Monday, 22 June 2020
Canada: behold Prince Rupert of the Rhine, your slavery promoting founding father
This snotty looking Anglo-European
wannabe Roman figure is Rupert, original governor of the Hudson Bay Company,
the corporation that operated Canada as a commercial enterprise from 1670, its
creation, to 1870, when the corporation was effectively purchased for £300,000 ($1.5 million) by Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert%27s_Land_Act_1868).
With the exception of the East India Company,
whose employee, Henry Hudson, got remembered in the name of the Bay, there are no larger examples of the route from
colonial commerce to nationhood than
that of the corporation that became Canada. By virtue of fighting for the monarchy in the
English civil war the well-connected Rupert ( 1619-1682), originally from
Prague in Bohemia, got his name on a huge stretch of land, first inhabited and managed
by first nations, in the north of what came to be America. Rupert is unknown by the vast majority of
the inhabitants of the country that bought his entitlement, but his legacy of
empire and slavery (https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Company_of_Adventurers_Trading_to_Africa_(Cromwell_the_Great)
is not dead, as recent murders of members of Canada’s colonized communities illustrate.
Any similarity of Rupert to any current Canadian leaders is entirely
coincidental.
Wednesday, 17 June 2020
Imagine: cities as commons
Mainstream governments everywhere are less and less popular among the people they represent. There is a reason: they are usually built on political and technological models from regresssive values and previous centuries. Recent incidents of police violence in Toronto and U.S. cities are examples More and more of today's citizens look for responsive, city-based, collective options like the one above that reimagines urban railways. TorontotheBetter was formed as a voluntary collective of progressive enterprises and is pleased to endorse the generative commons vision. We encourage all to learn from it and join us as we continue our work supporting urban commons in Toronto and beyond. https://generative-commons.eu/ge-co-webinar-on-urban-commons/
Monday, 15 June 2020
Neoliberalism and education: TorontotheBetter speaks to author Paul Bocking
Suitably distanced from each other, but not from the neoliberal, anti-worker policies that bite students and teachers even harder in pandemic times TorontotheBetter recently spoke to union colleague Paul Bocking in downtown Toronto about his new book on education throughout the NAFTA region.
Public education is always a way for establishments to reproduce themselves, and in recent years schools in Canada, the U.S.A. and Mexico have increasingly been focussed
on producing the skills and values needed by a job market dominated by science,
technology and business, that is, embodiments of the neoliberal ideology of small government and
privatization that for the most part these sectors are now serving. Paul Bocking’s new book “Education,
Neoliberalism and Teachers” is an illuminating overview of the various aspects of
this pedagogical process, with a special focus on the limitations of teacher
autonomy that it necessarily involves. Talking to educational workers in all three countries signatory to NAFTA 1 and 2, the book offers insight into how the values of the agreements affect education and so, the minds, of students and teachers alike. Generally, independent minds in either teachers, or
their students, are undesirable human qualities for a system seeking narrow reproducible
market skills. So, TorontotheBetter wondered, are narrowly focused test questions a
method to accomplish the required engineering of human minds for compliance
with a neoliberal world?
Bocking
explained that his book had its seeds in the simultaneous development in all three
countries of the NAFTA region of educational systems that prioritize the interests
of the market, in the way they are funded and administered, as well as in the
curricula they teach and, perhaps, most importantly for teachers and students, in the
standardized and standardizing tests by which their outcomes are validated. One
key consequence for teachers has been a reduction in their roles and autonomy
and a replacement. in school hiring policies, of trained teachers by subject
specialists. Education is now increasingly reduced to “preparation for the test”,
which simplifies the quantitative measurement of learners and learning.
Enabling students to work through any specific issues that exist in their local
environments, what we may call the social determinants of education (parallel
to the now well recognized social determinants of health in the healthcare
sector), is irrelevant and so ignored in this neo-liberalized version of
education.
Supervening over local differences, standardized evaluative instruments, such as the EQAO (Education
Quality and Accountability Office), are now used to evaluate school quality based
on the tests they use and administrators have increasingly become managers,
rather than teachers. The result, argues Bocking, is that “teachers’ ability to
apply their expertise to the specific needs of their class” is displaced and
downgraded. If pedagogy and evaluation are being hollowed out by the neoliberal
regime the associated competition for funds in an increasingly privatized
environment results in parentally fee-funded schools luring the “best”
students, with the highest income(d) parents, and preventing them from leaving
once enrolled.
In general, then, Bocking argues, teaching and teachers have
been de-skilled and degraded from any role as
system destabilizers to obedient pattern reproducers of students with skills that
fill job market needs rather than as defenders of public goods and values. In
Mexico, for a savage example, 43 striking student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacers College
were killed in September 2014 by drug cartels aligned with the Mexican state. Thus, Instead of serving democracy and social
questioning teachers are increasingly trained to produce obedient wage slaves, The simultaneous defunding of public schools in favour of private charter
schools in the U.S. compounds this drift towards the production of
technicians rather than citizens. Though primarily a phenomenon of education in
the U.S.A. the “charter school movement”, with its mantra of parental choice
through private school enrolment has been the banner bearer for many of the
above trends, allowing schools to pick and choose wealthier pupils and so
further entrench social and ethno-cultural inequality.
A parallel development,
as anti-tax campaigns and their corollary in declining school budgets have
grown, has been the rise of private technical schools like Herzing and Trios colleges
that narrow education down to business skill preparation. The traditional rounded liberal and
humanities education has been increasingly downgraded and excluded.
Paul Bocking’s new book is a needed exposition of the
destructive effects, for both learners and teachers, of neoliberal philosophy
on public education. It presents those who read it with the challenge of
defending public education and fostering a new embodiment of it that will be required
to build an emancipatory educational future in all three countries of the North
American free trade accords. The stakes are high: the minds and values of the next generations of oung people. If, on the one hand neoliberalism effectively increases
inequality by reducing basic social supports for those who need them though competition
for funds it simultaneously increases
the gap at the other end of the spectrum by aggrandizimg through private investment those already
advantaged.
ToronotheBetter encourages blog visitors reading this review to look for a copy of Paul Bocking's in their local library but we offer substantially discounted copies and free shipping for any who seek to buy their own by emailing postmaster@torontothebetter.net with Education in the subject line.
Friday, 12 June 2020
Inequality Kills
-COVID-19 where poorly regulated for-profit Long Term Care homes cram multiple residents in close quarters to maximize profit
-Racism, where the poor and ethnically excluded are victimized by authorities
-Climate change, where ecologies are exploited beyond their natural capacities in the service of economic growth and environments, including the human, react destructively.
However "nice" some people choose to be to each other pandemic causes are deeper than conscious human behaviour. Neoliberalism's regime of government withdrawal and privatization is a factor throughout.
TorontotheBetter works for a social economy where all are justly treated and fairly rewarded
Thursday, 11 June 2020
Postcolonial Toronto streetsigns
Once all imperial and racist legacies have been erased from Toronto's streets what will be left?
Wednesday, 10 June 2020
Good riddance to Dundas St.
This dark, forbidding statue of Henry Dundas (aka Viscount Melvile, 1742-1811) in Edinburgh, Scotland depicts a well connected Tory, known mainly for his opposition to the emancipation of slaves during the creation of the British empire and "celebrated" by those who knew him at the time, like Robert Burns, poet of A Man's a Man for A'That, and Adam Smith, he of "The Wealth of Nations", as a "coarse" and "loose" character. Perhaps inevitably imperial gratitude for his role in empire building led to the name Dundas being threaded through the early streets of British colonies like Canada. At a time, over two centuries later, when the many ill legacies of empire, most notably slavery, are being dramatically re-called and re-lived yet again on the streets of North America and beyond it is time for the name Dundas to disappear from our streets. TorontotheBetter invites you to visit and sign the petition at: https://you.leadnow.ca/petitions/let-s-rename-dundas-street-in-toronto?source=twitter-share-button&utm_source=twitter&share=76156208-5e16-4f48-93c0-5ecb897dee7e
And thanks to Andrew Lochhead for setting this modern emancipatory movement in motion.
Wednesday, 3 June 2020
Freeland and Trudeau cop-out on Trump's racism
"Silence is excellent and eloquent" said deputy Prime-Minister Freeland about her superior, Justin Trudeau's silence on the behaviour of the president of Canada's largest trading partner. In fact it was a not very subtle attempt to avoid telling truth to power. Silence in the face of racism is acceptance. Freeland and Trudeau are, therfore, gutless hypocrites when they say how unacceptable they believe it to be. Expressing unambiguous disapproval without expletives is something true leaders have always been able to do, but apparently not the leaders of the current government of Canada. Imagine if silence been the chosen response in the face of Adolf Hitler and other historical racists! TorontotheBetter seeks a world where we build respect through honesty.
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
The other side of skipping dishes: couriers speak up
Monday, 1 June 2020
Pakistani garment workers fight for COVID protection
Not much distancing possible in garment sweatshops
[thanks to @labourstart for this link]
On recent deaths, street anger and violence
No sooner had the reaction to the murder of George Floyd by state representatives appeared on the streets of the U.S.A. and other countries than predictable voices like ‘peace activist’ Donald Trump emerged, attacking “violence”. Such protesting about protest is hypocritical. What it really means is one type of violence (ours) is ok but your reaction is not. Same for anger. Much anger, from childhood on, is a reaction to injustice and such anger will lead to violence if ignored. If we are not angry about injustice we are complacent, and complacency enables continuance of the injustice and the anger. The truth is no progressive changes in history, from abolition of slavery to democracy and civil rights have occurred without anger and the violence it will lead to when the injustice that caused it continues Not all anger is just or creative but it can be and often has been, so the key issue here is not violence; it is whose violence and what is its purpose. If the unjust cause is not removed the anger and resulting violence cant’t be either. Better understood, such anger and violence, are the necessary seeds of change and improvement, if improvement is ever to occur. Building a better society for All in it is the best way to prevent anger. And “violence”.
