Category Archives: Education
The Georgia Straight on Post-Secondary Spending in the Valley
The Georgia Straight, and its online version, the straight.com, are useful sources for news, investigative journalism and media criticism. Amid its pop culture pap and racy personal ads, the Straight can deliver articles of surprising quality on topics rarely seen in BC’s corporate media. Here’s a recent article on the imbalance of spending on post-secondary […]
Notes from Michael Oakeshott’s “Political Education”
One of the most thoughtful and engaging conservative philosophers of the 20th century is Michael Oakeshott. I’m re-reading some of the essays from his famous work Rationalism in Politics. Here are my quote notes on the first essay I’ve read: Oakeshott, Michael. “Political Education,” Rationalism in Politics and other essays, Expanded Edition (Liberty Press, Indianapolis), […]
Elizabeth Warren: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
The following lecture features Elizabeth Warren speaking about the current crisis in (and looming collapse of) the American middle class. This presentation is almost 58 minutes, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested in long term social and economic trends and the future of the middle class. Warren is a Harvard law professor who […]
A Response to The CBC News Series on E-Learing in BC ( produced by Theresa Lalonde)
http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Canada/BC/ID=1467283984 Theresa, As a long-time teacher and e-learning veteran, I’d like to thank you for your series on online education (now called distributed learning [DL] by the Ministry of Ed. mucky-mucks). Unfortunately, many of us had a chuckle when we watched the first episode. Sorry, but the biggest problem in DL is not office privacy! […]
Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation
Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation* argues that modern western society (and particularly American society) is moving from a relatively literate print-based culture to a post-literate technology culture. Bauerlein’s specific focus is on the new realm of social technologies (“e-mails, text messages, blog-postings and comments, phone calls, tweets, feeds, photos and songs” (p. x)) that he […]
Provincial deficits for 2009/2010
Here are some interesting stats re: provincial deficits. We see that Alberta has a huge per capita deficit, thanks largely to Alberta’s reliance on irregular resource and exploration taxes, and not on more stable income and sales taxes. This is a good example of how debt and deficits are as reliant on what you tax […]