Tag Archives: Responsibility

News

How educrats sacrifice academic excellence for self-esteem

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UPDATE: Welcome Post-Darwinist readers! Thanks for the link Denyse! For more on the failures of educrats to focus on teaching young people instead of building up their self-esteem, please see Denyse’s post on the subject.

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blazing Cat Fur! One of my favorite Canadian blogs! Please take a look around, as I cover a number of issues of importance to Canadians, including health care, education, free trade, tax policy and of course FREE SPEECH! The Wintery Knight is a HUGE fan of PM Stephen Harper, MP Maurice Vellacott, MP Jason Kenney, Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and MPP Lisa MacLeod.

My friend Richard sent me this:

Apparently, it has come to the point where students may not be given a zero grade for handing in assignments late, or a zero for not showing up the remake test/assignment. Below is a link to a petition a HS teacher in Ottawa has set up to reassess this policy. Please sign it. The last thing we need is to raise a generation of kids that have no concept of deadlines and consequences. That would be the end of our workforce.

The petition is here.

Excerpt from the petition content:

According to the Ontario Ministry of Education policies, if a student misses a test (whether they skip class or are sick) or if they cheat then the evaluation is not valid and they must not be given a zero. The student must have an opportunity to be re-evaluated on the material. Assignments can have a due date but if the student does not hand it in on the due date a zero cannot be assigned. The student must be allowed to hand in the assignment late without being penalized.

In the past teachers would go out of their way to make sure they evaluated students, but when given an opportunity to be re-evaluated, the student had to turn up. Now you can offer the student a chance to be re-evaluated, and if they don’t turn up they still cannot get a zero. Assignments can be handed in at any time during the year. If the whole class is doing the same assignment, the teacher can receive the finished assignments any time between the due date and the end of the year. If the teacher marks the assignments as he/she gets them and returns them as they are marked, then anyone who has not handed in an assignment can, if they are so inclined, copy an assignment that has been marked and turn it in as their own work. The only way around this is not returning the assignments until all of the students have submitted their work, but this delays essential feedback to the students. Teachers have to be able to indicate to students that a zero may given on missed evaluations and give penalty marks for work not done on time.

We cannot succeed in a global economy when those in charge of educating our children fail to teach them the kinds of skills they will need to take on the demanding jobs of the future. This is just another area of life where things have gotten so politically correct that we have forgotten the purpose of school: to gain knowledge! I urge you to consider signing the petition.

UPDATE: I found this story featuring Caroline Orchard in the Ottawa Citizen. And a panel discussion transcript. MP3 audio of an interview with Caroline Orchard from 580 CFRA, the news talk radio station in Ottawa.

Commentary

Thomas Sowell explains why too much compassion is a bad thing

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Here is something you can forward to all of your progressive friends! It clearly explains what’s wrong with too much moral permissiveness and compassion. When you subsidize certain decisions, you get more of those decisions, when you tax certain decisions, you get less of them.

Excerpt:

Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand– for the very good reason that he could not afford it– why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn’t afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?

Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?

And what about saving for a rainy day?

Who hasn’t been out of work at some time or other, or had an illness or accident that created unexpected expenses? The old and trite notion of “saving for a rainy day” is old and trite precisely because this has been a common experience for a very long time.

What is new is the current notion of indulging people who refused to save for a rainy day or to live within their means. In politics, it is called “compassion”– which comes in both the standard liberal version and “compassionate conservatism.”

The article concludes with this:

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed “change,” the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions– namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

I would just encourage you to try to communicate with your neighbors who may not have thought clearly about “the forgotten man”, the taxpayer who works hard, plays by the rules and then is stuck with the bill for the compassion of well-meaning socialists.

In one of my more popular posts, I explained how the compassion of socialist democrats got us into this financial crisis by forcing banks to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them.

Videos

Michele Bachmann opposes Obama’s pro-abortion bill

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Representative Michele Bachmann
Representative Michele Bachmann

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from dcjunkies! Here are some other posts (usually with videos) on Michele: opposing nationalization of banks, explaining free market capitalism, opposing embryonic stem cell research, evaluating Obama’s spending plans, arguing that corporate tax rates are too high.

Michele Bachmann is the most capable and conservative House Representative. In the video below, she explains what Obama’s mis-named “Freedom of Choice Act” would actually do.

I just don’t think it’s right for people to choose to perform activities that result in pregnancy, and take innocent human lives in order to escape the consequences. In fact, it scares me that so many men and women would be willing to hurt other people in order to avoid the responsibility for their own choices.

Life is filled with choices that involve risk. The reason we have speed limits is because we recognize that driving too fast poses a danger to others. And pre-marital sex is no different than speeding. It’s fun, but it’s dangerous. How about this: let’s all try to avoid behavior that is likely to result in hurting innocent people. Is that too hard?

(H/T The Maritime Sentry)