Ontario post-secondary education history revisited - thestar.com

Ontario post-secondary education history revisited - thestar.com


Holy mother of God, this makes me angry.

Speaking as one of the few students that saw it from both sides of the cuts to education (I dropped out in 1996 and returned to high school in 2004) I can tell you that Harris utterly, completely, gutted and destroyed secondary school in this province. The lessons got easier to learn, sure. Good for the standardized testing #s. Not good, in fact just about the worst possible thing, once you get to university. That's how I can get a 94 in grade 12 university physics and a 64 in first year university physics - not for not trying. Thats why more and more universities are instituting their own remedial courses (that instead of being free like OAC or grade 13 was, you now have to pay through the nose for). That's why my own students, now, as a TA, struggle with basic concepts that they should have covered in high school. University has had to go through an entire dumbing down process in order to compensate for secondary school being so poorly executed nowadays. And that is NOT the fault of the teachers - they are still doing the best that they can, with far less, and bad textbooks, and less prep time, and more students. Having gone to a university with a large proportion of international students, I can tell you that our secondary students are graduating with a fraction of the knowledge that they have.

My mother is a teacher. She still spits when she hears Mike Harris's name.

Well, Im definitely thinking again...

We forget that as white people we also have traditional ecological knowledge. We forget that it isn't the race that's the problem, its industrialisation, living indoors, advertising, and capitalism thats the problem. We look to other cultures to solve our problems and we end up bastardizing and co-opting the same things that we mean to preserve and cherish. Its a western problem, there has to be western solutions, otherwise we just end up polluting other cultures with our collective fucked up colonial attitudes and colonizing decolonization. How can someone want to deschool? As a freakin graduate student? Really? Well then, quit school. That'll deschool you pretty well. How can you dictate for others what you yourself have already gone through and benefited from? Where does that come from? What does that do? And do you realize the grave responsibility you wield when you say that? My daughter grows up in a materialistic, gendered, clearly consumerist capitalist world. She does that because she HAS TO. If she grows up in the bubble of deschooling/homeschooling/selfschooling, she lacks the skills to deal with the “real world”. We forget that we are first social animals. If we don't make sense to our social groupings especially as children, we are maladapted to life on this planet. It creates grief and unhappiness. We are creatures of conforming. People who don't end up like Levi, shot by OPP for being unable to live in society. Someone who just wanted to be left alone.

Its astonishing how much grief has been racked up over the years. Grief of incarceration, grief of clear cut, grief of concussion and brain damage, maiming and dismemberment, grief of death in Chiapas, grief of squats evicted, losing people, losing touch, child abuse, seams coming apart on already tenuous experiences of life, vulnerability, susceptibility, anxiety that seemed so prevalent in that clan. Grief of loss of enthusiasm, wonder, life, energy, creation, creativity, all going up in smoke and flames and molotov cocktails, percussion bombs and tear gas canisters and beatings. Grief of brutal, brutal beatings sustained by gentle, gentle people. And grief caused by the realization that we experience so little of what so many other people experience that we think we are justified in a moral and righteous outrage when it happens to us. Grief of privilege.

Deschooling can only exist in relation to schooling. Otherwise all you create is a less educated person. A less educated person has less power to change things because they must necessarily spend more time surviving. To learn is to thrive.

Now for my bi-yearly contribution...

A stream of consciousness writing that was spurred by a class in Environmental Education. It's a challenging space for me to be in. It'll be good eventually, but its definitely me rubbing up against some former boundaries...

...This strange and fascinating experience of being on the other side. once told to quit school to avoid the hegemony of higher education, by people who then went on to do their masters and doctorates and law school, now I am facing these same people in their privileged ivory towers and claiming myself the same title of privilege that I once eschewed. You live long enough and you do play all the parts but Bookchin was someone I thought was long dead in my past (I hated the old bastard anyways). The anger that comes up when looking at a 6 page article infused with crap language that makes it inaccessible and therefore irrelevant to so many people and seeing for the first time that it was a pride of understanding and not an elitist attitude that I encountered so many times. Counter hegemony. I still don't understand exactly what that word means, and I wonder what happened to that guy that formed my first embryonic class analysis by making fun of the cop for not understanding his chalk graffiti in Kingston. My experience is steeped in, well, experience. I am a natural story teller, it is how I negotiate the world. I get it from my father who always, for every situation, “had a friend” when I was growing up, usually to convey precautionary tales of what I should and should not do. I believe in the concrete and the ordinary, things I can touch, I can see, smell, taste and hear. The privilege of directional hearing, being so easily able to identify and label sounds as if it were nothing, because it is nothing, absolutely nothing to us, something that takes the entirety of his concentration and fatigues him greatly we can do without thinking twice about. My cyborg, my man machine my reason to finally come to terms with technology and embrace rather than despise it. The reason why in my mind the answer to a technocratic society has to be a rather sheepish but emphatic yes. We need the computer, the phone, the screen to interface. The texting must go on, our relationship would be non existent but for IM. There is a reason to embrace or at least make peace with it.

Death and Facebook

I found out that an old friend was shot to death by the OPP about 3 weeks ago, way up north in Pickle Lake. I found out about this the same way I have found out about many deaths of people that I knew/know - over facebook.

It is fascinating, really.

Peter said to me a couple of weeks ago, considering between the two of us, there have been about a half dozen deaths of people we knew once upon a time - shouldnt this be happening in our sixties? Not thirties? But the reality is, is that even though I don't speak to the majority of the people on my friend list, they are all there for a reason - that is, I know them. Or knew them. A small minority I only knew online, but most of them in person, at least to the extent of being friendly. Now, considering that this is the first generation that has the ability to stay in touch with friends from every part of their lives (I have people on my list I was friends with in childhood, haven't seen in person since we were both 6 years old, and was out of touch with until last year), it stands to reason that we hear - through the grapevine, through friends of friends, through whatever means, when someone dies. Had it not been for facebook, I wouldnt have known about Brad Will, and probably would have only heard about Levi much later on, in passing. So in a way, these social networking sites bring us closer to death.

Is this a good thing? Honestly? I think yes. Death is as much a part of life as, well, birth is. And yet we willfully ignore, sanitize and hush it up in this culture - we try to keep it as far away from us as possible. As a consequence, people dont know how to react, dont know if they are justified in their grief, dont observe important rituals that are able to allow us to cope with it. We are terrified of death.

The only way, of course, to get rid of a fear, is to face it. Facebook, in a weird way, helps us get accustomed to the idea of death and tragedy. Of course, it also spreads a lot of joy around too - I have lost track of the amount of people that I have found out are pregnant over facebook, heh. I have friends all over the world, so reading the obits doesnt do it (though it is a past time I highly recommend, for reasons detailed here and as a reminder to enjoy life, as it is very very short.)

wow.

Four years ago at this time, I was a 26 year old highschool student with a 5 month old at home, waiting to hear back from universities as to whether or not I could go there.

Today, I got accepted into the MES at York University. I am officially a graduate student.

That is so, so, SO cool.

Existential Angst is meeeeeeee...

Well, damn, I'm closing in on the last 6 months of my undergraduate degree. Of course the question is, what on earth do I do now???

I've worked so hard over the last four years, just gotten my nose down to the grind and pushed myself to make it through. Despite all nighters, being puked on, or screaming due to teething, with the Boo. Despite my mom nearly dying due to Necrotizing Fascitis. Despite a custody battle. Despite a total retooling of the diet made necessary by severe illness. Despite depression. Despite a low self esteem. Despite never having any time off ever to do anything. Despite insomnia. Despite devastating and unexpected death. Despite life, in short.

So now what? Grad school? Med school? Law school? Michener Institute? Victory Lap? Work force? Volunteering? College?

Can I go back to first year, please? I've seen reality, and I don't like how it looks.

Two more sleeps!

Then I'm done.

The major difference between fourth year and first year was illustrated to me yesterday. I had an exam yesterday. It snowed yesterday. Instead of feeling like I didn't have the time or energy to concentrate on anything but my exam, I went out and built a rockin good snowman with the boo.

Its all relative, you know? That half hour crawling around in the snow probably did far more for my state of mind than a half hour studying the 12 links of dependent origination. Im glad that I can have enough perspective about where on the importance scale things lie now. Just in time to graduate, heh. Thats not to say that I wasnt fully prepared for the exam, of course - just that I knew for a fact that I could take a bit of time and it wouldnt make much of a difference, and more importantly that I could enjoy that time while I was having it because I knew that school was school, and school needs to be put in perspective.

I started getting all anxietal about the exam at about 4 pm in the afternoon yesterday, but then I realized that it actually wasnt the exam I was feeling wound up about at all - it was all the stuff that goes along with the exam, all the embellishment and meaning that I add to it - ie "If I dont do well on the exam, then I dont get a good mark, if I dont get a good mark, I dont get into grad school, if I dont get into grad school, I wont be able to get a job in these tough economic times, blah blah blah blah blah... " and then I realized that it wasnt the exam itself I was being freaked out about, it was my future. And the thing with the future is that it just hasnt happened yet, so no use being upset about it.

Now, I'm gonna go back and attack the second half of my environmental bio course. Whee!

As a post script, after the exam I texted my partner and said to him "its weird not feeling all stressed out about stuff." He reassured me that he had faith in my ability to find something. :P