Bedford School: Drainville blames the union
With the service centre having failed the students of Bedford School, Bernard Drainville blames the teachers’ union for not doing the service centre’s job.
Adding: Patrick Lagacé also thinks the union should have done more to effect change rather than protecting its members. He still calls the teachers’ actions religio-rétrogrades although I’m still not seeing any evidence of proselytizing mentioned at the school.
(Uatu’s comment below was in reference to Drainville, which I posted first, not Lagacé.)
Uatu 09:25 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
Well he’s right. I mean it’s the service centre’s job to change oil and rotate the tires and not take complaints lol
jeather 10:47 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
I am entirely shocked that every one of the dysfunctional levels is blaming a different one.
Joey 11:40 on 2024-10-21 Permalink
Re: proselytizing, one of the things that irked me in Lagace’s earlier column was the causal xenophobia that has started to creep in to some of his writing. I think it’s a rite of passage into middle age for most Quebec columnists. Anyway, he called out the fact that the school had made efforts to connect to the local Muslim community; I think that this assessment is backwards. What proportion of the student body consists of Muslim kids? If it’s significant, I think it’s valuable for the local public school to make outreach efforts to the religious organization supporting and engaging with those kids and their families. The assumption seems to be that the Muslim teachers were evangelizing to non-Muslim students, but I suspect that many of the kids are already Muslim, and thus would not need to be proselytized to…
The arguments about the structural roadblocks to any kind of meaningful improvement to the situation or legitimate consequences for the teachers in question are much more compelling. No need for Diet Racism…
jeather 14:59 on 2024-10-22 Permalink
They suspended the teachers’ brevets, and are now of course blaming religion. (As I said, I didn’t find much suggesting they taught anything religious, and if you think that only Muslim teachers are sexist do I have news for you.)
Chris 07:09 on 2024-10-23 Permalink
>What proportion of the student body consists of Muslim kids?
There’s no such thing as “Muslim kids”, there’s only kids of Muslims. They are too young to understand or consent to that label, grade school especially. If a Liberal/Conservative/NDP parent had kids, would you call them “Liberal kids”? Likewise no. Being Muslim is an opinion, a choice, a lifestyle, it’s not a genetic trait you get from your parents like skin colour.
>but I suspect that many of the kids are already Muslim, and thus would not need to be proselytized to
Even if I granted “Muslim kids” exist, this doesn’t follow. To get people to believe anything, constant proselytized helps. A kid may be barely Muslim due to parental teaching, but could be convinced further by reinforcement from school teaching, or dissuaded by school teaching of the opposite. So it very much matter if the teachers were evangelizing or not!
Kate 09:38 on 2024-10-23 Permalink
I disagree, Chris. There are Muslim kids, by which I would mean children in families, chiefly from Muslim-majority countries, in whose households Islam is a way of life, and who practice its tenets because their parents do.
No, it isn’t genetic, but it’s a very strong bond to family and community. It isn’t a choice as you so airily put it, like a white westerner telling everyone they know that they’ve decided they’re now a Buddhist. It isn’t even an opinion, as it comes before opinions form, when you’re a kid. It’s much deeper than that, and it’s why people sometimes write whole books about their process and pain in pulling away from a religion and its consequences in loss of family and connections.