AN EXTENSION OF
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
I am not a Conservative, but already it is apparent that
Kathleen Wynne, the new Liberal leader, is a disaster as premier.
She has exactly Dalton McGuinty's smarmy instincts and political
ethics.
One of the only worthwhile things done in his decade as the
most irresponsible and inept premier in memory was his reminding the teachers
of the fact that they are employees of the public at a time of fiscal
difficulty.
This woman has wiped out the effort entirely.
And just look at her other acts over so brief a time as
premier.
The investigation she launched into the cancer-drug scandal
was genuinely McGuintyesque, a way to delay and put-off while appearing to do
something. Any good private investigator
could have got to the bottom of the matter in 3 days.
Her recent initiative on wind farms represents virtually no
change from McGuinty's high-handed ways. In Britain, for example, the
government is giving local municipalities a veto over them.
Wynne has done nothing of substance about McGuinty's several
scandals of mismanagement.
No changes at e-Health beyond McGuinty's last appointment
resigning and getting a Golden Handshake for solving nothing at the troubled agency.
No changes in our forgotten air-ambulance scandal.
Her recent change in teacher education requirements are
leftover initiatives of McGuinty.
The cutting of places in education colleges was something
which should have been done years ago. It's just basic housekeeping never kept
up with, not reform.
The new two-year requirement for graduates is backward. Many
other jurisdictions have realized that "teachers' colleges" are
ineffective. Putting well-educated and motivated young people – or indeed,
not-so-young – into class rooms is what we need. Learn-by-doing under, say, two
years of mentoring by experienced teachers is the reform we need.
Teachers' colleges are staffed by teachers who dropped out
of the classroom, who promote unscientific, and even plainly silly, theories about how
things are done, and who use language which calls a spade a manually-operated
excavating machine. Any intelligent young person will learn how their skills
best serve teaching during a couple of years practicing, not the 80 days now proposed
for teachers' colleges and certainly not the present standard of 40 days.
Hasn't our government learned anything about education? The
previous director of TDSB was hired by people who clearly did not know what
they were doing. He was likely awarded his doctorate by an education faculty who
also did not know what it was doing.
Ontario schools are by no measure outstanding. Our public
education is a leader in nothing. We don't even compare to the world's most
successful systems. The computer hasn’t yet been integrated with many teachers
unable to use them and our schools not supplying them to all students, a
longstanding practice in a number of jurisdictions.
But this government can tell young people if they just spend
more time in education faculties and waste more resources, adding costs and
debt, they'll be able to do a better job. Nonsense.
If "found money" – money supposedly suddenly
discovered in declining enrolments - went anywhere, except applied to the
deficit where it genuinely belonged, it should have gone towards obtaining
computers for our students, but then we still have many teachers who cannot use
a computer. Many jurisdictions put lap-tops into each student's hands, but not
Ontario, bastion of teachers' union interests and second-rate education.
I'm going to vote Conservative for the first time in my life
at the next provincial election, and I'm not even attracted to the leader, Mr.
Hudak. A decade of McGuinty was enough, and Wynne shows every promise of being
even worse.
