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Educators or Instigators?
By
Bob Orrick
It is generally conceded that parents, in compliance with provincial law, send their children to school to be educated. Where, one asks, do parents send their children's teachers to be educated? According to reports carried in national print medium, some teachers in Ontario and British Columbia are in great need of 'being educated.'
In Ontario, a few members of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association [OECTA] attacked that province's minister of education. The minister had been invited to speak to the Association at an open meeting. Upon arrival, the minister was advised that the meeting was closed to the media and that her speech was turfed in favour of a question and answer format. When the revised format took a turn for the worse the minister, escorted by aides, departed. The minister was "chased up an escalator by about two dozen people." As she was escorted through the mob, she had "water thrown on her head, was shoved several times by a male protestor." As this was going on, "a few mob members wore paper masks and chanted 'Shame! Shame!'"
"It was … the ugliest confrontation in nearly eight years of feuding between teachers and the provincial government," is how the National Post termed it in an editorial.
One wonders how those teachers [so-called] will feel when they return to the classroom and face their pupils. The pupils are knowledgeable and will most certainly be aware of how their teachers acted. Is such behaviour the message that teachers should be giving to their pupils? Are teachers above the law? Is it any wonder that some students ignore authority or jeer at officialdom or display utter contempt for their elders when they see how their teachers act in public?
One letter writer opined, "The reason teachers' unions fight to hard against freedom of choice in education is that if parents had such choices, you would see few choosing to have their children educated by thugs."
Clearly, those teachers from the OECTA who acted in such a despicable manner and who tarred all teachers with their brush of hatred need to be educated and until they are, they should be removed from the classroom.
Out in British Columbia, the Vancouver Sun opened its lead editorial with, "With the behaviour of teachers' unions lately, it is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between teachers and Teamsters left over from the era of Jimmy Hoffa."
The editorial referred to the British Columbia Teachers' Federation's "plans to reconsider its commitment to political neutrality." It seems that the Federation is more intent on non-classroom topics such as the province's bid for the 2010 Olympic Games, the Kyoto Protocol, the Romanow report, Iraq, and a host of other subjects better left to the politicians than to the teachers.
One area that jumps out is the Federation's intent to support "socially progressive" candidates in elections. One supposes that covers both municipal and provincial elections. As the Sun's editorial put it, "… isn't really surprising, given that they're the same actions encouraged by most unions and union leaders."
Confrontation appears to be the name of the game and educating students would appear to be a casualty of that fight.
Is it any wonder that parents from coast to coast are looking with favour on home-schooling or charter schools as alternatives to provincially-mandated, taxpayer-supported public schools?
Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to off-shore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
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