What the American Tea Party learned from Canadian Educators

OK, I?m being facetious with this title ? there?s no way the Tea Party would bother to look northward for any reason ? but there is one troubling way in which the approach that Canadian educators take to their critics consistently mirrors that of the Tea Party. The Tea Party?s one-size-fits all response to attempts to increase taxes on billionaires, introduce a health care system that covers the poor or regulate Wall Street investment bankers is to label such initiatives as ?socialist?. In a very similar way, Canadian educators accuse anyone calling for alternatives to the current educational hegemony of trying to ?privatize? Canadian education. This approach dispenses with the need to do the hard work of actually listening to your opponents to truly understand the points they are making. Coming from a group like the Tea Party, most of whose members believe the universe is 6000 years old, this simplification is lamentably predictable. But coming from a group that is highly educated and charged with educating future generations in Canada, it is simply an abuse of the power that we have (unfortunately) given them.

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