I am dropping out.

Few people know that he was actually defending Bertrand Russell.

I am writing this post mostly for myself as a reference to be used later when I write a much more exhaustive memoir documenting these experiences.

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A vocal minority of people in the academy wax lyrical about the substance and nature of "speaking truth to power" when it's actually relatively banal in practice if university faculty and administrators happen to dismiss or to enable malpractice, corruption, and/or bad faith action.

Just speak the truth. Challenging existing false and dubious authority is concomitant with the communication of unadulterated truth.  But hey, if you really want to speak truth to power, 

rip that doctorate up at the podium, ideally while also reaffirming to the people of the cloth that 

"this is how we speak truth to power."

Cathartic incendiary invective aside, I am dropping out of my PhD program in year 7, after finishing and submitting a full first draft of my dissertation a little over a year ago.  My only regret is that I did not drop out the moment that my thesis committee refused to recognize my data collection in 2021, allegedly because it was unethical for me to collect data without their unanimous approval of a revised proposal, and despite my receiving full ethical approval for the study's Ethics Protocol from my respective Ethics Review Board.  Despite my most recent attempted compromise negotiated with my departmental administration this past summer of 

collecting a second set of data, 
after ratifying a second set of amendments to my Ethics Protocol, 
upon conducting a secondary analysis, 
and despite offering to consolidate two dissertations worth of data and analyses into one oversized manuscript, 

my thesis committee seems to be stonewalling my progress.  Despite paying tuition out of pocket without working full time while living in downtown Toronto, I submitted a revised proposal (about the 6th or 7th version) with highlighted sections for review early November 2023, and no one on my thesis committee has yet gotten back to me as of this writing with feedback or suggestions for revision.  For some of the folks on my thesis committee, this is not a first-time offense.  One might ask, 

"how did you get here?"

I am not interested in flaming my thesis committee and departmental administration, even if I were convinced that such whistleblowing may assist other current and future colleagues experiencing abuse at UofT; there are other fora for that.  Moreover, I am a pacifist who researches and teaches pacifistic pedagogy.  Yet, I think it's still worthwhile to revisit the basic facts of my situation.

I first applied for my program in 2015 from China while teaching math and science just outside Shanghai.  Unfortunately, I was not accepted to OISE's Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning program's fully-funded PhD cohort on the grounds that the department could not find someone to supervise my research.  Upon receiving the decline, I was convinced that the only way to do my research justice was to leave China and to spend at least a year developing contacts and building my application in-person in Toronto.  So, during a year of massive turnover of staff at my school, I elected to pass over an opportunity to serve as vice-principal in order to pursue the PhD program in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning department at UofT.

What followed was one of the craziest years of my life; it was essentially fully-funded cohort or bust.  My close friend and confidant in China insisted that I could not accomplish what I set out to accomplish in a single year. He insisted that I could not learn French while securing a teaching job in Toronto while also gaining admission into the fully funded cohort at UofT.  Not only did I nearly achieve B2 level French with Alliance Française in about 8 months (as a backup to teach FSL if I didn't get into the PhD program), but I also landed a job at Olympiads School to build and teach their Advanced Placement US History Course after publishing my Masters thesis research in a journal article to convince my current supervisor to give me a recommendation for the program at OISE.  I know my work ethic.

Yet, I should have paid more attention to the red flags.  After admission into the program, I developed a permanent scar in my eye (from a "peripheral corneal ulcer" in the words of my optometrist) from the additional stress of a two week stint supporting my supervisor in writing a grant proposal for over 300 thousand dollars (which they won).  I needed to support a close friend and colleague who had their work plagiarized by a member of my committee after I had recommended them to this individual.  I imagine my growing reputation as a whistleblower (or, you know, someone who cares about the pursuit of truth in a university) merely exacerbated my thesis committee's willingness to attempt to stonewall my completion and my departmental administration's unwillingness to intervene.

The most common advice I receive is to either escalate to the School of Graduate Studies or to lawyer-up.  Feeding other UofT departments additional ammunition to fire at OISE betrays my own commitments as an educator and as an education researcher.

And, I refuse to earn my degree at gun-point (through coercion via "hired gun").  It betrays not only what I believe, but what I research and teach to my students. If the only thing standing between me and a doctorate is my willingness to retain legal counsel, I'm better off just going straight to law school.

Fundamentally, a doctorate is premised upon the recognition of the value of an original contribution to an existing body of knowledge by the doctoral candidate's moral, ethical, or at least intellectual superiors.  On these grounds alone, the degree has lost most of its meaning to me.  I will likely never redeem my image of my department or of UofT, partly because of the over-idealizing I engaged in prior to and near the beginning of my program.  I pursued this path based on a mythology.

These intuitions allege to support and foster intellectual specialization.  But, if your research is truly speci-al (and thereby essentially original in keeping with the etymological roots of that word), then arguably no one in any of these institutions should be able to support your work directly, and, therefore, there would be a real need for other specialists to trust you to conduct your research rigorously and ethically because you're making a tangible but original contribution beyond existing knowledge, including the existing knowledge of your doctoral committee.

Empathizing with my departmental administrators and thesis committee, it's entirely possible that the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education was never actually equipped to support my work in the first place, despite the relevancy of my teaching and the research study's content to both the work of my colleagues and the interests of student participants.  Hence, I fully plan to finish the research study and to publish my research.  My last goal at UofT is to seek approval of the second set of amendments to my ethics protocol to conduct my second set of data collection.

I will finish this research project, conducting the additional data collection and analysis for a second write-up that honestly could undergird a second PhD dissertation.  I care about this research; I didn't give up vice-principal and leave China for a degree; I returned to Canada to finish the project that I began with my Master's thesis.  I will see this through to the end, with or without UofT, and with or without their increasingly irrelevant institutional recognition.

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When a colleague asked me why I submitted a manuscript for journal publication under pseudonym, I commented on the importance of practicing "a measure of humility in an ocean of unexamined arrogance."  These experiences have not shaken my resolve.  If anything, I'm more certain of my position now than I've ever been before.  From my work as a volunteer domestic violence counselor, to my role in the classroom as a professional high school teacher, to my role as a leader in the UTGSU Resistance, to the work that I continue to conduct as a researcher, we normalize the abuse that we're unwilling to contend.  

Moreover, I keep letting other people set my win conditions.  For me to finish my research project despite the neglect, misdirection, and sacrifices necessary to persist in my program is a greater accomplishment from my perspective than if I jumped into an existing research project and finished my doctorate in under four years. It'd be a far greater loss if I abandoned my research completely and betrayed the promises that I made to students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and to myself. My department may have failed me, but I won't fail them. I know what I promised to do.

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People familiar with this blog likely know about my effusive appreciation for Bertrand Russell.  He's been a tag on here since I launched this blog over a decade ago.  In the early 20th century, he was arguably the closest thing folks had to Socrates in the English-speaking parts of the world.  Yet, as I've insisted elsewhere, he would not have survived in some of the departments currently operating in North American universities.

As I was editing this post, I kept revisiting Einstein's quotation because I kept that same poster in my office, directly above my desk, at OISE; (I bought the poster among a couple others with the $60 my brother handed me when I began undergrad at Western University).  Turns out, my supervisor also kept a copy of this exact same poster, framed, in their office.

I'm too empiricist and agnostic to argue or to believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe in generalizable correlations as a researcher and someone committed to the development of knowledge.  If I were smarter, I would have recognized sooner the implications of most of the intellectuals I appreciate subsisting in exile from the academy.

As my close friends and colleagues could confirm, I did not plan to use the honorific even if I "earned it".  My students call me "Mr." from conventional courtesy; "Adam" is still just fine.

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Post script:  I've only just begun writing "thank you" letters to the faculty, staff, and administrators who have supported me throughout this journey.  A lot of great people do a lot of great work at OISE.  I will never forget their support.

On corruption

Probably a misattribution, but in lieu of reading this nonsense, just listen to Tim Minchin.

Preface: I have rewritten most of this post several times over the past couple of months since no matter how I approach revisions, this particular memorandum still seems too much like a rant.  I do not know if it is the topic or my lived experiences but apologies in advance if it still sounds like a tirade.

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One of my past professors whom I still deeply respect once affirmed to an entire undergraduate history classroom that "corruption greases the wheels of governance."  I have hated those words only increasingly since he uttered them.  Since, in my brief stint in student and administrative governance since high school, his claim has only ever been validated by my exposure.  

As someone currently fighting on the front lines of an anti-corruption movement at UofT, I feel relatively confident promising the reader that to contend one agent's corruption is to contend all agents' corruptions.  Corrupt people tend to congregate; the permissibilities of their corruptions are co-dependent.  "An attack against one is an attack against all," except these tribes play a different game with different rules.

In my five years at UofT, I think I may have demystified the potential ceilings of corruption among both student and university administrative governments, and they go far higher than I could have imagined prior to returning to Ontario from China.  During my undergrad, vocally among my friends and classmates, I had already declared university politics "as among the worst politics, because of all stakeholders, these folks should, and usually do, know better."  Yet, my then naïveté now feels total.

---

These institutions prioritize classist, nepotistic, and ultimately dynastic considerations above all.  Moreover, the people managing these institutions generally care far more about control than about students' understandings.  Yet, many of the people responsible for preserving these not-for-profit corporations' marketed images would undoubtedly deny or at least attempt to qualify these allegations, but behind closed doors, they're usually playing kingmaker.  Obviously, not everyone elects to play that game or, at least, elects to play that game monolithically.  However, frankly, most faculty and staff will not bite the hand that feeds them, so why should we expect anything more of our elected student leaders?

There's an admittedly Orwellian thread running among the intentions of university stakeholders and administrators.  Generally, the principal benefactors of these institutions want people educated just enough—conscious just enough of what's actually going on day to day behind closed doors.  Not too much.  Just enough—to keep the institution operational.  Faculty included.  Anything beyond that threshold, and your increasing consciousness can become a growing threat, especially if you have the courage to speak and/or to act on it (by virtue of the crisis of conscience to try to do either in the first place).  

One cannot appreciate the exhaustive extent of corruption in our post-secondary institutions until one starts speaking truth to these folks in power.  With empiricism under continued assault, the stakes of any remaining good faith commitment to alethic coherence have never been higher, and I write that with a deep appreciation of the historicized moment.  Somehow, in the era in which people have had among the greatest access to knowledge, the knowledge project itself has endured its greatest proportionate vulnerabilities since the Dark Ages. Bertrand Russell would not have survived in 2022.

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I don't know if I will ever redeem my image of the University of Toronto.  I'm not going to gaslight myself.  I know what some of Canada's "best and brightest" have done and, especially, what they haven't done with the knowledge that they had when they had it.  

It's easy to try to argue that my experience is the exception: that my exposure has been exceptionally unique or unlikely, but I have heard one too many stories from friends and colleagues to ignore the logical implications of their real experiences and feelings.

As such, it's difficult to face my students when they ask me about UofT.  I don't think I'm doing them any favours by misrepresenting my experiences, and especially the experiences of my friends and colleagues who have been harmed and could be harmed again with the same impunity, but misrepresent I do.  As implied, we at UofT are generally engaged in a great project of misrepresentation.

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I will finish my PhD, but not with the pride that I would have had five years ago.  Universities are not immutable or indispensable; in Canada, our larger institutions' undergraduate programs continue to be integrated as public-private extensions of public high schools.

Prophetically, that same professor also once noted that "if you want to learn, just get a library card."  A small part of me regrets that I did not follow that advice.

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To conclude, I find myself returning to Camus's alleged words almost weekly.  Despite my own bias toward the fundamentality of epistemology, I believe that rebellion is more ontic than epistemic: One exists in a state of rebellion if they are truly "rebelling".  Mere thoughts of dissent or of rebellion do not constitute or predicate ontic rebellion unless one were living under (e.g.) a totalitarian dictatorship, categorically.

If nothing else, my program has taught me that it's far easier to join (or more often to submit to) those inhabiting corruption than to fight for any other alternative.  But, the same were true throughout most of recorded human history; I can think of no exception where electing for corruption within a corrupt system presented the more difficult or higher justice, regardless of what people perceived as that which they had to lose at the time through resistance.

I told my mother something off-the-cuff over Thanksgiving that still resonates with me as I finish writing this post: "Power does not give one the right to abuse it."  Upon critical reflection of my own words as part of my endless attempts to falsify of my own positions and morality, I realized that this is still artifice, still baseless: nothing gives anyone rights.  We give each other rights, since time immemorial, regardless whether we philosophize or categorize them as inalienable and/or a priori.  Since—We can also take them away, as we have done so and will continue to do so, unless We stop them from rescinding or disrespecting what We have established as Our rights.

Only would-be tyrants fear a free and honest will.

"The protagony of vice villainizes virtue."

Excerpted from a cease and desist letter.

I presented my dissertation research at a national academic conference in May.  I had anticipated that injection into the marketplace of ideas since I started (obsessively) reading Nietzsche and the surviving Socratic dialogues in high school.  It's likely that those texts were the only reason that I reached university; as my mother could still probably attest, I almost dropped out in grade 11.  As I remarked to my current class of Writing 11-12 students the other day, my grade 11 and 12 Law teacher typically conducted all class time and assessments, including the exams, through fill-in-the-blank exercises that reiterated the courses' textbooks verbatim (every. single. class.).  My classmates and I were keen enough to know that this was dubious even as teenagers.  This teacher continued to teach at my public high school for years after I left, protected by the OSSTF no less.

Clichéd clichés, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth.  As a lower-middle class White male growing up with a single-parent mother in South-Western Ontario (with a genealogy of significant mental illness), I experienced oppression, but orders of magnitudes less than those of many of my current colleagues and friends.  This origin seems to have nurtured my empathy with those who have experienced or especially continue to experience absolute poverty—true desperation.  More than most of the people whom I've encountered in the academy, especially in its upper echelons, we often had to choose, deliberately and consistently from relatively young ages, to become the ways that we are now.  We didn't have the external pressures from our immediate communities (let alone families) to search for better lots in life; if anything, we faced opposite pressures.

However, I don't write this from self-pity.  This context is necessary to situate the subject of this post.

Why I—like those others—often confront the problem of protagony.  

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Sidebar.  I'm an English teacher.  Narrativization is an essential composite of both the learning and teaching processes of disciplinary English.  In some ways, we've never finished or transcended the Ancient Greeks' "agon".  The great contest continues unabated—among tragedians in fifth century BC Greece and among players of roles of all recreational, intellectual, and political stripes today.  However, arguably the self-consciousness of this role play and of the impulses to interpret, to retell, and to witness lived experiences through narrative has a history and developmental arc traceable to prehistory.  In other words, in some ways, the narrativization of these impulses to story can be traced to and reaffirming of the essentially human and therefore humanizing—ascriptions of prot-agon-y and antagony offering signs and signifiers of people attempting to interpret meaning from the human experience.  I don't know that we need Thomas King to confirm this, but he's still an awesome read.

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During a seminar at that academic conference, one of my department's professors contributed an interesting point regarding the liberation of inter-generationally oppressed peoples in systemically violent conflict zones.  The professor noted the importance of nurturing progatony among the oppressed.  On the surface, this object may seem rather benign and even benevolent.  However, like so many other tools of the human experience—empathy, charisma, sophistry, etc.—protagony is only as Good as the agent (self-)actualizing it.

I don't think I need to belabour societal obsession with heroes and heroism.  It's popcorn fare for the looking-glass self's validation.  These heroic narratives and narrativizations present elevated forms of protagony, appealing to their audiences' ideals.  As a gamer since toddlerhood, I grew up immersed in the protagonies of Japanese role-playing games.  It's terribly easy to inhabit these stories, since generally, people tend to find solace in the un(der)examined assumption that they may inhabit their own RPG.

But take two seconds to stare into the stars, and our collective cosmic insignificance is once again rendered obvious.  The universe probably doesn't care about us, falsifiably, and even if it did, we don't yet have the (observable) evidence necessary to validate thus.

Needless to say, we're probably not the heroes of our narratives; we might not even be Fifth Business.

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And yet, it's 2022, and people continue to heroize their choices and actions. But who among us are most predisposed to protagonization?  Our political leaders?  Sure.  Celebrities?  —I'm sure at least one or two people come to mind.  What do these folks have in common?  

Let me guess.  Do the germane characteristics validating their protagonistic candidacies involve (under-)philosophizing, a (lack of) truthfulness to their lived experiences, or a (repudiation of) the "conscientization" that this blog has alluded to since its inception?  Right.  As a virtue-ethicist, I make a point to avoid the skulljacking of virtue ethics, but the omnipresence of vice seeking validation (and most often exoneration) through protagonization has become comically conspicuous.  

Implicitly, an agent's protagonization of their actions requires an under-examination or self-deception.  Today, we endure the great irony that the people most inclined to narrativize themselves as protagonists tend to be the last to self-examine, if they ever bother to do so.  It's "those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness," as Sophie Scholl would say, who seem to be most predisposed to protagonize their actions and existences, if only as a last resort.

Crucially, this trend becomes especially worrisome among our intellectuals. After all, our "Doctors of Philosophy" have (allegedly) exhibited a threshold of love of wisdom, communicated a threshold of trustworthy truth value, and have (allegedly) habituated a threshold of consciousness and of conscientiousness critical of the former.  Intellectuals tend to be the most vulnerable to protagonizing their triumphs over adversity—as those among the most self-conscious of the gravity and magnitudes of their struggles and positionalities.

Make no mistake: A commitment to virtue can threaten the very existence of anyone protagonizing vice.  Those protagonizing vice will almost certainly experience harm in your presence, although necessarily self-inflicted. Virtue is the villainy of vice.  Moreover, the people aspiring to virtue tend to be the last people to self-identify as the protagonists of their own narratives.  Unadulterated self-examination tends to bar said individuals from the necessary myopia.

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When V for Vendetta reached theatrical release in Ontario, I paid to see it in theatres four times in just over a week (a substantial feat for a teenager pumping gas on weekends).  I knew nothing of the graphic novel at that time; I knew only that the Wachowski sisters had a hand in its production, and after ruminating over The Matrix for years, I knew that I needed to see this film—to attempt to understand it. After my first viewing, I would have rewatched it in its entirety on the spot.  The film's cultural legacy and co-opting aside, it still communicates the importance of fearlessness and of determination in the face of oppressors, of authoritarians, and of their contemporary iterations.

With few exceptions, we have almost no Disney-villain level antagonists today.  Most of the people who have been villainized have been ascribed such villainy for political purposes, usually through some collaborative gaslighting.  But this follows logically; if one has already protagonized vice, (let's call it an "hamartia" to keep my English colleagues satiated), the various varieties of prevarications tend to be one concentric circle deeper.

To conclude, the vile yet vociferous villains to virtue violate with vengeance the vocations of valor and veracity; yet, the virtuous vicars of vigorous vantage vacillate voicelessly, vetting varieties of ventures to venerably vanquish the vacuous villainy.  Voilà! The vanishing vanguard vie the vogue vignette: that the protagony of vice villainizes virtue.

Old thumbnail.

On courage

Gary Oldman deserves every accolade that he received for his portrayal of this role.

Reflecting on this post—from before I started writing it, through its major modifications while editing, to my final insights as I approached its publication—I honestly believe that this is one of the most important arguments that I've assembled in this blog to date, and it has some hot competition.  This post attempts to resolve and to delimit a broader philosophical system that I started writing about in high school as well as attempts to articulate one of the greatest existential crises posed to the academy, today.

This post lay inert, collecting digital dust in my drafts for months, labeled as "On cowardice."   As those who've consulted the terms and conditions of this blog—or lack thereof—might discern, I'm not monetizing this platform—nor do I have any intention of doing so in the future.  Hence, the writing process tends to embody Nietzschean becoming; given that I'm more or less All-But-Dissertation and that I recently discovered that my CSSE (Canadian Society for Study of Education) proposal to present my dissertation was approved, I need to false flag a justification to publish here.

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I was half way through this post when, by coincidence, I encountered what has become known as the Grievance Studies Affair, often labeled "Sokal Squared" by the academic press in reference to the more widely known Sokal Affair.  I remarked to some of my colleagues that it felt like fate that I found myself writing and editing a piece about courage just as I encountered this fearless defense of academic freedom and of the knowledge project.  

For those of you unaware of the circumstances and significances of this affair, three exceptional scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—attempted to co-publish twenty hoax journal articles, successfully publishing seven of them.   Deliberately non-sensical, the articles included a piece re-interpreting anatomical male genitalia as socially constructed concepts.  They sought to expose problems that they perceived among pay-to-publish models of scholarship and, especially, the inadequacies among the standards of rigor, vetting, and methodology of academic journals associated with what they referred to as the academic "grievance disciplines": including gender studies, decolonizing studies, and other fields that tend to draw lineage from the post-modern philosophy and critical theory of the 1960s.

If you've read this far, I feel that I should assure you, the reader, that I believe that what they did was highly unethical.  I have no doubt about the unethical character of deliberately lying to editorial boards and to peer reviewers with ulterior motivation if one construes of ethics as an ideal system of actionable dos and don'ts.  Arguably, they could have achieved the same ends without undermining the scholarship of people researching and writing in so-called "grievance studies" because, as their critics rightly contended, their actions undermined the legitimacy and capacity of those working in these fields who respect traditional research standards of rigor, validity, and reliability.  The public perception of these "grievance" fields can directly impact their funding and therefore solvency & growth. Despite the ongoing ideological culture wars in many North American post-secondary institutions that some of these fields tend to legitimize, scholars working in, for example, gender studies and decolonizing studies have done a lot of Good in the service of the knowledge and the human projects.

However, I believe that what they did was moral.  Morality, traditionally, concerns the "whys" of action in lieu of ethics' traditional "whats" and "hows".  The morality of the academy rests on some basic assumptions with origins traceable to the Socratics.  For example, the knowledge project depended and continues to depend, in part, on the assumption of academic freedom, its associated rights and freedoms of speech and of association.  Although those scholars had adverse, if not arguably malicious, motivations—their actions could be justified as a form of counter-attack, or even a desperate defense, in the ideological culture wars that increasingly enthrall the academy.

"Empiricism" is currently under assault.  Verifiable sensory observation of phenomena no longer serves as the gold standard of evidence-based reasoning.  I don't mean to sound like an insurgent here, but academics increasingly find themselves in exile for defending what amount to experientially evidenced-based reasoned claims.  People outside of our academic institutions might find these allegations bizarre or even unfathomable, but I assure you, this is happening, and it is getting worse.  Moreover, the consequences could be existential to the future of the knowledge project.

I anticipate that I am too honest and too committed to traditional conceptions of truth to survive in the long-term in these institutions.  Although I would never engage in the shenanigans of Sokal Squared, increasingly, it'll take a lot less than those levels of professional transgression to get "cancelled" from the academy, or at least, that seems to be the general trans-disciplinary trajectory.  Predictably, this pathology terminates in (former) academics finding themselves with no other recourse than to argue that the public should defund universities.

And not to (re)tread that clichéd slippy slide, but academic freedom is probably next.

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As a teacher, I am constantly reflecting on what capacities, attitudes, and predispositions I should be attempting to foster among my students.  Recently, due in part to political shenanigans at the University of Toronto, I stumbled upon an insight regarding an ideal or vital characteristic that could logically supersede the value and function of every other bit of wisdom and virtue as conditions for human flourishing.

In some respects, this characteristic has been in front of me the entire time.  Despite my commitments to consistent self-reflection, I tend to take my own positionality and willingness to confront dishonesty and corruption for granted.  I am and will probably always be a social gadfly.  However, I only recently realized the true significance or condition of that designation.

Thought experiment: What potential human characteristic, when removed, would only compromise and/ or weaken all other human characteristics?

If you've read the title of this post, then I un-surreptitiously spoiled the surprise.  Virtue, wisdom, and and all other knowledges can be rendered inconsequential, incomprehensible, and ultimately immaterial if one lacks the courage to responsibly enact them.  Cowardice presents the ultimate source and consequence of the failure of the intellect; in fact, I would argue given my recent experiences that cowardice can render all intention and value vacuous.

But what is "courage"?  What is its essence?  What denotes it phenomenologically? I struggled with its definition significantly leading up to and while editing this post.  Though, I'm relatively confident in my identification of this last piece of the puzzle of human action or of "why [...] people do what they do."

If ascribed values constitute the sources of intention and action, the final threshold of action can be defined by this additional variable.  Undeniably Nietzschean, this willingness to enact the will presents the last barrier to enacted choice.  Following the aforementioned logic, without this willingness, the Will or volition constituted by an individual's intuitive and experientially situated values can be rendered void of meaning and of consequence.  Therefore, courage could be defined as the most valuable of values (of objects ascribed meaning by people) since it can render all other values valueless, practically.

Construed another way, inductively, what is the only human characteristic that cannot be supported by other human characteristics?  Or that can only support other human virtues?  Courage doesn't have a "source" along the same pathways of virtue, wisdom, and other empirical knowledge.  Courage cannot be traced to Kantian empirics.  Like Kant, we often interpret free will as a freedom of choice.  To enact courage is to choose to enact a choice.  In other words, our "Will"s cannot be free without it.

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I've been inspired by Winston Churchill ever since I first encountered him.  After all, he may have hated democracy almost as much as Socrates did.  But, Churchill knew that we could do worse—that we had done worse.

And I might be witnessing a precursor to one of his worst-case scenarios at the University of Toronto at the time of publication.

I've lost count of the number of people who I respect and trust who have told me that I should just give up on the University of Toronto Graduate Students' Union, including several of its former executives. Undoubtedly, my involvement has stretched my PhD studies by at least a year and a half. But, I stand by the same principle that compelled my involvement in the first place.  If UofT graduate students can't manage Good governance, what hope is there for our municipal, provincial, and federal governments in Canada?  Democracy dies in darkness.

And authoritarianism prevails where courage fails.  I've deliberately avoided drawing any contemporaneous macrocosmic comparisons publicly in my communities given that Twitter is already inundated with presentists grafting the flavour of the month onto their every myopic political concern.  But folks, this is how authoritarianism happens.

Despite my continued commitment to defending the Left as a liberal, and given the increasing authoritarian tendencies of other parties who also assume these labels, I might be destined to join Boghossian's camp.  But if only the spectrumed Right will defend cognitive liberty, where else does an academic courageously committed to truth and to the knowledge project find themselves in modern academia?

Moreover, these failures of courage in academic governance tend to osmose from the academy.  Everything I've ever taught or tried to teach my students could be rendered meaningless if my students lack the courage to stand by their senses of truth and justice.  I reflected recently that I care far less if my students understand how and why to consistently respect pronoun-antecedent agreement than if they would stand up for the people or ideas that they care about when it matters.

Ultimately, I would teach my own kids if I were ever to procreate that they should never compromise their integrity or sense of truth for the sake of preserving or shaping their reputations.  Because honestly, what is the ethical or moral character of increased clout with people who would prefer that we compromise our understanding of truth or integrity in order to achieve such ends?

On Responding to Fan Mail

As alluded to in my most recent blog post, I was publicly defamed during the April 2020 UTGSU Executive Elections.  The defamatory email cited "evidence" from this blog.  It's estimated that this email reached anywhere from 400 to 800 UofT graduate students after its initial publication some time on or before April 21st, 2020.  For a prospective political campaign and for peace of mind, I decided to unpack the potential inaccuracies of some of the authors' claims.  The fan mail is transcribed verbatim in the following red, bolded text.  My commentary and changes are appended in black.

From: [REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

Date: Tuesday, Apr 21, 2020 at 11:55 AM

To: [REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

Subject: GSU election: vote today to defeat racist, sexist candidates!

Hi friends!

Tbh I haven't remotely looked into student politics/elections at UofT but a friend just sent me this below. In the end it is something very important - I didn't know about the two anti-equity, anti-union candidates that currently hold positions at the university. So do please take the 5 minutes today to vote to be sure that you rank them last so they won't be re-elected to their positions at the union.

best,

[REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

P.S. Please fwd on to others as we have until 5pm for folks to vote. I imagine it is because student politics has a very low voting turn out (it is a low priority for most of us) that these candidates were able to get elected in the first place.

Hello fellow graduate students and friends, 

I hope you are all staying healthy and safe. I am reaching out about the Graduate Student Union executive elections to urge you to help elect the first truly diverse, equity-minded leadership at our Union with grassroots experience during these critical times.

Voting is now open until Tuesday 21 April at 5pm and it’s super easy!

Just click here to log in with your utorid and vote.

Please consider voting for Jacqui Spencer (External Commissioner) given her stellar record in social justice and student governance. I also believe it is vital that we elect June Li (Academics & Funding Commission Div3&4) and Lynne Alexandrova (Internal Commissioner) to promote a diverse leadership and defeat men’s rights and anti-equity candidates, Adam Hill and Jesse Velay-Vitow (see below). 

Given the appositional syntax, it's implied that I was a "men's rights and anti-equity candidate."  The first category error is easily dispelled.  I am not, nor have I ever been, a men's rights candidate.  A cursory review of this blog might implicate my critical predisposition toward toxic masculinities and the broader problems of men's violence against women; my four years of experience volunteering as a counselor in the domestic violence clinic, Changing Ways, in London, Ontario led me to fight to write and defend my Master's thesis and, more recently, to pursue my PhD.  I was literally counseling men twice my age who were on and off men's rights activism online fora before and after our group therapy sessions.

As for "anti-equity [candidacy]", at the time this defamatory email circulated, I was to be considered for impeachment due to ongoing equity concerns within the UTGSU Standing Committee that I chaired, the Policy and Operations Committee.  Notwithstanding my ongoing research and publications regarding the importance of empathy and humanization, including multiple posts in this blog, I hear and acknowledge the authors' concerns.  I am a volcel white dude from southwestern Ontario.  Equity, for me, requires a constant interrogation of my privileges and a dedication to affirmative action for others with less or different privileges; as I've argued many times in the past, the game was rigged from the start.  We need to do our part to change or at least subvert the game.

Furthermore, MLK is one of my personal heroes; his warning has comprised the last words of my Facebook profile for almost a decade, not to mention serving as the basis for my justification to continue writing this blog.  My research, and ultimately my life, is dedicated to the human project; fostering empathy and humanization has the potential to contribute toward redressing inequities.  I never put down Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; I physically carried it around with me throughout most of the writing and editing of my Master's thesis and have variously argued that people should read it asap, multiple times if necessary, to understand the meaning and importance of the oppressed's liberation of their oppressors and themselves.

But anyways, let's continue reading.

Dhanela Sivaparan (Academics & Funding Div1&2) and Luwanga Musisi (University Governance) have been acclaimed, which is great news since they have strong equity and social justice credentials! It’s more important than ever for us to have a strong and equitable union leadership as we face the fall out of this pandemic on our studies and lives in the coming months. It is also especially important given that over the last year, there’s been a series of equity-related complaints and resignations at the executive and committee levels of the Union that the predominantly white cis-male leadership has proven incapable of addressing adequately.

More information on the candidates can be found here. To cast your vote, click here.

If you have the time, will you consider also reaching out to your graduate student contacts and help mobilize the vote?

Why is it vital to not elect Adam & Jesse?

Adam is currently UTGSU Internal Commissioner and Jesse is an elected member of the Policy & Operations Committee. In these and other roles, they have demonstrated their anti-union and anti-equity agendas.

So, I've already addressed the anti-equity bit; therefore, I'll problematize the "anti-union" accusation.  The authors and disseminators of this email might have been alluding to my past comments regarding the OSSTF.  As of this writing, I've been teaching high school on and off for six years overseas in China and for a private school in Toronto.  When I completed my practica for my Bachelor of Education, I met and worked with a brilliant and inspiring public school teacher who happened to currently serve as their school's OSSTF representative.  They confirmed that they despised the job since, time and again, they were forced "to defend the indefensible."  I can understand why they argued as such since I had a law teacher in high school who taught the entire course from beginning to end, including the exam, via our reading the textbook and completing fill-in-the-blank handout exercises.  She's still working there as of this writing. 

There's a threshold after which defending unprofessional, weak, and/or abusive teachers becomes dubiously moral or ethical, especially when such defenses come wrapped in a rhetoric of protecting and benefiting students & young children.  However, such is not the case for labour unions like the ETFO.  On multiple occasions, I have articulated to my colleagues and friends the importance of the ETFO since the Ontario public generally underestimates and/or misunderstands the jobs of kindergarten to grade 8 teachers.  These teachers need aggressive representation, especially during a pandemic.

Although I remain critical of the OSSTF, I love the UTGSU.  I have fought up hill to preserve the UTGSU, even since leaving office in May 2020; I have persistently argued, with close colleagues and friends who believe that the UTGSU is beyond saving, that we should still do everything we can to preserve it.  A part of the reason I still haven't sued the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Caucus leadership (who probably had a hand in writing and disseminating this email) for defamation is because I still believe that we can resolve this internally like adults.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I'll keep fighting for the UTGSU, and I'll be there to help rebuild it once the dust settles.

Jesse is a men’s rights activist and libertarian. He has run as a candidate for the Libertarian Party of Canada [yadda yadda yadda defaming Jesse]

NOTE: I'm omitting the next couple of paragraphs since they only concern Jesse, and he doesn't deserve this.

[...]

Adam is currently facing an impeachment motion due to complaints by members and staff that he has violated the Union Equity Statement and abused his power as UTGSU Internal Commissioner. Complaints allege that the Adam has made racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments and microaggressions. They also allege that he has overtly and subtly demeaned, belittled, and undermined the contributions of equity seeking members at the Union while creating an unsafe environment for Union members to participate. Such behaviors, which I have witnessed many times, include consistently misgendering and misnaming queer, gender liminal and racialized members verbally and in print. 

As I've acknowledged in public and in writing multiple times, I misgendered a Member of the UTGSU at least once in person and once in writing.  I formally apologized to this Member and committed to redressing their concerns regarding my behaviors and those identified in the Policy and Operations Committee.  

I haven't written about my positions regarding transgenderism in this blog, but a hand full of people might remember posts that I've written on Facebook in the past.  In short, I've articulated the position that traditional gender theory, particularly Betty Friedan's gender constructivism, can contradict the alleged intuitivity and/or a priori status of gender.  It's difficult to argue that gender can be both innate and constructed, but maybe this is the case.  Regardless, these people, like any people, should be respected and validated.

It has also included interrupting, belittling, and blocking attempts by racialized and other women (trans and non-trans) to speak in Union spaces. He has also organized to block resolutions and motions pertaining to equity agendas through procedural tactics and voting alliances with other ostensibly straight, white cis-men. He is a close ally of Jesse at the Union. 

I cannot stress how strongly I believe in procedural justice as the basis for all other Justice(s).  It's the primary means in deliberative bodies to create equal and even equitable space for all voices.  As Chair of a Bourinot's Rules of Order-governed Union body, I had the responsibility to enforce procedure to the best of my ability.  In a email to all voting and non-voting members of the Policy and Operations Committee, I even offered to suspend procedure, promising to prioritize safety before procedure, something that I myself did not agree with at the time since I believed and still believe that procedure is the primary means of preserving safety.  "Points of personal privilege" are sacred for a reason.

His blog gives a good sense of his politics where he makes baffling and unsettling statements like:

“If you happen to have a phallus, have you endured blue balls deliberately more than once to the degree that you could no longer stand erect?”

This quote is referencing this blog post.  If you read it yourself, you might discern that the question is part of a bad ironic joke since it's part of a "check list" to determine whether one has achieved selflessness.  It's also a subtle reference to my status as a volcel.  I've been voluntarily celibate for quite some time; in that blog post, I discuss how selflessness requires a "denial of sexuality."  Blue balls are a real thing, and they can be pretty painful.

“I've always been fascinated by women, due to both previous sexual attraction as well as my general appreciation of humanity. For a while in high school I was even a bit of a ‘man whore.[...] In fact, I've desired to write this Facebook note for a while, I just lacked the courage and the balls. [...] Much of women's self-worth is based on what they think other people think about how they look. That's why much of society has taken to consistently reassuring women that they are aesthetically pleasing. [...] we never once touched the topic of women's relationship with the visual. I - as the only guy - had a unique sensitivity to this relationship - I think most women take it for granted. For example, my self-proclaimed radical feminist professor wore (extensive?) make-up to every class - and never once talked about it.”

The material referenced in this paragraph can be found here.  In another post that I've reverted to draft for an indefinite period, I explored that second statement: "For a while in high school I was even a bit of a ‘man whore."  I was a bit of a man whore in high school until I began to realize the full impacts of my willful negligence and lies on my partners.  When I voluntarily quit "the game" as we called it during grade 10, my wingmen legitimately contemplated killing me because of the challenge that I presented to their lifestyles and world views.  As quoted, I had wanted to write the Facebook note that preceded the blog post, back in 2012, for years.  However, my position has changed a bit since I wrote that Facebook note.  

The typically feminine has a greater affinity for the visual, the seeing and being seen, than the typically masculine.  I don't know how people could dispute this decisively.  I was referring to a gender studies and history professor who taught my third year North American Women's History course at Western University.  I don't, and never have, worn make-up, unless it was for theatrical shows in high school; (I starred in my high school musical, Tommy).  As an avid proponent of "the unexamined life is not worth living," I still wonder what we could have accomplished in that North American Women's History course had we engaged in academic discourse regarding these latent values.  Interestingly, there's arguably far more damning material that they could have cited from that almost decades-old Facebook-note-republished-as-blog-post.

“Hate-speech is rarely a thing in itself: i.e. people don't just hate on other people for the sake of doing so. They do it because some one or group's behavior or way of life threatens their own. Hatespeech then, is not what most believe it to be: an objective moral judgement, but is simply a situational perspective. Accusations of hate-speech represent one of the ultimate forms of repression, because those who would accuse others of "hate-speech" most often do so self-righteously. In reality, they're doing more harm to progress and the planet than good.”

I imagine the target audience of the defamatory email devoured this particular tidbit from this blog.  I recommend reading the 2012 Facebook note republished as blog post yourself, since it's relatively short, and it's difficult for me to argue that they're decontextualizing this paragraph without your knowledge of its content and position in a dialogue.

Okay, assuming you've read my short blog post, it's vital to understand that it was written as a response to one of my old professor's blog posts.  In some ways, both my old professor and I mischaracterized hate-speech since we neglected some of its vilest forms.  I overgeneralized in 'On Freedom of Speech', partly because I was naïve to all of the forms of hate-speech possible.  Hate-speech can describe some of the most maliciously abusive human communication.

However, the concept of hate-speech can be used repressively.  I'm sure some of the more radical among the people who assisted in writing and disseminating the defamatory email would argue that even my writing this blog post could be construed as hate-speech.

Please help me ensure that our Union leadership is committed and able to uphold the basic principles of equity and safety for our diverse membership. As CUPE 3902 prepares to enter a bargaining year and the student union continues to field off attacks from our right-wing provincial government, it is so important that there be a pro-union UTGSU leadership that fosters an equitable, open space for all to participate and build our Union.

In solidarity,

UofT Divest

To be honest, to this day, I'm not even angry.  As indicated in the graph preceding this post, my blog had another ~500 hits in the month following the dissemination of the defamatory email.  People actually read my nonsense for once.  Make no mistake, I am no less committed to all that I've said and promised in this blog.  Although, as a professional teacher and as an educator of teachers & education graduate students, I think the UTGSU's Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Caucus leadership might need a time-out.

It actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This post has been months in the making.  I've wanted to say this for a long while, but I didn't have the words... or the time.

As you probably know, the world's not doing so hot.  And worse yet, very few of us are attempting to do anything about it, let alone care.

The ones who care are searching for better ideas.  The ones who act are trying to foster better habits.

Both are seeking and attempting to realize solutions.

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What if I told you that there's a significant chance that there is no "solution"?  No paradigm to shift to; no golden idea that will transform society; and no be-all end-all way to solve our problems?

These words are not those of a pessimistic fatalist.  Recently I've become tentatively confident that one could have all of the currently knowable knowledge in our world and still go through his/her entire life without making a positive impact on society.  This reality is less a reflection of the potential qualities and quantities of knowledge than of the day-to-day maintenance and function of the human race.  Our collective condition is such that one person could have an idea that could solve all of the world's problems and yet this person could forever live in a world full of problems.

I was lucky.  I stumbled upon the Meta-discourse at a relatively young age.  I'm speaking of the values discourse: the discourse that overshadows, informs, and shapes all other discourses; the first and last discourse of importance. I've often questioned whether my knowledge has been a blessing or a curse.  However, to this day, I continue to maintain that knowledge in of itself is neither good or evil; that the value of knowledge depends on what one does with it.

It's funny.  Knowledge of the highest discourse is actually meaningless given the parameters of planet Earth.  Even if one had an idea as to how every human decision is made, this knowledge in of itself is valueless.

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Exhibit Edward Snowden, our new modern middle-class hero.  He opened our eyes in ways that few have in our generation.  He gave us hard evidence that our governments in the West are not to be trusted and that our supposed representatives have a systemic distrust of the public they supposedly serve.  And yet here we are, almost years later living ostensibly the same lives we were living almost years before.  What really changed in the day-to-day habits of the masses?  The people who already distrusted our governments gleefully confirmed their biases, and the people of faith have yet to demand hard concessions.

Snowden demonstrated a reality of democracy that ironically few care to acknowledge.  You could walk into a crowded town square containing the majority of a society with a gold tablet handed to you from the highest God telling everyone how they should live their lives differently with the greatest wisdom, and almost no one would change their day-to-day routine.  If one cannot market that understanding, sell it to the masses comprehensibly, and institutionalize it for future generations, then that knowledge in of itself has no value to the future of humanity.

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In fact, it actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This is my problem with some of the people who continue to look for that gold tablet, the so-called whistle blowers.  Practically speaking, these martyred actions change almost nothing  In fact, they will likely change less and less the more bureaucratized and institutionalized society becomes.

That's not to say that the situation is hopeless.  We just need to accept the situation for what it is, and use the resources at our disposal.  Particularly, we need to target structures.  And first and foremost, we need to stay practical.

I continuously hear my friends and colleagues demanding for better ideas.  But many of the ideas have been here all along.  "An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man."

People need to make better use of existing good ideas.

We need less armchair humanists and more people carefully leading on the front lines.  We need less concern for new ideas and greater execution of ideas that have been around for millenia.  We need less people concerned with being right and more people concerned with making us right.

What is the purpose of institutionalized education?

page 288, second paragraph

I have not published anything in this blog for almost half of a year.  In large part, this hiatus was due to beginning writing, defending, and publishing this monstrosity.  I will start teaching full-time at a Canadian International School in Jiangsu province, China, in January and so I felt that this was as good a time as ever to finish this blog post and to re-energize this blog.

I've danced around the question of the purpose of institutionalized education for over half of a decade.  As someone who changed his entire life trajectory to that of affecting reform of institutionalized education, it's rather ironic that I have never attempted to address the "final cause" of education in writing or otherwise.  I've yet to attempt to explain the conceptual logic behind what I continue to choose to do on a daily basis.

I am almost certain that there is an end that links all means of institutionalized education.  Educa-tion can connote the process of "putting someone through" something. When referenced to a curriculum, education can be both figuratively and practically defined as "putting someone through a course."

Therefore, all means of education can be described as means of putting or guiding someone through some kind of process.  This author wonders "why do we bother putting someone through anything?"

From my experience, the final purpose of any and all education is to foster responsibility: i.e., a particular onus or commitment to respecting and to enacting a disposition of responsiveness.

There's a wealth of nomenclature utilized throughout the scholarship of pedagogies that describe aspects of this unifying purpose of education, from mindfulness, to forms of critical thinking, to resiliency.  However, these terms are all aspects of or precursors to an end of fostering greater responsibility.

After all, one's greater responsibility is directly linked to one's greater degree of knowledge.  One cannot be responsible for that which one does not know.  Moreover, the desire to foster knowledge mirrors the desire to foster a kind of responsibility where there was none before.  More generally, there are as many forms of responsibility as there are forms of knowing.

Furthermore, we can only be responsible for that which we have some degree of certainty.  Regardless of context, without a basic degree of certainty of cause and effect, one cannot be responsible for an outcome.  Therefore, to foster certainty is to foster the precursor to responsibility.

Throughout the past, certain forms of knowing have come to be discredited or disavowed of the same legitimacy as that of other forms of knowing.  Today, scientific understanding, or certainty derived from observing patterns and habits, holds sway in many parts of the world.  In spite of the rise of scientific methodology, knowledge from authority continues to hold prominence.

Just as certain forms of knowing have been gradually discredited over time, so have certain forms of responsibility.  Our degree of responsibility is directly constrained by our knowledge that we hold with the greatest certainty.

But regardless of one's epistemology, or means of knowing, one educates for responsibility.  Whether it be a responsibility to use proper grammar, to uphold the sacraments, to the proper use of electron microscopes, or to utilizing the fine motor skills required to create a work of visual beauty, educators seem to educate to this common end.

Moreover, educators working within the disciplines concerned with humanity teach toward a particular set of aspects of responsiveness, empathy.  What is empathy, but a kind of humanistic responsibility? What are the capacities of empathy, but cognitive processes involved in accurately responding to human needs?

Importantly, responsibility is nothing more than a set of suggestions for action; responsibilities as human dispositions do not control action.  Cognitive empathy, (empathic capacity dependent on thought processes), provides a person with a set of suggestions for how to best act with or toward another person.  But a person can refuse to listen to the data he/she acquires through his/her empathic capacity, just as any person with any responsibility can shirk it.  However, the fact remains, without any degree of responsibility, without any degree of certainty, one cannot behave ethically even by one's own standard(s) --- nihilism being the noted exception.

The commonality among the various products of education has some important implications for how to effectively conduct the processes of education.  I've already spoken of the importance of fostering appreciation.  Appreciation, like technique, is merely a means to responsibility or to acting responsibly.

The goal of this post is to serve as a far-cry to educators contemplating the learning objectives, specific and overall expectations, prescribed learning outcomes, and <insert ministry edujargon here>, of their educational programming.  If the goal of education is to foster responsiveness, then this goal should be reflected in how we structure our interactions with students.

I try to be reasonably skeptical of my own ideas.  However, this commonality across ends of educative processes has held in every instance I've witnessed to date.  You are welcome, as always, to challenge my opinion.  These posts are intended to serve as contributions to the continuing discourse, not as solutions.
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When I participated in service-learning in Berlin and Poland as a part of my Teacher Education program, I visited Birkenhau.  Today, behind what was "the little white house", there's an open field.  One of vilest acts against humanity in recorded history occurred in and around that field.  It's one thing to torture and murder human beings on a vast scale.  It's altogether another to have their kin dig up the victims' remains and burn them in order to hide the evidence of your deeds.  The conductors of this abominable tragedy demonstrated by facilitating it that they knowingly shirked their responsibilities to their victims' and their own humanity.  I now have the responsibility to carry-out their memory and, given the seeming logic of education, now you do too.

T2P Application for the Poland Trip: A Manifesto?

I just applied for a trip to Poland for my transition to practice (T2P).  From what I've read and been told, the trip is designed to evoke remembrance of the Holocaust and empathy for its victims through meetings with survivors, tours of museums, and a trek to Auschwitz.  Here's a description of the trip by the organization facilitating it.  We had to provide learning objectives for the application process.  Normally in these situations I'd simply employ ingratiating sophistry.  Instead, as usual, I took to being bluntly and uncompromisingly honest.  And then this happened.  Enjoy.

My first objective is to grow as a global citizen.  I've almost never left the province of Ontario (the only exceptions including a week in Cuba for my brother's destination wedding and crossing the border into Hull to see the Canadian Museum of Civilization).  I’ve declined every opportunity to “see the world” thus far and as a Social Justice and Peace Studies student from King’s who worked for [anonymous], that’s a lot of opportunities.  I always felt I knew most of what I could learn from the trips already.  Through the experiences of this trip, I want to prove myself wrong.  I always jump on vulnerable learning opportunities and this trip is an opportunity to make myself vulnerable to learn.  I want to become ever more cosmopolitan and, therefore, my first objective is to grow as a global citizen.

My second objective is to grow as a philosopher.   I’ve always thought myself a philosopher in the Ancient Greek interpretation of the term: a lover and pursuer of wisdom.  Much has been made by both philosophers and historians alike about the “lessons of the past.”  I’m of an appreciation of the paradox of our inability to value the knowledge from an experience before we’ve had it.  I see this trip as an opportunity to gain some insight, and maybe even some wisdom, about the human condition and our roles as the keepers and sustainers of memory.  I hope to draw ethics from my experiences on this trip, new perspectives and ways by which to live a good life.

My third objective is to grow as a historian.  History’s crux is primary sources and the interpretations of, and discourses around, those sources.  To go to Poland is to go to the primary sources, to the people and places touched by the people and places of the past.  Also, to go to Poland is to witness and potentially join another set of discourses of history.  As a future history teacher, through my experiences on this trip, I’ll have a wealth of primary sources and discussions to draw on when teaching about various concepts and topics in history such as Nazism, remembrance, and dehumanization.

My fourth objective is to grow as a learner.  We’re all learners before teachers.  I’m of the opinion that we should always listen more than we speak; we should always read more than we write.  As such, on this trip I plan on doing a lot of listening and reading.  I will use this trip as an opportunity to further foster my love of learning and intellectual curiosity.  Therefore, my fourth objective is to grow as a learner.

My fifth and final objective is to grow as a teacher.  I believe that knowledge and wisdom come with a responsibility to foster, to nurture, and to protect.  My personal motto is “take everything from the world but keep nothing for myself.”  I believe that as teachers, we take everything we can from the world, our experiences, understandings, and values, and share them with others to the best of our abilities.  Therefore, I will embrace this trip as an opportunity to experience, philosophize, and understand, as an opportunity to grow as a teacher to the benefit of my future students.

On standardized testing

I started writing a reflection for one of my classes and it turned into an off-topic gripe-fest about standardized testing only worthy of publishing to blogs dedicated to improving the world such as this.  Enjoy!

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In my graduate studies, my Introduction to Curriculum class once came to the conclusion that standardization in schools is not inherently evil.  The key question to ask when confronted with standardization is “standardization of what?”  Are you standardizing the process of education?  I.e. pedagogies and practices. (the means) Or are you standardizing the outcomes?  I.e. evaluation and the desired understandings and skills of students. (the ends)

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Standardizing evaluations and outcomes can create many problems, as demonstrated by researchers of standardized testing.  Standardized tests like the EQAO and AYP have the potential to create systems of schooling that---instead of improving students' overall understanding, skills, and allowing them to realize their full potential---actually just increase students’ ability to score well on standardized tests.

Standardized evaluations can create systemic problems such as polarizing the efficacy of schools.  For example, magnet schools that do well at reaching standardized outcomes tend to attract the best teachers meanwhile schools that are barely surviving under scrutiny based on standardized test results tend to ward off good teachers.  This relationship creates a positive feedback loop in which the better a school does on the tests the more it attracts good teachers and funding (which allows the school to do even better on the tests); the worse a failing school does on the tests the more it wards off good teachers and suffers reduced budgets (which cripples the school at the expense of the students who end up doing even worse on the tests).  This exponentially increasing gap between the best and worst schools is very real in certain parts of the United States.

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However, standardizing outcomes, but especially standardization the evaluation of outcomes, can help organize and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of educative systems (pending those educative systems actually use the data collected by standardized evaluation).  Ideally, if you have a sufficient effective measure of outcomes, it's possible to compare school environments, demographics, students' socioeconomic statuses, etc. with schools' capacity to achieve learning outcomes.

Standardizing evaluations of outcomes provides benchmarks.  They can act as a ruler to measure the relative efficacy of schools and their educative potential.  Further, standardization of evaluations of outcomes encourages teachers to organize their lessons around learning outcomes.  It forces teachers into backward designing their lessons: identifying outcomes and developing teaching practices and activities which create the educational experiences necessary to achieve those outcomes.

Whereas standardizing outcomes can be justified, standardizing pedagogy and practices almost always creates more problems than it solves.  Every student learns at different times in different ways.  Given the diversity of learners, there’s a strong justification for differentiated instruction. 

There's something enormously dehumanizing about homogenizing teaching practices and pedagogies.  It denies the individuality, diversity, exceptionality, and the potential vitality and vibrancy of the human condition.  This goes for students AND teachers.  Teachers are just as diverse as students, and to constrict teaching practice and philosophy is to try to take the human beings out of teaching and learning.  You kill style, attitude, and enthusiasm.  Teacher-directed teaching can be just as important as student-directed learning.

All that to say, it's in everyone's interest that we constantly renegotiate the qualities, understandings, and skills that belong to an ideal global citizen.  Therefore, it's also in everyone's interest that we constantly renegotiate the methods and philosophies that should be employed when educating such citizens.