Tag: Education

Remember Grade 3, when school was all about storybooks and gym class and crafts? We had to learn our multiplication tables and cursive writing, too, but these are not the memories we tend to hang on to.

Education is increasingly thought to be for the good of the individual rather than for the greater good of society – a belief that has made it politically acceptable to place the bulk of education costs squarely on the shoulders of the students seeking that education.

Imagine opening your morning paper to read the following: “The Minister of Human Resources announced today that she will be working with the provinces to lower university and college enrolments across the country. ‘We don’t think young Canadians should be wasting their time with post-secondary education,’ the Minister said. ‘It’s not good for them and it’s not good for the Canadian economy.’”

The Sunday blues are back, familiar and unwelcome like symptoms of an old illness.

Quest for Community, a new program of the public school system in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia’s Southern Interior, aims to sow the seeds of community in the most fertile soil there is – the minds of youth.

University professors are a curious bunch. Many are gifted and dedicated post-secondary teachers, working hard to educate and inspire their students, while others, despite having succeeded only at school work, exude arrogance and an exaggerated sense of themselves.

What does “history” mean to you? A list of names and dates? Great deeds of long ago? “History,” says historian Margaret MacMillan, is something we all do.” Formerly at the University of Toronto, now at Oxford, Professor MacMillan is well-known for her Governor General’s Award-winning book, Paris 1919, and, more recently, for Nixon in China.

Nunavut, “our land” in Inuktitut, was the result of more than 30 years of negotiations and planning by the Inuit of the Eastern and Central Arctic. So why are these original inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of people in the territory, not the principal beneficiaries of their land’s economic development?

At last fall’s University of Toronto conference on academic freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Teach, James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, offered some useful reminders about the intersection of schools with free expression.

Today Afghan women are ranked by Human Rights Watch as “among the world’s worst off” by most indicators of social, economic, and political status. What happened? And has the U.S. invasion and NATO occupation improved the situation, or made it worse?

I’ll never forget my first day at the Centre, the beginning of a nearly two-year period that would alter my life forever. They’re not all bad memories, but still, they stand as reminders of a traumatic childhood and a time of immense and difficult transition in my young life.

Film review of Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide