In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Peel District School Board purging all books written before 2008 is a worrying red flag about what’s happening in government schools… and I do mean red.
“They talk a great deal about education, because it is compulsory education. Whether or no they can educate, they are always eager to compel. But as a fact their aim is the very contrary of education. It is the destruction of education, and even of experience. It is to make men forget the past, forget the facts, forget the very memories of their own lives. And if their compulsory culture spreads successfully, it is very likely that we shall be alone in knowing what was known to every man, woman and child, in the hour of our danger and deliverance.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 24, 1920, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that trust is decaying fast in our society, because trustworthiness is succumbing to self-actualization, with dangerous consequences from politics to concerts.
In my latest Epoch Times column, I ask that people apply their vaunted “evidence-based decision-making” to the claim that there are hundreds of unmarked graves of aboriginal kids killed in residential schools in cruel or callous ways or stop making it.
“All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 20, 1914, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
In my latest Epoch Times column I take aim at Orwellian social justice as is unjust, antisocial and un-Canadian.
“The Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival is a secondary school competition... More than 120,000 students have taken part in the event since it was established 30 years ago. For the past decade it has been awarded about NZ$30,000 annually from Creative New Zealand. But this year, the organization has withdrawn its contribution. A board member from the country’s arts body said: ‘I question whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonizing Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) in the 2020s and beyond.’ Another member said the funding was withdrawn because the festival represented a ‘canon of imperialism.’... Nicola Hyland, a senior lecturer in theatre at Wellington’s Victoria University, said... ‘It would be a massive, awesome act of decolonization if we discovered our own stories first and discovered Shakespeare afterwards,’... But the head of Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand... Dawn Sanders... said: ‘Just like the MeToo movement, Measure for Measure explored misogyny, Taming of the Shrew explores the way women are controlled and Othello looked at cheating and manipulation.’ The festival allowed students to interpret the plays in many ways, she added, with pupils free to introduce elements from their own cultures, from Maori and Pacific Islander to Asian. ‘Not many scenes are done in doublet and hose anymore,’ she said.”
Daily Telegraph story in National Post October 15, 2022 [think they’ll do one about the “Musket Wars” and the Moriori genocide?]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I berate Canadian “conservative” politicians for being as clueless about how to avoid wedge issues as they are spineless about how to approach them.