So long Tory.
The provincial Tories just lost my vote. I was considering voting for them in next months elections as I liked John Tory when he ran for mayor and some of their policies are decent (not all, I don't like the idea of funding religious schools). But then today they go ahead and announce that Creationism should be allowed to be taught in schools here. What??? First off, since when has anyone in Canada ever even wanted this? As far as I know this has never been an issue here. This is just another example of the Americanization of Canadian politics. Yuck.
posted by AndresS @ 1:56 PM
2 Comments:
Any suggestion that John Tory "favors" or "supports the teaching of creationism" is either Liberal spin, sloppy reporting, or some combination of both.
I think John has been very clear all along that any independent schools that wish to receive public funding would be required to implement the Ontario curriculum (as well as hiring only certified teachers and testing their students using the province's standardized tests).
The Ontario curriculum does not allow the teaching of creationism or any other religious belief or theory in science classes, Those subjects can, however, be part of a religious studies class - as they are right now in many of Ontario's public and Catholic schools.
So Tory's policy would mean that the theory of creation would be handled no differently in independent schools than it is in schools which currently receive public education funding.
Further, his policy would ensure that those faith based schools would have to start following the Ontario curriculum, using only certified teachers, and implementing standardized testing if they wanted to receive any funding from the government.
Thanks for your comment Janice. Indeed John Tory went on to clarify his comment and it also emphasizes these points which is good and I now understand better what his stance is.
The fact that the topic of creationism was even brought up still disturbs me. Like I said, it smells of Americanization of our politics.
Also, I still don't agree that we should fund any religious schools with taxpayers dollars, that includes funding Catholic schools. If we're going to start funding religious schools we should also start funding other schools such as the local Toronto Estonian School and other specialized heritage schools.
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