To stir the pot a little, I remember that when I was a grad student at the U of T a fellow student told me that he came from a small town in southern Ontario, and had found the teachers in his local school to be civilised and decent people. When he began his graduate studies, he had worked as a substitute teacher, in the Toronto area naturally. He was disgusted to find that the conversation of his fellow teachers consisted solely of relating their exploits in gambling, and discussions of where to pick up the cheapest streetwalkers.
He was not impressed.
Is it any wonder this element, school teachers, conduct themselves as superior? Something like our underpaid Police…(sarc\)……
I live in Ontario. I have friends that are teachers or retired teachers. Believe me, they are all, without exception living in an alternate universe. As much as I try to reason with them, it falls on deaf ears. They are truly indoctrinated and you will never ever get through to them. Children in an adults body. Their maturity ended the day they graduated from university and entered the vocation.
Too funny. The Sun page won’t open. You have sent so much traffic their way that their server – the server of a major media company – can’t measure up. Kate, I am always comforted at how many people come here. It gives me hope that I am not alone. Please, never stop.
Good ol’ Ezra!
If i ever run into the fella i’m gonna shake his hand.
Apparently Alberta teachers work 55 hours per week, which is pure unadulterated horse $hit. I’ve known a lot of teachers and the most I’ve ever seen one work is maybe 8 hours per day on average so 40 hours per week. In Alberta they work 190 days instead of the former 200 while almost everyone works 250 days.
When my siblings went into education, around 50 years ago, the pay was low but it was clean indoor work. It only required 2 years of education and that was none too demanding. At university, every moron I ever met was a teacher. Education was not overly demanding. I knew somebody who dropped out at Christmas and passed 2 full year courses.
The price of labour peace in Alberta has been to break the system, with the overpayment of teachers, snivel servants, and health care workers. The strange Alberta anomaly is that the more money paid to solve a problem, the worse it gets. I think it has come to the point that pay needs to be slashed and a$$es kicked to get those pathetic whining government workers back on task without the normal overwhelming self pity.
Alberta anomaly?
Hahahaha.
So blackmail and buying votes does pay off after all.
Oh and Agent Smith, my wife and I shook his hand at the McNally Robinson in Saskatoon book launch of Ethical Oil. A Socialist Revolutionary in a leather jacket and Greek fisherman cap and a younger male and female university types heckled him for some time until management staff from the store escorted them outside where they promptly kept up the heckling with a megaphone until Saskatoon’s finest showed up and told them to get lost.
Awww you ruint it for me cal2…was gonna offer that in readers tips…funny thing is the stupid bastards just fell into the “let’s review equalization” trap…baaawahahahahaha….
Teachers work on average no more than 800 hours a year, while other professionals work 1800 to 2000 hours a year. The short school day and abbreviated school year fail to add up.
My experience with teachers in Ontario exactly, original rick. Well said.
Just one thing.
When you said “…[they] entered the vocation”, I might have said “….entered the vacation”.
They are on almost perpetual breaks of some type. The best of course, is the retirement at 52-55 with fully indexed pension. Then returning to work which then keeps young teachers from being hired. They make more retired than when “working”.
They have no clue and quite frankly, they don’t know they’re alive.
Ontario teachers next to Luxembourg are the highest paid in the world …and unless it’s a sex thing it’s impossible to be fired. All it costs is about a $120/ month ‘donation’ to the union.
Putting “but it’s for the kids” at the end of your salary demand is apparently adequate justification to further screw the taxpayers.
No longer civil servants but uncivil savants.
In the professions that I’m familiar with, ie accounting and law more people work closer to 3000 hours than 2000, never mind the 800 in teaching.
Does any provincial government in this country have the balls to fire all of the public school teachers and replace them with minimum wage babysitters? That’s what it will take to end this “education” kleptocracy. In anyone who’s self-motivated, once they learn to read they can educate themselves. As far as work hours go, last week I worked my usual 100+ hours although I must be getting old as I decided to take this week off.
When I was in school, there was maybe 1 teacher in 10 that I had any respect for. The other 90% were too dumb to do anything else. I have a lot more respect for people who work outside or farm than these overpaid babysitters. Given technologic advances, most students can be self-taught using the internet. I did so using books found in any library in the pre-internet days, and, for the most part, school was the greatest interruption to my education that I’ve ever had.
If we adopt the Swiss vocational training approach, once students have learned to read and have appropriate mathematical ability, they can become apprentices in various trades. There’s no point wasting time in schools which teach nothing of value but instead try to tear down western civilization. Given that in most provinces education is funded by property taxes, the only way we’re going to get anything done is via a mass homeowner revolt against this completely unsustainable and absolutely useless “profession” (I have a lot more respect for hookers than teachers).
Agreed. Once a kid can read and add/subtract multiply/divide the rest is extraneous. Life experience and hands on learning in some trade is more valuable as a second step. Personal interests and proclivities guide advanced learning. Simple.
$10,000 per month for every month they work. I can’t get the video to run, but I posted in the comments section of an article that if teachers make $90,000 a year on average like the article said, then that means teachers make $10,000 per month because they work 9 months a year.
Follow on comments must have been from teachers – they were entirely too stupid to do the math and just couldn’t understand that if you work for nine months and get $90,000 dollars – that means you get $10,000 for every month worked.
Pathetic. Competition is required, vouchers or whatever. The only way to leverage that though would be by saying that every one should have a choice of schools, not just rich people. That angle might work.
Any government with balls could solve the problem of poor quality education and lazy union teachers by going to a voucher system, where every child gets a voucher that they can take to a school of their choice.
If the playing field was level for private schools it would be only a matter of a few years before public schools would be out of business.
The problem is simply a complete lack of any serious competition.
Oh my God. I just read a teacher acquaintance of mine (from Burnaby school district) posting titled “Poor Teachers”.
Here is what the idiot said:
“Yes, the middle class is taxed to death, but not the corporations and the rich. This is the problem, Since the Liberals came to power, they have lowered the tax revenues by not taxing corporations. They are now making record profits. The only problems in BC right now is the fact that the tax income is down a lot. Business is fine. The banks don’t make record profits in bad times. GDP is up 3%.
Our education spending has dropped from 26% to 15% of income. They are starving education.”
Obviously has no idea that eliminating corporate tax would do more for job creation than any other single government move. Also hasn’t a clue that corporate owners pay taxes twice, first on profits, second on dividends. Holy smokes the stupidity is breathtaking.
Stupidity in education…gadzooks….
You forget Loki, that the teachers unions collectively and provincially are arguably the best funded most radical union/NGO in the nation. Teachers unions are a wealthy radical special interest organizations which have enormous undue political influence – that influence is the result of their demonstrated agenda to destroy (through negative media messaging and strikes) any leader or administration which will not bow to their extortion. This has festered to a point where the public are aware that unionized teachers are the equivalent of an extortionist spoiled brat who controls his parents with tantrums. They are sick of it and open to change.
The thing to do, for any government tapped into public sentiment, is slowly (incrementally) allow competition for the education dollar. A statute allowing parents a government credit for education that they can spend where ever they wish will see parent-directed private schools evolve, and by extension, quality education. Eventually private parent-run/subsidized private education and responsible teaching will displace the monopoly on education the radical, decadent, unionist pedagogue cartels extorting the public now.
It wouldn’t take “balls”, just some planning and political will.
Every single one of them will tell you theirs is the most important job in the world and they’re underpaid and under-appreciated.
It’s like talking to a wall, that has two volvos a house and a cottage.
At the risk of belaboring this issue there is an underlying malefic pragmatism common to this aggressive pedagogue unionist elitism –
According John Taylor Gatto, a teacher and published education expert, in a treatise he wrote entitled “The Public School Nightmare”, he cites the American state education system (infact, all “compulsory education” systems of other Anglo-democratic” countries also) was copied directly from the Prussian 19th century schooling system with the objective to produce: Obedient soldiers to the army, Obedient workers to the mines, Well subordinated civil servants to government, Well subordinated clerks to industry, Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
We all need to know and understand this because over the last 60 years our public school designers have institutionalized the Prussian purpose ( which was to create a form of obedient state-worshipping collectivists). This has gradually forced out traditional North American liberal democratic purpose, which was to prepare the individual to be a critical independent thinker and self-reliant. The modernization of this Prussian model which created obedient citizen/workers has degenerated to producing political/ideologically indoctrinated automatons who accept their servitude to collectivist statist ideologies unquestioningly – and do think but react with conditioned response.
Ezra Levant… isn’t he that guy who advocates sending the Roma off to the gas chamber? You know it’s funny… when you guys say “not something you’ll see on CBC”, you’re right. CBC would never allow a nut like Levant to shrilly goose-step around on stage shouting about how a particular race (one that shared the showers with his own people) is prone to criminal behavior.
So yeah… I’m not really going to listen to anything this guy says.
In other news… Tesla turns a profit. Ruh Roh!!!! http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/291133-obama-backed-automaker-tesla-motors-turns-a-profit
I guess maybe investing on future technologies is a good thing after all? Don’t agree? Step away from the computer. You wouldn’t want to sully yourself with something that is the direct result of government investment.
I agree with you completely, of course. On the theme of life imitating art, and all that, it’s a fair bet that public education today is pretty much any given episode of “Glee”, which has to be the barfiest show on television, without exception, of the current age, if not the entire television era. I do feel sad for Lea Michelle, however: how’d a beautiful and talented 30-something woman like her end up trapped on a manifestly forgettable siding in the middle of this high-school nowhere? But, if you were to ask my opinion, I’d recommend a by-pass, isolate and cordon strategy — of the sort practiced routinely, to salutary effect and unbounded gratitude, by members of the medical profession.
It rather seems to me that many folks of a conservative disposition always seem inclined, as their first order of business, to launch a full frontal assault against the entrenched position of the teachers, who are inarguably the contagiously militant, if utterly self-absorbed, vanguard of the public sector union movement. I well remember the unfortunate remarks of Mike Harris’s first education minister, John Snobelen (something about creating a crisis in the education system) — a mistake from which the Ontario Tories have still not recovered.
I personally believe that there’s a whole big agenda that needs to happen in Ontario. The teachers are on the list, to be sure, but I don’t really think they need to be at the top — unless you subscribe to the worldview that says, in part only, that the LCBO needs to stay in government hands to make sure that the selection remains as it is. Besides which, the steady attrition of declining enrollment, of oxymoronic denominational/linguistic discrimination/quadruplication (which both screams for a professional (as opposed to red-neck) approach to reform and has the added value of potentially pitting teacher groups against one another), and of redressing unsustainable deficits will help to thin out the teachers’ numbers while we’re implementing the rest of the agenda.
A voucher system. Of course. Because single payer education will be any better or more efficient than single payer health care.
Listen. Everyone knows most of the bank tellers in this country have been replaced with ATMs (which are, incidentally, the only innovation in finance in living memory that’s benefitted anybody but the banksters). Nobody misses having to skip lunch to go to the bank to beg a teller for his own money. In a free market most of the teachers would be replaced with computer software so fast your head would spin. You’d only need to keep a few around to read essays submitted by e-mail from students across Canada, and you could probably hire half of those in India. Arithmetic lessons would be graded by the computer itself. All for a fraction of not just the expense for the parents but the time for the child, who would learn how to read and write and add up sums much faster and could devote the rest of his time to something much more useful—like going to work learning a honest trade so he can support a wife, his own children and his parents in their old age.
(Loki: The province is under no obligation to provide free day care to get children out of the house so women can go to make-work government jobs, or spend their days at home drinking themselves stone-blind or amusing themselves with other men behind their husbands’ backs. Any woman who earns enough honestly to hire a full-time nanny is free to do so. If she can’t, she’s better off staying home and looking after her own children for as long as they need a mother around. The children can help her with the housework.
Older children should be expected to look for work and start paying their parents something for their keep as soon as they are able to, not sitting in a school every weekday doing nothing constructive—unless you count having their moral education undone by godless socialist “teachers,” or acquiring drug habits and venereal diseases “constructive.” Most modern “child labour” laws are intended to allow their alleged elders and betters to show up for manual labour jobs, if at all, drunk or hungover with the risk greatly reduced that they’ll be replaced with someone younger, fitter and willing to show up on time and sober.)
Liquidate Ontario’s school boards and send the lazy, stupid, ungrateful teachers packing once and for all. Liquidate the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Fund while you’re at it. Anybody with the wits to be having children at all will find a way to finance their education. At current asset levels, liquidating the OTPP would raise enough cash to excuse Ontario taxpayers from taxes for a year. That ought to be more than enough for a family to hire someone or something to get Johnny up to speed on how to read and write and add up sums. Rest assured that the disappearance of teaching jobs, like bank teller jobs, will be a nine-day wonder for anybody who can do anything else.
Of course, explaining any of this to your typical Ontario teacher, passed over for marriage long since and lacking the wits for any other trade, much less for planning ahead for her old age, will be difficult, to say the least. In that case, the province’s best option is to refer the old maids’ complaints to their cats. We’ll see then if the beasts are truly their children in any meaningful sense and are willing to do appropriate filial duty.
“…I personally believe that there’s a whole big agenda that needs to happen in Ontario.”
And it will happen. It won’t be brought in willingly by any politician – but it certainly will happen.
All of them play the old ‘kick the failed economy can’ down the road for a few more years and hope the collapse won’t happen on their watch.
Master Can-kicker/King rat Dildo McDinky had a keenly-tuned altimeter – he scuttered down the mooring ropes as soon as he sensed the ship was settling to the bottom.
Occam, must explain why I detested public school when I was forced to go there. In order to have a population who thinks independently, one needs to simply have minimal standards for each subject and how students get there is up to them. I would have had a hard time meeting the English requirements as the only literature I read was Science Fiction. Physical Education was trivial and the only course I’d make compulsory to attend.
With all other subjects, it would be up to the student to decide how to learn them. As others have noted, computer based learning is severely underused as it will displace teachers in the same way that ATM’s have virtually eliminated bank tellers as Dick Slater noted. Curiously, some people like to go to lectures rather than read a book and those people could attend classes.
No-one likes to pay education taxes and the solution to the school system is to publicize the existence of a coddled socialist parasitic class that has about as much use now as buggy whips in an SUV. Considering that the teachers unions are hostile to the tenets of western civilization, there should be an active movement to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Once they’re all fired, begin rehiring teachers in private schools and a drastically downsized public school system. This is where one can hire back the truly useful teachers and suggest that the incompetent deadwood learn how to serve burgers.
To stir the pot a little, I remember that when I was a grad student at the U of T a fellow student told me that he came from a small town in southern Ontario, and had found the teachers in his local school to be civilised and decent people. When he began his graduate studies, he had worked as a substitute teacher, in the Toronto area naturally. He was disgusted to find that the conversation of his fellow teachers consisted solely of relating their exploits in gambling, and discussions of where to pick up the cheapest streetwalkers.
He was not impressed.
Is it any wonder this element, school teachers, conduct themselves as superior? Something like our underpaid Police…(sarc\)……
I live in Ontario. I have friends that are teachers or retired teachers. Believe me, they are all, without exception living in an alternate universe. As much as I try to reason with them, it falls on deaf ears. They are truly indoctrinated and you will never ever get through to them. Children in an adults body. Their maturity ended the day they graduated from university and entered the vocation.
Too funny. The Sun page won’t open. You have sent so much traffic their way that their server – the server of a major media company – can’t measure up. Kate, I am always comforted at how many people come here. It gives me hope that I am not alone. Please, never stop.
Ah, but don’t forget all that prep time!
oh no ,now Ontario feels like Alberta , the horror , the horror
http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-unfairly-strained-by-11b-fiscal-gap-given-to-ottawa-report-1.1219162
Good ol’ Ezra!
If i ever run into the fella i’m gonna shake his hand.
Apparently Alberta teachers work 55 hours per week, which is pure unadulterated horse $hit. I’ve known a lot of teachers and the most I’ve ever seen one work is maybe 8 hours per day on average so 40 hours per week. In Alberta they work 190 days instead of the former 200 while almost everyone works 250 days.
When my siblings went into education, around 50 years ago, the pay was low but it was clean indoor work. It only required 2 years of education and that was none too demanding. At university, every moron I ever met was a teacher. Education was not overly demanding. I knew somebody who dropped out at Christmas and passed 2 full year courses.
The price of labour peace in Alberta has been to break the system, with the overpayment of teachers, snivel servants, and health care workers. The strange Alberta anomaly is that the more money paid to solve a problem, the worse it gets. I think it has come to the point that pay needs to be slashed and a$$es kicked to get those pathetic whining government workers back on task without the normal overwhelming self pity.
Alberta anomaly?
Hahahaha.
So blackmail and buying votes does pay off after all.
Oh and Agent Smith, my wife and I shook his hand at the McNally Robinson in Saskatoon book launch of Ethical Oil. A Socialist Revolutionary in a leather jacket and Greek fisherman cap and a younger male and female university types heckled him for some time until management staff from the store escorted them outside where they promptly kept up the heckling with a megaphone until Saskatoon’s finest showed up and told them to get lost.
Awww you ruint it for me cal2…was gonna offer that in readers tips…funny thing is the stupid bastards just fell into the “let’s review equalization” trap…baaawahahahahaha….
Teachers work on average no more than 800 hours a year, while other professionals work 1800 to 2000 hours a year. The short school day and abbreviated school year fail to add up.
My experience with teachers in Ontario exactly, original rick. Well said.
Just one thing.
When you said “…[they] entered the vocation”, I might have said “….entered the vacation”.
They are on almost perpetual breaks of some type. The best of course, is the retirement at 52-55 with fully indexed pension. Then returning to work which then keeps young teachers from being hired. They make more retired than when “working”.
They have no clue and quite frankly, they don’t know they’re alive.
Ontario teachers next to Luxembourg are the highest paid in the world …and unless it’s a sex thing it’s impossible to be fired. All it costs is about a $120/ month ‘donation’ to the union.
Putting “but it’s for the kids” at the end of your salary demand is apparently adequate justification to further screw the taxpayers.
No longer civil servants but uncivil savants.
In the professions that I’m familiar with, ie accounting and law more people work closer to 3000 hours than 2000, never mind the 800 in teaching.
Does any provincial government in this country have the balls to fire all of the public school teachers and replace them with minimum wage babysitters? That’s what it will take to end this “education” kleptocracy. In anyone who’s self-motivated, once they learn to read they can educate themselves. As far as work hours go, last week I worked my usual 100+ hours although I must be getting old as I decided to take this week off.
When I was in school, there was maybe 1 teacher in 10 that I had any respect for. The other 90% were too dumb to do anything else. I have a lot more respect for people who work outside or farm than these overpaid babysitters. Given technologic advances, most students can be self-taught using the internet. I did so using books found in any library in the pre-internet days, and, for the most part, school was the greatest interruption to my education that I’ve ever had.
If we adopt the Swiss vocational training approach, once students have learned to read and have appropriate mathematical ability, they can become apprentices in various trades. There’s no point wasting time in schools which teach nothing of value but instead try to tear down western civilization. Given that in most provinces education is funded by property taxes, the only way we’re going to get anything done is via a mass homeowner revolt against this completely unsustainable and absolutely useless “profession” (I have a lot more respect for hookers than teachers).
Agreed. Once a kid can read and add/subtract multiply/divide the rest is extraneous. Life experience and hands on learning in some trade is more valuable as a second step. Personal interests and proclivities guide advanced learning. Simple.
$10,000 per month for every month they work. I can’t get the video to run, but I posted in the comments section of an article that if teachers make $90,000 a year on average like the article said, then that means teachers make $10,000 per month because they work 9 months a year.
Follow on comments must have been from teachers – they were entirely too stupid to do the math and just couldn’t understand that if you work for nine months and get $90,000 dollars – that means you get $10,000 for every month worked.
Pathetic. Competition is required, vouchers or whatever. The only way to leverage that though would be by saying that every one should have a choice of schools, not just rich people. That angle might work.
Any government with balls could solve the problem of poor quality education and lazy union teachers by going to a voucher system, where every child gets a voucher that they can take to a school of their choice.
If the playing field was level for private schools it would be only a matter of a few years before public schools would be out of business.
The problem is simply a complete lack of any serious competition.
Oh my God. I just read a teacher acquaintance of mine (from Burnaby school district) posting titled “Poor Teachers”.
Here is what the idiot said:
“Yes, the middle class is taxed to death, but not the corporations and the rich. This is the problem, Since the Liberals came to power, they have lowered the tax revenues by not taxing corporations. They are now making record profits. The only problems in BC right now is the fact that the tax income is down a lot. Business is fine. The banks don’t make record profits in bad times. GDP is up 3%.
Our education spending has dropped from 26% to 15% of income. They are starving education.”
Obviously has no idea that eliminating corporate tax would do more for job creation than any other single government move. Also hasn’t a clue that corporate owners pay taxes twice, first on profits, second on dividends. Holy smokes the stupidity is breathtaking.
Stupidity in education…gadzooks….
You forget Loki, that the teachers unions collectively and provincially are arguably the best funded most radical union/NGO in the nation. Teachers unions are a wealthy radical special interest organizations which have enormous undue political influence – that influence is the result of their demonstrated agenda to destroy (through negative media messaging and strikes) any leader or administration which will not bow to their extortion. This has festered to a point where the public are aware that unionized teachers are the equivalent of an extortionist spoiled brat who controls his parents with tantrums. They are sick of it and open to change.
The thing to do, for any government tapped into public sentiment, is slowly (incrementally) allow competition for the education dollar. A statute allowing parents a government credit for education that they can spend where ever they wish will see parent-directed private schools evolve, and by extension, quality education. Eventually private parent-run/subsidized private education and responsible teaching will displace the monopoly on education the radical, decadent, unionist pedagogue cartels extorting the public now.
It wouldn’t take “balls”, just some planning and political will.
Every single one of them will tell you theirs is the most important job in the world and they’re underpaid and under-appreciated.
It’s like talking to a wall, that has two volvos a house and a cottage.
At the risk of belaboring this issue there is an underlying malefic pragmatism common to this aggressive pedagogue unionist elitism –
According John Taylor Gatto, a teacher and published education expert, in a treatise he wrote entitled “The Public School Nightmare”, he cites the American state education system (infact, all “compulsory education” systems of other Anglo-democratic” countries also) was copied directly from the Prussian 19th century schooling system with the objective to produce: Obedient soldiers to the army, Obedient workers to the mines, Well subordinated civil servants to government, Well subordinated clerks to industry, Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
We all need to know and understand this because over the last 60 years our public school designers have institutionalized the Prussian purpose ( which was to create a form of obedient state-worshipping collectivists). This has gradually forced out traditional North American liberal democratic purpose, which was to prepare the individual to be a critical independent thinker and self-reliant. The modernization of this Prussian model which created obedient citizen/workers has degenerated to producing political/ideologically indoctrinated automatons who accept their servitude to collectivist statist ideologies unquestioningly – and do think but react with conditioned response.
Ezra Levant… isn’t he that guy who advocates sending the Roma off to the gas chamber? You know it’s funny… when you guys say “not something you’ll see on CBC”, you’re right. CBC would never allow a nut like Levant to shrilly goose-step around on stage shouting about how a particular race (one that shared the showers with his own people) is prone to criminal behavior.
So yeah… I’m not really going to listen to anything this guy says.
In other news… Tesla turns a profit. Ruh Roh!!!!
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/291133-obama-backed-automaker-tesla-motors-turns-a-profit
I guess maybe investing on future technologies is a good thing after all? Don’t agree? Step away from the computer. You wouldn’t want to sully yourself with something that is the direct result of government investment.
I agree with you completely, of course. On the theme of life imitating art, and all that, it’s a fair bet that public education today is pretty much any given episode of “Glee”, which has to be the barfiest show on television, without exception, of the current age, if not the entire television era. I do feel sad for Lea Michelle, however: how’d a beautiful and talented 30-something woman like her end up trapped on a manifestly forgettable siding in the middle of this high-school nowhere? But, if you were to ask my opinion, I’d recommend a by-pass, isolate and cordon strategy — of the sort practiced routinely, to salutary effect and unbounded gratitude, by members of the medical profession.
It rather seems to me that many folks of a conservative disposition always seem inclined, as their first order of business, to launch a full frontal assault against the entrenched position of the teachers, who are inarguably the contagiously militant, if utterly self-absorbed, vanguard of the public sector union movement. I well remember the unfortunate remarks of Mike Harris’s first education minister, John Snobelen (something about creating a crisis in the education system) — a mistake from which the Ontario Tories have still not recovered.
I personally believe that there’s a whole big agenda that needs to happen in Ontario. The teachers are on the list, to be sure, but I don’t really think they need to be at the top — unless you subscribe to the worldview that says, in part only, that the LCBO needs to stay in government hands to make sure that the selection remains as it is. Besides which, the steady attrition of declining enrollment, of oxymoronic denominational/linguistic discrimination/quadruplication (which both screams for a professional (as opposed to red-neck) approach to reform and has the added value of potentially pitting teacher groups against one another), and of redressing unsustainable deficits will help to thin out the teachers’ numbers while we’re implementing the rest of the agenda.
A voucher system. Of course. Because single payer education will be any better or more efficient than single payer health care.
Listen. Everyone knows most of the bank tellers in this country have been replaced with ATMs (which are, incidentally, the only innovation in finance in living memory that’s benefitted anybody but the banksters). Nobody misses having to skip lunch to go to the bank to beg a teller for his own money. In a free market most of the teachers would be replaced with computer software so fast your head would spin. You’d only need to keep a few around to read essays submitted by e-mail from students across Canada, and you could probably hire half of those in India. Arithmetic lessons would be graded by the computer itself. All for a fraction of not just the expense for the parents but the time for the child, who would learn how to read and write and add up sums much faster and could devote the rest of his time to something much more useful—like going to work learning a honest trade so he can support a wife, his own children and his parents in their old age.
(Loki: The province is under no obligation to provide free day care to get children out of the house so women can go to make-work government jobs, or spend their days at home drinking themselves stone-blind or amusing themselves with other men behind their husbands’ backs. Any woman who earns enough honestly to hire a full-time nanny is free to do so. If she can’t, she’s better off staying home and looking after her own children for as long as they need a mother around. The children can help her with the housework.
Older children should be expected to look for work and start paying their parents something for their keep as soon as they are able to, not sitting in a school every weekday doing nothing constructive—unless you count having their moral education undone by godless socialist “teachers,” or acquiring drug habits and venereal diseases “constructive.” Most modern “child labour” laws are intended to allow their alleged elders and betters to show up for manual labour jobs, if at all, drunk or hungover with the risk greatly reduced that they’ll be replaced with someone younger, fitter and willing to show up on time and sober.)
Liquidate Ontario’s school boards and send the lazy, stupid, ungrateful teachers packing once and for all. Liquidate the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Fund while you’re at it. Anybody with the wits to be having children at all will find a way to finance their education. At current asset levels, liquidating the OTPP would raise enough cash to excuse Ontario taxpayers from taxes for a year. That ought to be more than enough for a family to hire someone or something to get Johnny up to speed on how to read and write and add up sums. Rest assured that the disappearance of teaching jobs, like bank teller jobs, will be a nine-day wonder for anybody who can do anything else.
Of course, explaining any of this to your typical Ontario teacher, passed over for marriage long since and lacking the wits for any other trade, much less for planning ahead for her old age, will be difficult, to say the least. In that case, the province’s best option is to refer the old maids’ complaints to their cats. We’ll see then if the beasts are truly their children in any meaningful sense and are willing to do appropriate filial duty.
“…I personally believe that there’s a whole big agenda that needs to happen in Ontario.”
And it will happen. It won’t be brought in willingly by any politician – but it certainly will happen.
All of them play the old ‘kick the failed economy can’ down the road for a few more years and hope the collapse won’t happen on their watch.
Master Can-kicker/King rat Dildo McDinky had a keenly-tuned altimeter – he scuttered down the mooring ropes as soon as he sensed the ship was settling to the bottom.
Occam, must explain why I detested public school when I was forced to go there. In order to have a population who thinks independently, one needs to simply have minimal standards for each subject and how students get there is up to them. I would have had a hard time meeting the English requirements as the only literature I read was Science Fiction. Physical Education was trivial and the only course I’d make compulsory to attend.
With all other subjects, it would be up to the student to decide how to learn them. As others have noted, computer based learning is severely underused as it will displace teachers in the same way that ATM’s have virtually eliminated bank tellers as Dick Slater noted. Curiously, some people like to go to lectures rather than read a book and those people could attend classes.
No-one likes to pay education taxes and the solution to the school system is to publicize the existence of a coddled socialist parasitic class that has about as much use now as buggy whips in an SUV. Considering that the teachers unions are hostile to the tenets of western civilization, there should be an active movement to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Once they’re all fired, begin rehiring teachers in private schools and a drastically downsized public school system. This is where one can hire back the truly useful teachers and suggest that the incompetent deadwood learn how to serve burgers.