitation was in the cards for some time now. And this despite all the non-attention I’ve received from many of your Catholic intellectuals; wasn’t it your own Fr. Cheever in Ancient Near Eastern Studies who said in your student paper that I don’t exist? (laughter). He’s not alone in thinking that, though I take it that after we got to know each other a bit better last night he has a different take on things. Talk about an ashen countenance when I discussed my background! Suffice it to say that he knows a bit more about ancient mythology & sacrifice than he did before we spoke. It really is too bad he can’t be here today, as he’s much in my thoughts, as are all the fine academics at this institution. Much of the work you do is directly responsible for my being here today, & I am much pleased by it.

To honor the graduates of St. Sincerus, I will focus my remarks on the creative gifts God has so richly blessed you all with, as well as on your sacred responsibility to nurture those gifts, despite the heavy costs. As you know, you live in a world in which the majority of people seek to restrain, to control, & even to deny the creativity of the few. Isn’t it a sad irony that such a gift, which can help you to make & remake your world, & which is an expression of God’s image within you, so badly frightens the unimaginative? 

Read the rest here. 

On Teaching Students to "Think For Themselves"

Here are three questions every university professor must answer:

1. Should university education be "unbiased"?
2. Should professors teach students "what to think" or should they teach them "how to think"?
3. Should a student expect a professor to come to class, lay out a range of conflicting views on a certain topic (eg. economic theories about creating jobs in a recession, whether Aristotle is misogynist, whether the British Empire was a force for good or evil in the world, various views on abortion or euthanasia or war, Milton's view of free speech, or Mill's no harm principle) and then invite the students to choose which one to accept?
   

I think each of these questions is more difficult to answer than one one might think at first glance.

First, let's take the third question, which asks about what I call the "cafeteria approach to forming one's opinions." Now, I understand that many of my students come to my classes expecting professors to function like the operators of the campus cafeteria. Here are four (or three or five) views on this subject: pick the one you like best.

They think this way for several reasons. For one thing, they have never experienced any form of education that did not avow this as the goal except for the hard sciences, which most of them have not studied at a rigorous level. Even those who understand that the hard sciences do not traffic in personal opinions seem to think that the humanities and social sciences are completely different on this point. So even if they are not relativists about the hard sciences, they usually are about ethics, literature and politics. (This often applies even to students who are committed Christians!)

If there is one lesson most students learn from twelve years of public school it is that they have the personal right to choose - except when they don't. The point is that in matters concerning their own bodies they have the right to be total, postmodern relativists and make up their own morality, but in matters of government, taxes, money, language and politics they must conform to group think. This is what contemporary educational theory is designed to teach and does teach very effectively.

All reality is divided into the realms of the "private" and the "public." They are convinced that it is perfectly fine to hold any view you choose on "private" issues and utterly heinous to depart from group think on "public" issues. On private issues you can have any opinion you like; on public issues you must think like the herd. However, they never get around to thinking about why various issues get assigned to each category. It never seems to intrigue them that sexual behavior used to be private and sexual morality public and now it has been reversed so that sexual behavior is public and sexual morality is private. Why is that? "Dunno, just is" many would say.

Thus, they are essentially confused about the foundations of truth, goodness and beauty. But they think their mixed-up views are sane and logical simply because they derive their opinions from the majority of authority figures in the culture.

When they encounter me, however, they are often quite shocked to realize that I do not think they have the right to choose their own truth in private matters and I actually encourage rebellion against the group think known as "political correctness" on public matters. I'm authoritarian where they have been taught to glorify the romantic rebel against authority and rebellious where they have been taught to be meekly submissive!

Unlike secular, public educational theory, I believe that there is a vast difference between the right to choose for yourself and the right to think for yourself. I believe that everyone has the right to think for himself, but also that, having thought carefully about an issue, one must bow to the objective truth on that issue instead of choosing the view that is most congenial or comfortable to oneself.

It is "pedagogical prostitution" simply to teach what the "customer" wants to hear and it is irresponsible in the extreme to present a range of true, partly true, partly false and false opinions as if they were equal in status. In fact, to teach this way is to teach epistemological relativism in practice no matter what one says in theory.

Does this mean one only teaches the "one, true view" of every issue? No, of course not. It simply means that, even when presenting views one does not hold, one recognizes and admits openly that one is coming from a particular perspective. I notice that this makes some students uncomfortable and, when that happens, the most common response is to accuse me of "bias" as if I wasn't supposed to have any - or more realistically - was not supposed to admit openly that I have any. It is as if the mere assertion that one is unbiased does the trick. But of course it doesn't in actual practice. To avoid accusations of bias, it has to be followed up by a relativistic listing of options and an invitation to the student to choose according to his own, personal, irrational preferences. As soon as it becomes clear you won't do that, the accusation of bias comes back like a shot.

As for the second question, it should be clear by now that it presents a false dilemma because the only way to teach students how to think is to challenge the late modern and false idea that discovering truth is an act of the will - a choice - and advocating the traditional and true idea that discovering truth is an act of submission of the will to reality itself. It is not submission of the will to the professor any more than it is a submission of the will to "political correctness," "leftist media elites" or "the authority figures of pop culture." We teach students to think by getting them to think instead of lazily just choosing. Our goal is to teach them to think, not to merely to let the exercise of the will lazily substitute for rational deliberation. The more they actually think the more they will come to see the poverty and nihilism of just choosing.

As for the first question, it would seem that we have a paradox: the university can only be truly unbiased by being biased. How so? A professor must be biased toward the truth as he honestly and sincerely sees it, but he he must make it clear that his opinion is not the standard of truth in itself. How can this be done?

Most importantly, a professor must, (like the preacher), point away from himself to something that stands higher than any individual opinion and try to get the student to see it for himself. Now, the fact that the student does not, at any given moment, see the truth in the same way is not as important as that the student understands that the truth itself is different from both the professor's opinion and the student's preference. The student must learn that this is so even when the professor's opinion happens to be true, just as much as it is when the professor's opinion happens to be false. Helping students develop a reverence for, and submissive spirit before, the truth is the greatest challenge of pedagogy. It is a delicate high wire act and extremely easy to mess up. For this reason, many professors lack the courage to teach well.

But if the professor seeks to exhibit no bias whatsoever, he must therefore treat truth and falsehood equally and to do this is to be a practicing relativist. And that is an ignoble betrayal of the teaching profession, for which love of wisdom and truth is the highest value.

So there must be academic freedom for both professor and student. Academic freedom for the professor will allow him to dissent from political correctness, majority opinion and cultural values that are false and in conflict with Christian truth. It thus frees the professor to stand for the truth as he sees it. Academic freedom for the student allows him to dissent from the professor's view without losing marks as long as the student has reasonable and fact-based arguments for doing so.

The grey area in adjudicating this delicate balance will arise from a clash of worldviews: the commitment to absolute truth that one hopes the Christian professor professes and the commitment to personal choice as higher than truth on private matters and the necessity of conforming to political correctness on public matters that the student has imbibed from secular education and the contemporary culture at large.

The result is a paradoxical situation: teaching students to think for themselves will necessitate a vigorous defense of truth and a refusal to allow students to say that it doesn't matter what a person chooses to believe because it is a personal choice. Some students will have to be drug through this door kicking and screaming and it won't feel to them like being made more broad-minded. It will feel like being indoctrinated - a curious paradox! But until they realize that the truth is not personal opinion - either their own or their professor's - they have not even learned that they need to think for themselves, let alone how to do so with excellence.

I tell my students that a real university education involves learning to detect, and allow for, biases because biases are everywhere - in the textbooks they read, in blog posts, in their professors, in their peers, in pop culture, in contemporary, public education etc. To expect a professor to be a safe island of objectivity in a seas of bias is unrealistic. I also tell them that open, professed, argued-for, biased beliefs are much less dangerous to them than unacknowledged, denied, presumed, biased beliefs. It is the latter for which they should especially be on the lookout.

When someone tells you that he is just "trying to help you learn to think for yourself," rather than "telling you what to think" your BS antennae should go up and a little red light should start flashing in your mind. For what comes next is likely to be either (1) a bid to get you to accept the idea that truth is a function of your personal choosing (inculcation in moral relativism) or (2) an attempt to persuade you that you have to accept the dicta of the politically correct police because that is what all right-thinking people do (inculcation in secularism).

Life is full of paradoxes.

Liberal Government Puts Political Correctness Ahead of the Welfare of Ontario's Children

Unfortunately, the Liberal government here in Ontario is resuming its radical, sexual revolution indoctrination program for children in Ontario schools against the will of Christian parents. Why? Because the election is over. We had our chance to vote them out and we didn't.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Ontario's Liberal government says it is not prepared to abandon the sex-ed component of a pending anti-bullying law, despite criticism by some religious leaders Tuesday that it is an affront to traditional family values.

Christian, Jewish and Muslim representatives say they agree school bullies must be stopped, but they can't condone a requirement under the legislation proposed to deal with it that schools promote sexual tolerance through gay clubs.

“To force, especially Christian classrooms or schools, to have homosexual clubs would of course be an affront to their family values,” Charles McVety, of the Institute for Canadian Values, told a joint news conference.

“And what does this have to do with bullying? Nothing.”

Mr. McVety, who led the fight against the Liberals' last attempt to update the province's sex-ed curriculum, says Premier Dalton McGuinty is using the problem of bullying to advance “his radical sex education agenda.”

The religious leaders say that agenda is driven by gay activists.

“When you are forcing teachers, Christian teachers, Jewish teachers, Muslim teachers, to teach things that are contrary to the values that they hold, to teach that there are six genders and that you are not attached to the gender of your anatomy, do you not find that that may be an offence to a lot of Ontarians?” asked Mr. McVety.

Rabbi Mendel Kaplan of Chabad Flamingo Synagogue in Toronto said he also believes that parts of the anti-bullying bill aimed at making schools inclusive and tolerant of gay lifestyles are offensive to many families.

“This legislation proposes that children be indoctrinated to reject their parents' faith and their parents' family values, and that's an affront,” said Mr. Kaplan.

“What nobody here in good conscience can support is a law that calls on people of faith to abandon the beliefs that we consider sacred, all in the name of political correctness.”

Let us be clear: the issue is not really bullying. This is a poll-tested bit of emotional manipulation used by the radical, sexual revolutionists used by them to slip radical changes past the public and to intimidate the conservative opposition.

The result of this policy is going to be our schools basically doing what the schools in the old Soviet Union did: indoctrinating the children with anti-family, anti-religious propaganda so as to turn them against their parents' belief systems.

This is evil and dispicible. Dalton McGuinty is a cynical, compromised, venal politician who should be disciplined by his Church. Only the cowardice of Roman Catholic bishops allows such a man to trawl for votes by subtly flaunting his Catholicism at election time and then turn against the Church (and all religious people) when it suits his political agenda.

Protestant leaders are no better. Where is the EFC? Where are leading Evangelical pastors and leaders of major Evangelical institutions? I'd say that we get the government we deserve, but our children do not deserve to be authority figures in positions of trust.

Vulnerable, confused children will be encouraged to be "gay" through this program and, as a result, we will see increases in depression, sexual experimentation, vulnerability to adult sexual predators, drug abuse and suicide. The children are collateral damage in the Revolution.

The Marxists are winning without firing a shot.

It Can't Happen Here - Can It?

I can't believe this story is true, but it seems to be factually accurate so far. I want to hear more information. But on the surface this looks like America is a lot closer to a ruthless police state than anyone could have ever imagined.

News 10 in Stockton, California, an ABC affiliate, reports that a SWAT team from the Department of Education broke down the door of a Stockton man's house at 6 am on Tuesday morning and held him captive for 6 hours in a police car in his underwear. They were looking for his estranged wife (who wasn't even there) because of something to do with unpaid student loans. Here is part of the story from the ABC News 10 website:

STOCKTON, CA - Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

"I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers," Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

"He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there," Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there - Wright's estranged wife.

"They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the city of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright's search warrant.

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans.

"They busted down my door for this," Wright said. "It wasn't even me."

Wow! Go here to see the TV report. The Department of Education apparently has confirmed that they did this but they are refusing to explain.

Things that are shocking:

1. The Department of Education has a SWAT team?
2. The government carries out home invasions over debt collection?
3. The national news media is not all over this story like flies on honey?

Maybe there will be a public outcry and a thorough investigation. Maybe heads will roll and high up officials in the Department of Education will be forced to explain what is going on.

Or maybe Obama will say it is all Bush's fault and the media will give it a pass.

You might want to note Kenneth Wright's skin color. Let's see how the Democratic appointee who heads the Department of Education, Arne Duncan, responds. I hope with outrage and decisive action. Is this administration on the side of black Americans or just left-wing black Americans?

If the facts are as they have been reported, I also hope Mr. Wright sues the Government and gets lots of free legal help. We shall see.

Heh, heh, ho, ho: Western Civ Has Got to Go!

Mona Charon at The National Review is happy that her son, who goes off to college this Fall, is going to study Music. Why? Because it is one of the disciplines least affected by grade inflation, political correctness and the obsession with sex that characterizes most of Western higher education today.

A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education counts David’s college as among the seven best for free speech in the nation. That such a list is required speaks volumes. The seven are Arizona State, Dartmouth, William and Mary, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. Not that these seven are moderate in their political or social views. Don’t make me laugh. Not that they have more than one or two Republicans on the whole humanities faculty. Ha! No, these schools excel simply because they don’t exert the kind of totalitarian thought and speech control so commonplace on American campuses.

Colleges are actually ranked on being "best for free speech"? In America? Who knew? Higher education is sinking lower and lower.

We scrape together our hard-earned income (lots of it) to deposit our cherished offspring at schools that are determined to teach them to despise everything we revere — even learning.

Three decades ago, at Stanford University, Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” If you were in any doubt, the National Association of Scholars reports that the mob was wildly successful. The institutions that are (or were) one of the glories of Western civilization — universities — now no longer see the worth of teaching the history of the West. In The Vanishing West, the NAS examined the curricula at 50 leading colleges over time. In 1964, all of them required some sort of Western civilization survey course or interdisciplinary course treating the same themes. They began with Greek civilization and encompassed Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, literature, art, music, the history of science, political philosophy, the modern era, and so forth. By 2010, none of the 50 colleges required any course in Western Civ. Even for history majors, survey courses on Western civilization are rarely required. The same is true for American history.

Students can still find courses on these subjects, but only as choices in a vast cafeteria of offerings that also includes courses like “Lesbian Queer Media Cultures” (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), “The Living and the Undead: An Inquiry Into Zombies in Cinema and Literature” (University of Mississippi), “The Militarization of American Daily Life” (Oberlin), and “The American Sexual Past” (Temple University). The term “higher education” is fast becoming a misnomer. American students are graduating with scads of courses on zombies and queer theory — which is why we’re importing an ever-larger number of our Ph.D.s.

What is wrong with colleges and universities today? They are occupied territory, having been conquered and occupied by the Generation of 68 with its anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-intellectual left-wing superstitions.

A liberal parent may glow with excitement and pride at the prospect of his child attending college. Isn’t that why she got straight A’s, crammed for the SATs, played travel soccer, and dug wells in Guatemala during summer breaks? But no conservative can be entirely cheerful at the prospect of an impressionable youth being bundled off to a university in the United States. Academia is a conquered land — the playground of the ultra left.

The fusion of Greek philosophy and science with Biblical revelation sparked the creation of the greatest civilization in the history of the world. Political liberalism, democracy, the separation of church and state, individual liberty, capitalism, science, Gothic cathedrals and classical music are just some of its accomplishments.

To think all this is evil, depraved and unworthy of study is to reject one's own tradition and one's own identity in favor of a revolutionary, Utopian, Gnostic dream of human perfectibility and economic equality.

Jesse Jackson can rest easy: Western civilization is sinking beneath the waves. I hope he is proud that the only civilization in the history of the world to abolish slavery so far is going down. I hope he is glad that universities are the least free, the most mediocre and the lowest quality they have ever been. After all, that is what passes for progress for Progressives.

University Education Under Fascism

In the Corporatist State of Sinclair Lewis's depiction of fascist America in It Can't Happen Here, it is interesting to see his take on what university education would look like under Fascism. All American universities are closed and entirely new Corporatist ones are created:

"Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the new Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in recivilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called 'intellectual' teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of 'intellectualism.'

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archeology, philolophy; all history before 1500 - except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarianians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained,but, to avoid the superstitious errors inordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to wast time on the so-called 'literature'; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief choruses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called 'pure science,' it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulae, cement-road construction, and all other useful subjects for the formation of he new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operations of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, thought students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-foggy inefficiency was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad could graduate in two years." (pp. 207-8)

I'm afraid to comment on this vision very extensively; suffice it to say that I fight a mild, incremental and respectable version of it every day.

Public Education Needs to Be Union Free

Here is Reason #999 why public sector unions, and teachers' unions in particular, need to be severely restricted, reformed and de-politicized. The Catholic Teachers Union in Ontario is charging all its members an extra $60 to help elect their bosses in the next provincial election. The political party thus elected with union money (the Liberals) will then continue doling out the goodies to the unions in the form of higher salaries, more luxurious benefits etc. It is a corrupt system and one that is going to bankrupt the country eventually.

The National Post reports:

An Ontario teachers union has approved charging its members an extra $3-million to fund a political action campaign aimed at keeping the Progressive Conservatives out of office in the fall provincial election.

The $60-per-member additional fee was passed by 67% of delegates at the Ontario Catholic Teachers Association’s annual general meeting last month in Toronto.

“Our goal is to elect an education-friendly legislature in order to protect the gains in education made over the past eight years,” says a letter from union president James Ryan sent to members.

The letter suggests the fund will not be agitating merely about policy. It says delegates left the meeting “acutely aware of how the election of a Conservative government under Tim Hudak would threaten the common good, particularly education.”

The fee will take effect July 1. All of the $60 will go to the teachers’ union’s campaign for the election on Oct. 6, when Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty will seek a third term. The local bargaining unit will get $12 of each payment to support local election-related activities.

With more than 45,000 members teaching all grades in publicly funded English Catholic schools in Ontario, the fee will generate close to $3-million for the election kitty, said Mr. Ryan.

What amazes me is how out in the open and brazen this corrupt, self-serving system is. Many of the teachers will vote Conservative but the union bosses don't care as long as they elect their Liberal pals and the teachers are forced to pay union dues for purposes they don't agree with forever.

Educational reform is badly needed in Canada. The power the teachers' unions must be broken. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey is doing what eventually every state and province in North America must do in order to avoid fiscal collapse.

But the pernicious effects go far beyond the financial. The unions protect bad teachers and prevent them being fired. They marginalize the wishes of parents and impose the latest crackpot, "progressive" (read cultural Marxist) ideologies on the poor, unwitting students, and they thus decrease educational standards and shortchange students who graduate unable to read, write, and think logically for themselves. They also impose a pansexualist, promiscuity-glorifying, debilitating sexual education ideology on children over parents' objections.

None of these problems can be addressed adequately until the power of the unions is broken. How do we go about it? Maybe the best approach is simply to destroy the unions altogether and impose a process by which salaries and benefits are imposed by legislators beholden to citizens and taxpayers and then people can choose to work for the public education system or not based on whether they really want to teach or are just in it for the money.

Or maybe a move to a voucher system would be better. In that system, parents would be able to choose schools that they think are best for their children and some schools will choose to be union-free. If unions are so great, they should not be afraid of honest competition.

"Edu-babble" and the Culture of Death

Our Canadian public education has been politicized and taken over by cultural Marxists and so-called progressive educators who are out to destroy traditional metaphysics, traditional epistemology and traditional morality. Since they do not believe in truth or good and evil, they are necessarily more concerned about social engineering and in conditioning children than in empowering them by teaching knowledge. This is not merely a problem in that it gives children an inferior education; it is far worse than that. This kind of education leads to the culture of death.

Here is a story from the National Post by Kenyon Wallace entitled "The Problem with Edu-babble" about a teacher who gets it.

The inklings that much of the educational dogma being taught at teachers' college might not actually work in schools began to form even before Michael Zwaagstra set foot in a classroom of his own.

It wasn't that the young student-teacher felt he knew better than his University of Manitoba faculty of education professors, or that the overconfidence of youth had taken hold. It was more of a feeling that the in vogue, so-called "progressive" ideologies and unwavering but nebulous theories about how best to teach our kids simply wouldn't prove practical when staring at a class full of uninterested teenagers.

"When I took subjects outside the education faculty, it was great because I was actually learning about the subjects in question," he says. "But I remember thinking in my education classes that what we were learning — the de-emphasis on conveying knowledge in favour of becoming more of a 'guide on the side' — just didn't jibe with what I thought would make sense."

Ten years on, Mr. Zwaagstra is now a high school social studies teacher at Green Valley School in Grunthal, Man., a small town about an hour southeast of Winnipeg. He's had plenty of time to test the education philosophies he was force-fed while at university. His conclusion? They don't work, and we will continue to fail our kids if we don't change the way we teach and the way public education systems are administered.

Mr. Zwaagstra has collected his grievances in What's Wrong With Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them, a new book he co-authored with two of his former professors at the University of Manitoba's education faculty, Rod Clifton and John Long.

As its title suggests, the book attempts to provide what the authors call "common-sense solutions" in short chapters designed to provide parents with a crash-course in the contemporary Canadian classroom. The book touches on a number of controversial practices that have made headlines recently, including no-fail and no-test policies, the spread of "edu-babble" in curricula and a diminishing of teachers' authority in the classroom.

The most significant hurdle facing students, Mr. Zwaagstra argues, is a pervasive anti-knowledge bias that resists the teaching of specific, common content. The "child-centred learning" philosophy expects teachers to tailor instruction to the individual needs of each student while making the experience "fun," instead of teaching facts--the building blocks he believes should be in place before higher-level concepts can be taught.

Read the rest here.

The Nature of the Problem
The most interesting part of his critique is his accusation that teacher's colleges are dominated by an "anti-knowledge bias." The irony is just too much to bear: educators biased against knowledge.

I can accept a society in which the media is image-oriented and entertainment-oriented. I can accept that children will have many distractions and hindrances to education in a high tech, wired and image-driven environment like our contemporary society. I can even accept that teaching techniques will need to change in such an environment and that there can be new and non-traditional ways of reaching the goals of education. What I can never accept is educators themselves renouncing the goal of teaching our children knowledge - both the actual content of various subjects and the skills needed to continue learning independently like literacy, numeracy, research ability and logic.

"Edu-babble" arises out of a relativistic, late-modern, constructivist epistemology that is based on a nominalist metaphysics that is demonstrably false and which, if accepted by a society leads inexorably to the culture of death. Modern Western culture is a culture of death because it has lost its grasp on absolute Truth and succumbed to the "dictatorship of relativism." And relativism quickly melts before the tyranny of the will of the strong and the result is that killing comes to be seen as the solution to social problems. Only a rational metaphysics in which the human reason participates in the Divine Logos is sufficient to undergird an epistemology in which we can know truth from error, right from wrong and good from evil.

The Practical Solution
The teacher's unions have been taken over by leftist activists; there can be no solution to this problem until their power is broken. The top-down approach to educational philosophy must be replaced by a bottom-up approach in which the grassroots are empowered to make decisions at the local level. We should settle for nothing less that a voucher system that allows parents to choose the schools that they believe to be best for their children.

Schools should be governed by parents councils which hire principals who are empowered to hire, evaluate and, where necessary, fire teachers. This way various philosophies can compete on a level playing field as far as funding is concerned and the reality-based educational philosophies will quickly become popular and crowd out the "progressive" ones.

This may sound radical but it is very practical and realistic. It could be implemented tomorrow if it were not for the tremendous political power wielded by teachers unions who act in the self-interest of union leaders while pretending to be acting in the best interests of teachers and students. This is why the teachers unions must be smashed to bits. One can only pray that what is going on in New Jersey with Gov. Chris Christie's crusade against the teachers unions on behalf of taxpayers, parents and children will not only succeed but be emulated all over North America.

In Defense of the Liberal Arts

At National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson speaks out in defense of the liberal arts against both the therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right.

The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits. Budget cutting won’t spare education.

The public is already angry over fraud, waste, and incompetence in our schools and universities. And in these tough times, taxpayers rightly question everything about traditional education — from teachers’ unions and faculty tenure to the secrecy of university admissions policies to which courses really need to be taught.

Opportunistic private trade schools have sprouted in every community, offering online certification in practical skills without the frills and costs of so-called liberal-arts “electives.”

In response to these challenges, the therapeutic academic Left proved incapable of defending the traditional liberal arts. With three decades of defining the study of literature and history as a melodrama of race, class, and gender oppression, it managed to turn off college students and the general reading public. And, cheek by jowl, the utilitarian Right succeeded in reclassifying business and finance not just as undergraduate majors, but also as core elements in general-education requirements.

In such a climate, it is unsurprising that once again we hear talk of cutting the “non-essentials” in our colleges, such as Latin, Renaissance history, Shakespeare, Plato, Rembrandt, and Chopin.

This is a strange alliance of Left and Right against the conservative impulse to remember the past, meditate on transcendent things and refuse to embrace the cult of novelty. Hanson writes:

But the liberal arts train students to write, think, and argue inductively, while drawing upon evidence from a shared body of knowledge. Without that foundation, it is harder to make — or demand from others — logical, informed decisions about managing our supercharged society as it speeds on by.

Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.

And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.

The liberal arts are the "liberating arts;" they are the studies undertaken by the free man who wishes to remain free and make the best use of that freedom. The liberal arts explore what makes humans different from high-tech beasts. The liberal arts connect us to our tradition, our past, our heritage and the things that transcend time: beauty, goodness and truth.

A collectivist society ruled by the Conditioners has no need of the liberal arts. In fact, the liberal arts are a threat to the rulers and conditioners. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond, the Controller for Europe, keeps the Bible and Shakespeare locked up in a safe. Such works are dangerous to tyrants and social engineers because they convey a view of man as possessing free will, a conscience and a capacity to know God. All this breeds people who are hard to control and manipulate, who question authority and who cannot easily be kept in their place.

The liberal arts will be needed as long as people are free and when the darkness of totalitarianism falls they will fade away.

The Corruption of Western Universities as a Contributing Factor in Cultural Decline

Ed West, in his Daily Telegraph blog, makes the case that British universities are a threat to world peace:

Perhaps the least surprising thing about the Stockholm suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly is that he went to a British university. . . .

As anyone watching the disgraceful riots last week will have picked up on, violence is not the preserve of the uneducated or poor. Indeed, throughout modern history, Left-wing student movements have shown both a willingness to commit violence to get their way and to condone violent acts by others.

Rather than terrorism being a product of poverty and despair, as we’ve always been told, statistical studies of Islamic terrorists show they are no poorer than the population at large. Islamism has very little to do with “injustice” and everything to do with alienation and isolation (80 per cent of jihadis are immigrants or the children of immigrants), a thwarted sense of entitlement, idleness, and radical anti-Western politics.

Which is why British universities are, of course, the perfect breeding ground for Islamism, combining all of those things.

Read it all here.

Today's universities, generally speaking, (with honorable exceptions here and there) are mostly bastions of entitlement, laziness, drunkenness, sexual debauchery, violence and political correctness. Much of the self-loathing of people who have no moral center or purpose in life is turned into rage against "society" and its "patriarchy," "racism" and "capitalism." To think that this is not a breeding ground for hate and violence is to delude only oneself.

Jonathan Kay, in the National Post, describes a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda written by an anti-Zionist Jew named Jenny Peto at the University of Toronto's teacher's college, OISE. He writes:

By now, many people have heard of Jenny Peto — the 29-year-old anti-Israel fanatic who managed to get a Master’s Degree at OISE for a navel-gazing essay that claimed holocaust education was a tool of the Zionist war machine. Peto’s project was so offensive that she actually was rebuked in the Ontario legislature. Even ultra-politically correct diversity maven Karen Mock thinks that Peto is out to lunch. We also know that the Peto paper is littered with unsupported claims — thanks to this fine article by Robyn Urback.

But Peto is a small fish. The bigger problem here is OISE — the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, AKA UToronto’s teacher’s college — itself. For years, I’ve been hearing tales of political correctness gone amok at OISE, including radical anti-Israeli events. But it took the Peto case to really get me probing around to see what else is going on at OISE.

Someone else who’s been doing his homework is Werner Cohn, a former UBC sociology prof now living in New York. Below, reproduced with his permission, is his analysis of the 36 internet-available master’s theses that have been conducted under the auspices of OISE’s Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department. They read like a satire of 1990s-era political correctness.

Surely, the higher-ups at UToronto know about this sort of thing. Will the Peto scandal give them the excuse they need to clean house?

Here is a brief description of one thesis cited by Cohn:

….In this thesis I will explore this ruling using a methodological approach that engages practices of: self-reflexivity; tracing historical and political genealogies; and case study analysis…. Through an engagement with transnational and black feminist theorizing, anticolonial studies, and disability studies, I will suggest that “medical inadmissibility” is one of many regulatory mechanisms that work to fashion the Canadian nation-state as white, healthy, fit, and productive.

Here is another:

This body of work endeavours to interrogate mainstream media and popular culture [mis]representations of racialized persons, in addition to the negative impact such imageries have on identity formation processes….The ultimate goal of this project is to propel racialized students to move away from the [mis]educative effects of the media, toward beginning to define themselves on their own terms.

This is left-wing politicized propaganda and it is done at a public university supported by our tax money. There is no political balance evident: no conservative faculty or research and there is not much of real relevance to actual educational theory or practice. There is just a lot of doctrinaire cultural Marxism dressed up in impenetrable jargon that defeat understanding by anyone except other cult members.

It is time to take the universities back from the left=wingers. The hard left has burrowed deep into the faculty, while their left- of-center enablers staff the upper administration. No one is brave enough to stand up to them and academic freedom is just a cloak for enforced ideological conformity. Entire departments and so-called "disciplines" should be axed and faculty hiring practices must be taken out of the hands of the faculty until the philosophical and religious views of the faculty as a whole reflects the spectrum of Canadian society as a whole. At the moment it is skewed radically and disastrously to the left and the imbalance is killing the university as a place of science, reason and wisdom.

This is the mission field Christians must enter and occupy or else watch as our culture crumbles.

In Praise of the Lecture

The paradigmatic act of the university professor in the (originally) Western (but now Global) university in the modern age is the lecture. The disputation was central to the pedagogy of the Medieval university and the tutorial system is fundamental to the Oxbridge system. The graduate seminar is the backbone of the modern, research university. But common to all universities of all times is the lecture.

Many of the great books of world history originated as lecture series and the lecture series tending toward publication is one of the paradigmatic acts of the university community. The invited lecture series recognizes expertise, brings the academic community together and provides an occasion for listening, dialogue and debate. The question and answer session, the chit chat over refreshments and later the well-aimed article or book written in reply all are sparked by the lecture. For a supposedly one-way method of communication, the lecture can spur a lot of thought, discussion and nuanced argument. It takes more than Twitter-sized sound bites or 30 second commercials to make an argument that can change informed minds about complex matters.

It is well-known that the most important theological works of the twentieth century (by a rather wide margin), the fat volumes of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, took their form as lectures over the decades in Gottington, Munster, Bonn and Basel. I had professors in graduate school who recalled sitting in the audience during the lectures on IV.3 in the 1950s in Basel. It it highly significant, I think, that when Barth retired at the age of 75 he immediately lost his energy for producing the remaining volumes of the series. Without lectures to give, it seemed somehow pointless to him.

Today, the lecture is out of favor in politically-correct circles. Like dead white males, high academic standards and absolute truth, it has been consigned to the dustbin of history by enlightened, late-modern, progressives who do not quite believe that God grades on the curve, but who do hold it against Him that He does not.

I would speak in praise of the lecture. Some of my most memorable academic moments of revelation and insight occurred in lectures. I have, on occasion, left a lecture feeling privileged to have witnessed an historic event. True, some lectures are boring. But scholars who bore students should simply be taken out and shot for they have committed the unpardonable academic sin. Isn't that why James 3:1 says that not many should aspire to be teachers? (For all those serious pacifists out there, please note that my tongue is firmly in my cheek. Steady, there.)

In all seriousness, I wish to offer a few words in praise of the maligned and the outdated lecture. I can only hope that the reader will not feel that I am "lecturing" him because, to my dismay, the verb "lecturing" has been reduced to a mere synonym of "hectoring." What a come-down for a noble verb of great pedigree!

The Lecture is a Moral Event
First, we should recall that the lecture is an event. A book can be opened anytime I want. You Tube is always there. Great libraries all over the Western world are full of wisdom and knowledge contained in books which go unread as millions race to get in front of the television before the show de jour comes on.

But a lecture is always at a certain place at a certain time. Once it is over it is over. I resist students who want to tape my lectures and I would never put my lectures on video. How painful it would be to watch them five years on when I have moved on in the intellectual life and gained a few more inches (I would like to think) in the pursuit of wisdom.

But what kind of event is the lecture? I say it is a moral event first because it is a kind of profession of faith, which is why we are called "professors." Max Weber, good positivist that he was, would be horrified by this flaunting of the fact/value distinction. But the fact/value distinction is a product of a stunted modern epistemology detached from its metaphysical life source and left to die slowly from its inability to sustain itself in thin air.

To lecture is to take a stand of some kind. It is to present a thesis, propose an interpretation, or make an argument. It is to choose to leave some things out and to put other things in. It takes place in a set period of time and must prioritize ruthlessly. The most important thing in a lecture is to tell the truth and no lecture that does so will ever be boring.

To take a stand is a moral act. A person lectures, not a disembodied ghost or a mechanical voice coming over a speaker that sounds like a robot. A lecture is given in a concrete, specific language and from a certain perspective, whether that is Marxist or Buddhist, Freudian or Augustinian, Christian or Positivist. To lecture is to be forced out on a high wire in front of an audience where it is impossible to be neutral with regard to the truth. Qualify all you want, nuance all you like: your audience expects (and has a right to expect) you to take a position and defend it. This is a moral act. To be insincere here is to be exposed to the world as a hack, a sophist and an intellectual prostitute.

The Lecture as a Personal Act
Closely related to the idea of the lecture as a moral act is the idea of the lecture as a personal act. True education is always about personal growth toward the Truth. Some would charge the lecture with being the paradigmatic act of arrogance: one person stands there with all the truth while the rest sit quietly as supplicants. But this is to distill the university experience into only one of its moments, as if the slow movement of the pendulum to the right were never balanced by its eventual arc back to the left. To read in preparation and to argue in response are the parts of the educational experience set in motion by the lecture, which acts a fulcrum.

The lecture is given by a person; an individual with a history, a faith and a worldview. It is not given by rote or in accordance with a preset ideology. That is called propaganda and is to university life what the brothel is to the marriage bed. The listeners are also persons and they respond in a personal way. This idea is captured well by a remark I recently heard Don Carson make. He said: "My students do not learn what I teach them. They learn what I am excited about." Many teachers would recognize the truth of that remark.

The Lecture as a Tribute to Metaphysical Truth
Christianity is the religion of the Logos, the Word become flesh. Karl Barth's great formulation, building on the teaching of the Fathers and Reformers, of the three-fold Word of God reminds us that Jesus Christ is the Word in the primary sense, the Scriptures are the Word in the sense that they bear witness to Christ and the sermon is the Word of God proclaimed in the power of the Spirit. This is Reformation theology and it is a re-capturing of a true spirit of catholicity.

The emphasis on universal literacy and public education in the countries most strongly influenced by the Reformation is a testimony to the connection in the Protestant and catholic mind between the word and truth. "I am the Truth" says our Lord. "In the beginning was the Word" says the apostle. Pictorial representations of God are forbidden by the Second Commandment, but preaching is the Divinely-appointed means by which the Word is to be communicated. Given the exalted status of the sermon in the Protestant, and especially the Reformed, Churches, it is little wonder that some of its prestige should have rubbed off on the lecture.

In the University of Zurich, which sprang from the Bible lectures given by Zwingli in 1525, the line between the sermon and the lecture was blurred in his exegetical lectures which were considered life-giving and life-changing by their hearers. In a multitude of Reformed Churches today, pastors give Bible lectures that are lapped up by thirsty listeners eager to get to know God better by searching out the truth of the Holy Scriptures.

The authoritative proclamation of Scripture became a model for the proclamation of truth in the university and the metaphysical framework provided by the classical tradition of biblical theology provided a canopy under which science could grow and flourish. This "sacred canopy" today is filled with holes and in many institutions of higher learning it has been rolled up and carted away to the delight of the atheists and materialists. But science and the pursuit of wisdom does not flourish in the harsh sun and flash floods of atheistic materialism. The lecture is dying; the university is dying. Could there be a connection between the two tragedies?

I have spoken in favor of the lecture. I trust that I shall hear many more and give many more before the end of my life. As long as Christian learning thrives, the lecture shall live.

Should You Bother Going to University?

Peter Hitchens, in his most recent Daily Mail column asks: "Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot."

What are universities for anyway? I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course. I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed­ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way.

I am still ashamed of the way I lived off the taxes of millions of people who would have loved three years free from the demands of work, to think and to learn, but never had the chance.

We seem to accept without question that it is a good thing that the young should go through this dubious experience. Worse, employers seem to have fallen completely for the idea that a university degree is essential – when it is often a handicap.

For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.

And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school. If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.

And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature is despised and ‘deconstructed’. Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place.

Even if they are study­ing something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against ‘homophobia’ and other thought crimes.

I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’

Read it all here.

Ever since Progressivism took control of most Western universities during the last part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, universities have been in decline. The hard sciences have pretty much been able to erect a fire wall behind which they have gone about their business without being bothered too much - as long as they profess undying faith in the Darwinist Creed so beloved of the Left.

But the Humanities and the Social Sciences are a different matter altogether and the ethos of the university as a whole is shaped by the politically correctness that is the result of cultural Marxism and the embrace of the sexual revolution. Universities in the West (which invented the university) are in decline and have become finishing schools for the Progressive Ruling Class.

So should Christians have anything to do with them? Well, not if you are going there to be educated; you won't be educated but rather indoctrinated into Progressivism. But Christians should infiltrate universities and wage endless war against the usurpers who have seized control. They should be harassed, debated, mocked and opposed at all times and defeated when it occasionally becomes possible. In the long term, if our culture is to be saved the universities will have to be reformed and won back to Christianity.

Part of the reform effort is the creation of alternative, conservative universities by Christians that can serve as models of what we want for all universities. This effort is not a withdrawal from the goal of university reform but an essential component of it.

Why Quebec Politicians Need a Course in Logic . . . or How Stupidity Leads to the Dictatorship of Relativism

It really is depressing to read utterly stupid and inane comments like the following one (see last sentence of quotation). Now, if a first year philosophy student said something like this in September, I would be patient, kind and understanding in correcting the obvious howler. But if that same student wrote a statement like this on the final exam in April it would be considered a glaring error and there would be no mercy. Frankly, I would feel like a failure as a professor.

But this comes from an elected official who could potentially (depending on the outcome of the next election) actually be setting public policy on education. And she is echoing the current government of Quebec. So what we have here is a set of ignorant, poorly-educated, arrogant politicians who lack critical thinking skills. It is a travesty, a disaster, an embarassment to the people of Quebec, a real mess.

Listen to Charles Lewis, who writes an excellent column in the National Post entitled: "Public Money is Religious Too" describe the situation:

The argument will soon be made that Montreal’s Loyola High School should not have the right to opt out of a Quebec government-sponsored ethics and religion program, despite a court ruling that said otherwise.

The argument will be made that if the private school takes public money, which it does, then it should follow the public program. Loyola, a Jesuit Catholic school, should have every right to refuse to institute the Quebec program, but only if it stops taking public money. Seem fair on the surface, does it not?

The assumption that many will made is that as a religious school it is somehow outside the public sphere and therefore should be grateful for whatever public support it gets.

On Friday, a court ruled that Loyola had every right to refuse to adopt the program and could teach faith and ethics from a Catholic perspective.

“In these times of respect of fundamental rights, of tolerance, of reasonable accommodations and of multiculturalism, the attitude adopted by the [Education] Department in the current matter is surprising,” Quebec Superior Court Justice Gérard Dugré wrote Friday.

“Canadian democratic society is based on principles recognizing the supremacy of God and the primacy of the law – both of which benefit from constitutional protection.”

Almost immediately, the Quebec government said it would appeal the court’s decision.

Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois, echoing the sentiment of the Liberal government, said: “It is up to parents and the church to transmit faith. Schools must transmit knowledge.

Read it all here.

The curriculum in question, by all accounts, teaches moral and epistemological relativism in a crude and popular form. But Marois thinks this is "knowledge" as opposed to "faith." No it isn't. It is just a form of faith called secularism. To take the leap of faith necessary to dogmatically proclaim the truth of relativism is (1) to take up a faith position, (2) to make a self-contradictory statement and (3) to claim to know that what Christians teach about God is untrue. How exactly does one know that? Is there an empirical experiment that proves it? This is in the same category of vulgar atheism as the USSR cosmonaut radioing back to earth from orbit that there is no God visible in outer space so there, that proves it.

And if everything is relative, then the statement that everything is relative is only relatively true, which means that the statement that some things are not relative is as true as the statement that everything is relative. So to hold this is to hold to a logical contradiction.

To hold that God both exists and does not exist (which is entailed in believing that Buddhism and Christianity are equally true), is to abandon rationality. The government of Quebec has abandoned reason in the name of Science. It makes Monty Python look serious.

Since Quebec has rejected Christianity, the realm of the secular is disappearing in Quebec. The secular is a Christian invention. Christians believe in the secular realm, i.e. that sphere of life in which people of various religious faiths can co-exist and even share some beliefs while being in fundamental disagreement on others.

But "Secularism" is different. That is a non-traditional, modern, religious faith that seeks to base ethics and politics on empirical science and logical reasoning. It is a demonstrably irrational faith because empirical science cannot tell us why we should respect all humans as being of equal value rather than considering one race superior to the other. Science can't tell this because it is not a scientific question; one must look to philosophy and religion for the answers to philosophical and religious questions. Some sort of non-relativistic worldview must underlie any society that wishes to avoid tyranny.

So now the secular is disappearing in Quebec. There is no secular left because without a belief in natural law or some other system of right and wrong, a great void is opening up into which all sorts of irrational philosophies, religions and worldviews are rushing. Secularism (or Scientism) is an irrational faith in which all the historic religions like Christianity and Judaism are considered wrong and untrue - or else redefined in relativistic terms.

What is left is government by whatever elite can grab power and morality determined by polling and sophistic rhetoric. In effect, the will to power is unrestrained by absolute moral truths and the weak just get exploited by the strong. When you see the government imposing by force a relativistic curriculum on Christian schools, you know that you have witnessed the degeneration into tyranny.

If all morality is relative then whatever the government does must be "right" in some sense. Since Hitler was democratically elected and the Holocaust was perfectly legal, then it must be all right. That is where moral relativism leads you and if Pauline Marois and the Charest government can not see that, then they are too poorly educated to be worthy of public office.

Some supposed relativists are really just uninformed folks who are trying to be tolerant so they do allow Christian schools to teach Christian morality. But when the rot of relativism reaches a certain point, tolerance falls by the wayside having served its purpose of undermining the moral order that places limits on the tyranny of the State. Then we have what then Cardinal Ratzinger called at Pope John Paul II's funeral "the dictatorship of relativism." Next comes the raw, unbridled will to power.

To pronounce glibly that relativism is knowledge and that morality is just a matter of faith is so inane and so out of touch with reason that it is unworthy of high school students, let alone the government of 8 million people.

A Good Reason for Getting a Ph.D.

Dane Ortlund, who is just finishing a Ph.D. in Biblical Theology at Wheaton College has a very nice post on "Stupid PhDs versus Wise PhDs." I love this quote: (HT Justin Taylor)

Another question to be mindful of is how a PhD might strengthen others, not only us. I'm hoping my dissertation gets published, for two reasons. One, I'm a self-loving sinner with unmortified infatuation with my own name. Two (more cheerily), my work exposes weaknesses in the theology of James Dunn and I would love to see fewer pastors and teachers buy Dunn's commentaries in light of my dissertation. I would be happy to help Dunn's stuff go out of print a bit sooner. Not because he's 180 degrees wrong on everything. Of course not. But because he's an influential writer who fuzzies what the gospel is, confusing essence and implication, vertical and horizontal, individual and corporate, the moral and the social. But that's another post.

This is great. The Church needs polemicists. Not jerks - polemicists. We can disagree politely and argue responsibly, but the academic convention of pretending that everyone is sort of right in order to maintain peace is unhealthy and does not really produce peace or mutual respect. Better to have the differences out in the open and let them be the focus.

By the way, many people are too young and socially and personally too immature to do doctoral work when they do it. It would be great for people to have some personal and theological maturity going in. It might help with the problem of pretending that we all agree as the only path to civility.

Homeschooling and the Experts

Deborah Markus at the Secular Homeschooling magazine has some funny responses for people who ask stupid questions about homeschooling (good use of Pauline sarcasm!) in an article entitled: "The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List."

1 Please stop asking us if it's legal. If it is — and it is — it's insulting to imply that we're criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?

2 Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we've got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3 Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize. . . .

6 Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You're probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you've ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

Here are my two favorites:

12 If my kid's only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he'd learn in school, please understand that you're calling me an idiot. Don't act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

16 Don't ask my kid if she wouldn't rather go to school unless you don't mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn't rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.

Read them all here. HT to Joe Carter at First Thoughts.

How I Spent My Weekend

Well, I'm back. April was a good month for blogging, but I've gone quiet for the past three days and perhaps you would like to know why. On Friday my wife and I enjoyed a nice drive up to Barry's Bay, Ontario, which is on the edge of the Ottawa Valley just south of Algonquin Park - a small town in north-eastern Ontario. Algonquin Park is one of the best places in the world for canoeing and we love to spend a few weeks there every summer.

Anyway, the purpose of this jaunt was not canoeing, but a visit to Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, an orthodox, counter-cultural, Catholic, liberal arts college, which has what must be the coolest address for a Catholic college in the entire world: "18 Karol Wojtyla Square, Barry's Bay, Ontario." I had been invited to give a lecture there on Friday evening, which I did. About 60 or so people crowded into the largest classroom at the Academy to hear a Baptist (!) speak on "An Evangelical Appreciation of John Paul II's Theology of the Body." It was a lovely evening and Bonnie and I were made to feel extremely welcome by the professors, students, board members and friends of this vibrant community of faith.

On the last page of Alasdair MacIntryre's After Virtue, he writes:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this time is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict.

What MacIntyre foresaw in this passage, I saw with my own eyes in Barry's Bay. Men and women of faith: priests, singles, married people, families living in close proximity and forming a community in which the moral and intellectual tradition of the virtues could be not only preserved and handed on to the next generation, but also inculcated into the students who come from all over North America and scatter out from the Academy all over the world.

The curriculum is heavy with Latin, Greek, theology, philosophy, history, literature and a smattering of psychology, science and mathematics. This curriculum is rooted in that of the Medieval universities and it is designed to preserve the best of the classical world as purified and corrected by revelation by the Church Fathers. The curriculum is taught, however, not by "mere experts" in the sense of scholars who know the subject objectively like atheist sociologists with a research interest in faith healing, but by committed Christians who believe what they teach and therefore imbue it with enthusiasm and vitality.

Everyone lives within walking distance of everything on campus and everybody attends the parish church for mass (most on a daily basis). It struck me that it must have been very much like what the first universities in Medieval Europe must have been like. The landscape of Barry's Bay is rugged and only moderately fertile. The area is not rich and there is a certain isolation. It is 4 hours to Toronto and 2.5 hours to Ottawa. Yet it struck me as infinitely more civilized than either of those two places. If Western Civilization has a future, it is being forged in places like Barry's Bay, not Ottawa or Toronto.

Public Education: A Spiritual Battleground

From the "What is the world coming to?" file, reason #98408 why Christians should seriously consider home schooling. Fox News reports:

"Parents of school children in Seattle are learning a shocking lesson, when it comes to some very important decisions they don't have a say. The mother of a 15-year old girl recently discovered that Ballard High School helped her daughter get an abortion and never informed her.

But it doesn't end there. The school can also send children off campus for mental health care and drug addiction treatment without their parents ever knowing. Supporters say the confidentiality allows teens who are too afraid to tell mom and dad to get necessary treatment.

Parents signed consent forms for off-school treatment thinking it was limited to emergency health care when the parents could not be reached. But the teen health clinics at 14 Seattle schools are about much more. They have a full-time registered nurse, counselor and nursing assistant on hand to help kids with more sensitive issues.

When the 15-year old girl's pregnancy was confirmed, they counseled her on the options. The mother says they encouraged her to have an abortion and not tell her parents. She claims her daughter was told that if she informed her parents they would have to pay for the abortion, otherwise it's free.

The teen clinics are administered by the King County Health Department. Officials say school clinic workers are supposed to encourage girls to include their parents in the decision. They will not comment on the specifics of the case.

As for the fact the girl was called a taxi and transported by herself to a clinic to have her abortion then driven back to finish her school day, officials say that's not unusual. They would not say how many girls have been helped to have an abortion.

Washington State is one of thirteen states that does not have either a parental consent or parental notification law. Girls of any age can obtain an abortion without having to tell a parent.

State lawmakers included mental health care and drug counseling on the list of services kids can get without parental notification."

Is it just me or does everyone else not find this to be beyond creepy? I mean, you send your children to school to learn. You expect the school to teach. You don't expect the school to try to get between you and your child and take your place as moral guide and mentor.

First, the schools said that they couldn't teach traditional morality because they had to be neutral with regard to differing moral systems. But in the blink of an eye, it seems, that moral neutrality has gone right out the window.

Public schools have gone from not being able to teach the Judeo-Christian moral system based in the Ten Commandments to teaching a pagan ethic of the autonomy of the self and the will to power. If it is inconvenient, kill it, even it the "it" is a "he" or a "she." This pagan moral system is every bit as much a morality as the Judeo-Christian morality; it is just different. In fact it is the moral system that characterized the decedent Roman Empire in the time of early Christianity. So why can the school teach one but not the other? It isn't a question of "can't," but rather a question of "won't."

The public schools have fallen into the hands of neo-pagans and they now impose their morality on us. It is time for parents to stand up and demand their rights to raise their own children in their own moral system be respected. The only way this will happen is if the pagans and their liberal Christian fellow-travelers who control the schools are booted out and banned from public education. Christians did this once before in the fourth century and it looks like it is time either to do it again or withdraw from the system. Handing our children over to the tender mercies of pagans is not an option.

Obviously, live and let live doesn't work.

Political Indoctrination Does Not Belong in Publicly Funded Education

Here is a story from The Toronto Star (sigh, yes I'm still reading that socialist rag) that describes how the Toronto District Shooolboard plans to put aside all that boring reading, writing and arithmetic and get students involved in left wing politics. They make is sound like the children themselves will come up with the issues and ideas - as if the teachers would never influence them to get involved in say promoting homosexuality instead of advocating a pro-life position on abortion.

"Toronto District School Board students will be expected to contribute more to their communities under a new ''social justice action plan'' unveiled yesterday by education director Chris Spence.

The initiative will see every school in the board take on one local and one global social justice issue -- such as poverty, equity and environmentalism -- in order to "create awareness of how students can be empowered through their leadership to make a difference in their world," according to Mr. Spence.

"When I visit schools and talk to kids and staff, they're all engaged in this kind of work. Now we're raising the bar in terms of expectation and saying this is part of what we want to stand for as an organization," he said in an interview with the National Post. "When you put these kinds of issues in front of kids, they will run with it and go places."

The launch of the plan comes on the heels of the announcement that students and staff at the TDSB's 550 schools raised more than $625,000 for earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

It's that kind of concerted response to a calamitous event such as the Haiti earthquake that TDSB chairman Bruce Davis says is indicative of the kind of change students can make.

"I call it leadership by children. It's the kids who go home and say, 'Hey, this isn't right. We've got to do something.' That is so powerful," Mr. Davis said.

"We have 550 schools so you're going to see 550 different responses to this call for action. It could be something around poverty in their neighbourhood or the city. It could be something around homophobia. It could be something around racism or how newcomers are treated. We really need schools to, first of all, challenge our kids. We're giving them licence to do something."

Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education, agrees the board's plan is an opportunity for students to affect change, but said the wide definition of "social justice" may present difficulties.

"I can foresee some bumps along the way," said Ms. Kidder, whose organization is a parent-led advocacy group that tries to improve public education in Ontario's English, French and Catholic schools.

"One person's version of what social justice is may not agree with someone else's. There are disagreements," she said. "It may push some buttons but in a way that's the most interesting part. It will force young people to think about things."

My favorite line is "One person's version of what social justice is may not agree with someone's else's." Ya think? I can just imagine the following conversation:

_______________

Grade 8 Female Student: One of my friends got an abortion. They told her that it was just a blob but she went on the Internet and found out that her baby already had eyes and hands! She was a wreck! Now she want me to go to picket the abortion clinic with her and try to tell the girls going in that they should find out information first.

Teacher: Now, you know that abortion is very controversial. Most Canadians support a woman's right to choose -

Student: But how can they choose if no one tells them?

Teacher: What about a project on gay rights? We could go picket the Catholic Cathedral? How about that?

Student: But I'm Catholic.

Teacher: You're in the public education system, you know.

Student: But I want to do the pro-life social justice project.

Teacher: Now class, let's get started on those anti-homophobia signs. While we are at it, who wants to make a pro-choice sign? You know we will spend all Wed. afternoon out of the classroom at the cathedral and you never know, school might be out early that day! Wink, wink.

Class: Yeah!

Later at the protest - Teacher speaking to news reporter: Yes, it was the students' idea to come and protest the awfulness of homophobia. I'm so proud of their social justice consciousness. This new TDSB program is teaching students how to think for themselves.

What is the Purpose of the University - Power or Wisdom?

As David Bentley Hart points out in Atheist Delusions, the Medieval Age was not an age of magic. Magic and experimental science were the twins of the Renaissance era; one twin was sickly and died but the other twin, healthy and strong, grew into modern technological science. Both magic and science had the same goal: power. Both sought the ability to manipulate nature in such a way as to extend the power of humans to shape and control their environment and, eventually, other people.

The battle for the soul of the Western university is being fought today over whether technological science will so dominate the modern university as to drive out completely the other leading contender for the soul of the university: contemplation and the pursuit of wisdom. Whereas technological science seeks power to control and manipulate, contemplative wisdom seeks understanding of the created order in order to adapt oneself to reality and, by conforming, find peace. Whereas science is restless, impatient and imperialistic, contemplative wisdom is calm, submissive to its subject matter and gentle.

J. R. R. Tolkien, in a 1951 letter to publisher, Milton Waldman, wrote as follows about the fall of the men of Numenor, who were deceived by Sauron into attempting rebellion agains the Valar by sailing to the Undying Lands. This is the second fall of men in Tolkien's mythology and is recounted in The Silmarillion.

"There are three phases in their fall from grace. First, acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel - and a rift appears between the King's men and rebels, and the the small minority of persecuted Faithful." (as found in The Silmarillion, ed. Christoper Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 2004, p. xxvi)

It occurs to me that the purpose of the university could very well be conceived in terms of the prevention of the endless obedience without understanding by a progressive understanding of the will and purposes of God through meditation, study of Scripture and the development of the Christian mind as one contemplates the origin, meaning and telos of all things. It is not that we ever expect to attain the same degree of perfect knowledge as God; but we can hope to grow in knowledge through contemplative wisdom as an aid to obedience. Perhaps the Numenoreans began to go wrong when they neglected contemplative wisdom and eventually became disenchanted with an obedience that seemed legalistic, that is adherence to arbitrary rules that emitted a faint whiff of tyranny because of their very arbitrariness.

This would mean that poetry, music, history, languages, theology and philosophy would be required. But so would the study of nature, the laws of nature and the scientific study of all things. But the goal would be understanding for the purpose of conforming to the ways of the creation rather than the power to control and manipulate.

The content of the curriculum would not change much but the methodology would be broader, less uniform, more suited to the unique character of each object of study. The use of a methodology that did not promise the power to control nature would not be seen as useless. The cultivation of thought about, rather than merely descriptions of things, would be seen as useful.

Most important of all, university study would not be content to describe nature, including human nature, in such a way as to permit one to predict it and thus control it. Rather, one would not be satisfied until one had penetrated to the essence of a thing so that one could understand its telos.

What we are really talking about, I suppose, is the restoration of the Aristotelian concept of final causation as central to the academic enterprise, and to the university. The question of what is the purpose of the university can only be answered, in the end, if the question of final cause is not meaningless. The word "university" implies unity, like the word "cosmos," and if there is no final cause or telos of things, then there is none of the university itself. But, in that case, there is no purpose at all. The university having a purpose - the right purpose - turns out to be closely linked to our lives having a purpose.