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Posts Tagged ‘education’

Fear and Anti-Male Discrimination in the Classroom

Thursday, February 26th, 2009
In his book The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Barry Glassner discusses how Americans have become unnecessarily fearful of many things, thanks in good part to opportunistic politicians, single-minded advocacy groups, sensationalist news media, “news magazine” programming and so on. Such irrational fear complexes can do profound and unjustified harm not just to the directly affected individuals and groups, but to society as a whole.

When a segment of society has been unjustifiable tarred, it often takes dedicated activism to raise people’s consciousness to the injustice and perniciousness of such discrimination. My consciousness was recently raised by blogger Justin Trottier with regard to a branch of discrimination that does not seem to receive much public acknowledgement: discrimination against men. (more…)

Kids in Quebec to be “confused” by religious choices

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

The province of Quebec (in Canada) has begun requiring all grade 1 through 11 students to take classes that teach various ethical and religious systems.

Some traditional Catholic parents have tried to keep their kids out but the school boards have turned down their requests.

Marc-André Richard said the school board has just started a war with parents like himself.

He said he is worried that if his kids learn about other religions on top of Catholicism, they will become confused by too many choices. [emphasis added]

M. Richard is going to keep his kids home for these classes even if it means they fail.

As much as I want to respect the rights of parents to raise their children how they want, this crosses a line.   To say “I don’t want my son/daughter knowing that some people think differently than us” is utterly absurd! If your religion is logically coherent, or at least ingrained enough in your child’s head, then the child should be able to survive a provincial religious education course.