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podcast friday
Feb. 28th, 2025 07:36 amWell, my benighted province once again chose "swift and repeated kicks to the balls for four years" over...basically anything other than that. Oh joy. This government wants me first unemployed, then homeless, then dead. Good times.
What's in some ways even more dispiriting is the results of the CIVIX Student Vote. This is a province-wide mock vote carried out across elementary and high schools. To my knowledge, it's never failed to elect the NDP. This year, for the first time, it went Tory.
A Grade 12 student today was in Grade 5 the last time a government pretended to care about their education, and even then, the public education system was in slow decline under a neoliberal regime. They simply do not remember what a well-funded public school system looked or felt like. Nor do they remember what it was like to go to a hospital ER and not have to wait 12 hours and emerge with two new infections. Short memories have doomed this province to eternal fascism and corruption. It makes me despair for the future.
You know who else despairs for the future? It Could Happen Here. This week in "Text Books and Holy Books," guest hosts Steven Monacelli and Dr. Michael Phillips talk about the two largest textbook markets in the US, California and Texas, and in particular how Texas' market share determines educational standards for the entire country.
I used to work in textbook publishing and there's a similar problem here, where at least back then, all textbooks had to conform to the standards of Alberta (the most conservative province with an economy that runs entirely on burning down the planet) and Catholic schools (the problem is obvious). I've been out of the game too long to know if that's still the case, but it resulted in materials that erased genocides, queer bodies and histories, and Indigenous peoples, promoting instead the accomplishments and worldview of white, Christian men. Obviously, the problem is way worse in the US where they just straight-up rewrote history so that the Confederate slaveholders were the good guys, but it's always the most extreme result of the same problem, which is the whiniest little bitches get the most say in what your kids are learning.
Oh, there's also quite a bit about the role of Hollywood in shaping the rather unique way Americans view the Ten Commandments, so also fuck you very much Charlton Heston.
What's in some ways even more dispiriting is the results of the CIVIX Student Vote. This is a province-wide mock vote carried out across elementary and high schools. To my knowledge, it's never failed to elect the NDP. This year, for the first time, it went Tory.
A Grade 12 student today was in Grade 5 the last time a government pretended to care about their education, and even then, the public education system was in slow decline under a neoliberal regime. They simply do not remember what a well-funded public school system looked or felt like. Nor do they remember what it was like to go to a hospital ER and not have to wait 12 hours and emerge with two new infections. Short memories have doomed this province to eternal fascism and corruption. It makes me despair for the future.
You know who else despairs for the future? It Could Happen Here. This week in "Text Books and Holy Books," guest hosts Steven Monacelli and Dr. Michael Phillips talk about the two largest textbook markets in the US, California and Texas, and in particular how Texas' market share determines educational standards for the entire country.
I used to work in textbook publishing and there's a similar problem here, where at least back then, all textbooks had to conform to the standards of Alberta (the most conservative province with an economy that runs entirely on burning down the planet) and Catholic schools (the problem is obvious). I've been out of the game too long to know if that's still the case, but it resulted in materials that erased genocides, queer bodies and histories, and Indigenous peoples, promoting instead the accomplishments and worldview of white, Christian men. Obviously, the problem is way worse in the US where they just straight-up rewrote history so that the Confederate slaveholders were the good guys, but it's always the most extreme result of the same problem, which is the whiniest little bitches get the most say in what your kids are learning.
Oh, there's also quite a bit about the role of Hollywood in shaping the rather unique way Americans view the Ten Commandments, so also fuck you very much Charlton Heston.
