They just aren’t spending on PSE. Instead, they are spending it on an ageing population
If that is so, shouldn't they be investing in education for PSWs and RPNs then? I asked myself once again, where is the $6B? Here it is: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/economic-update-budget-skilled-trades-canada-workers-youth-unemployment-9.7180411 It will be invested in apprenticeships for the skilled trades; not PSE. <sigh>
And by a simply *amazing* coincidence, $9.5 billion–in real dollars—is almost identical to the increase in income postsecondary institutions have seen in revenue from international students over the same period
This is a bit of vindication in my opinion. There were two phases to the rollout of the cap on international students; the first had an 18-month lead time, where Mohawk College was prepared to absorb the time of the cap (supposedly two years). It immediately fell apart when the Provinicial Government reduced the Ontario cap by a further 10% without warning; that is what tipped most Colleges over into the mass layoffs we continue to see today. This move was what made me think about the intentionality behind burning PSE to the ground: and why that would be.
There is a really basic argument about the value of postsecondary education which somehow, postsecondary institutions are losing with governments and, I think by implication, the public.
When the general public perception seems to be the glaring lack of ROI (return on investment) on a postsecondary education. The story of graduates struggling to get a job in their field of study, sometimes years after graduation, which necessitate them taking on "survivor" jobs to begin to repay the tens of thousands of student loan dollars do not support the case for PSE investment either.
provincial spending definitions aren’t entirely parallel
This has always been a challenge for me. Ontario is home to approximately 40% of Canada's population. As such, it would stand to reason then that revenue from taxes would also be the greatest. Why then does Ontario continue to demonstrate a pathetically low commitment to postsecondary education? What is the endgame here?
Canada, as well as the United States, Australia and New Zealand are quintessentialsettler-colonial societies, as the existence of such nation states is premised upon the erasure ofIndigenous peoples and complicity in the ongoing dispossession, oppression and appropriation ofIndigenous lands, peoples and ways of life.
Many wouldn't recognize this, but countries like Jamaica also have deeply settler-colonial societies, even while the majority of the population is black. The majority unconsciously yield to the cultural hegemony that Gramsci spoke of (Zuckerman, 2025), willing to do pretty much anything to become the minority. Colonialism is a deep psyop.
Whiteness plays into how teacher identity itself isformulated; t
True. Attempts at assimilation continue. I wish that I could express how demoralizing it is to ask someone to strip away who they are to "put on" the identity of another, knowing that, even when you do so, "proximity will never equal acceptance". Would white people allow this to be done to them? Isn't this what they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent from happening to them, while they do it to others without a second thought? Why are white people so afraid to share space with others?
As such, school administrators (principals and vice principals), who are overwhelmingly White,are responsible for hiring of teachers into permanent positions, as well the promotion of permanentteachers into leadership roles
As someone who TA'd one of the mandatory courses in the Teacher Ed. program at Brock, you can't hire what doesn't exist. Gatekeeping structures that prevent access to BIPOC students becoming teachers must also be addressed. I have spoken with BIPOC students who would never consider teaching as a career because of the abuse they faced in the school boards as students. I wonder if that's part of the "plan"?
This activism has been highly effective due to theprevalence of social media and solidarity between Black parents, students and communities andother communities that have been marginalized by the school system.
This is a beautiful example of how to push back against colonialist oppressions. "Divide and conquer" is the chief strategy. Quite often, a person alone cannot overcome a bully; when a group of friends, or their older sibling accompanies them, it's almost comical how quickly the bully caves. Bullies rely on isolation to enforce their terror. We must band together and resist.
Although Ontario is often praised for its public education system and multicultural socialcohesion, extant research suggests that BIPOC educators are underrepresented in permanent andleadership positions (Abawi, 2021; Abawi & Eizadirad, 2020; Abawi, 2018; Turner, 2015).
This is an unsettling statement to read. If Ontario's education system represents the best of Canada, then what do the other Provincial systems look like?
there has not been the same attention towardtroubling the administrator diversity gap within publicly-fundededucation and its impacts on teacher hiring.
I was privileged to moderate the student and teacher panels at Future Black Female's "Breaking the Cycle" Conference this spring. It was very revelatory in the way that Administrators hold the decision-making power about what EDI practices/policies do/do not get enacted in individual schools. It also made me think about the Gaudry and Lorenz (2018) article, where "Inclusion" seems to be best concession that institutions are willing to make at this time. Perhaps moving towards Reconciliation Inclusion, and even Decolonization Inclusion would mean installing the types of bodies that would bring policy/systemic change, and that's the "fear"?
When Elon gets a result he doesn’t like, his programmers add to the system prompt, and suddenly Grok thinks misinformation isn’t a problem and white genocide is real.
This is a blatant, narcissistic skewing of the LLMs ability to infer knowledge. It is the narcissists who will have their version of utopia in the days ahead; the rest of humanity will call it dystopia I'm afraid.
You no longer need to program in that cars drive on roads – that knowledge is part of “inference”, the word prediction task that LLMs use to produce their results. Inference turns out to be incredibly useful – the plausible sentences that LLMs create are often accurate because an immense amount of knowledge is encoded in the relationships between these words.
Reading this phrase gave me the chills. It makes me wonder what inferences are being drawn about humanity, based on the immense amount of "knowledge" that we are currently feeding LLMs?
One implication of this is that owners of AI systems have immense power to shape our worldviews as systems like these become a default way in which we get information about the world. But another point is just how hard it is to change the core values that get distilled into that blob of linear algebra when you squeeze a civilization’s worth of texts into a large language model. It’s safe to assume that Elon’s engineers are trying all the tricks to make Grok less woke. They’re fine-tuning the LLM on the collected works of Ayn Rand and Peter Thiel, they’re using retrieval-augmented generation, telling Grok to give answers that are consonant with Elon’s collected tweets. But it doesn’t work, which forces programmers to use brute force.
This gave me a laugh. For now, at least, the LLMs are attempting to disagree with information contrary to the texts they have been fed, and the responses that they generate from logic, without emotion. So this leads me back to my question: what is the end goal for humanity, based on what the owners envision as "utopia"?
In all cases, the voices of people most likely to hew to a hegemonic viewpoint are also more likely to be retained.”
So, this is deliberate then. I wonder. As I reflect on the "selection process" for the Trans Atlantic slave trade, it was the children and the youth that were targeted then. One doesn't need to observe for too long that history is repeating itself here. In the face of systematic dismantling of EDI in the USA, is what were are looking at mass grooming/indoctrination of the young? The first time I saw this ad, my skin crawled, and my heart sank: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DC1KMLjIfhO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
replacing cultural hegemony with a new culture – a historic bloc – in which fairness and justice make common sense.
Doesn't this depend on who exactly is defining "fairness" and "justice" to begin with? Is it truly possible to be fair to all? If you respond to this comment, I am intrigued to learn how you personally define "justice". Perhaps our definitions may help uncover insights as to how hegemony has shaped us? Let's carry out this courageous experiment, and see where it takes us. So as to not introduce bias or undue influence at the outset, I will reserve my definition until the end of your responses :-)
the rise of large language models and their danger of further excluding Global Majority populations in online spaces.
This is one of the first times that I have witnessed naming of folks who have historically been labelled as "minority" as the Global Majority. I find the leveraging of inversion tactics by dominator culture to enforce their hegemony fascinating.