Friday, July 01, 2011

Canada: Islamic Ritual Prayer Conducted At Toronto District School Board Middle School

No separation of church and State in Canada?

Every Friday my daughter's school cafeteria changes into a mosque as dozens of Muslim boys and their imams (Islamic preachers) lead Islamic ritual prayers and no one else can even walk through the cafeteria.

Some imams (Islamic preachers) come from the outside of the school and lead Muslim students in the Islamic prayer and this happens at the school Cafeteria after the lunch on Fridays. All other non-Muslims are in classes in the afternoon when they are using the cafeteria as mosque. There is a mosque nearby but the Muslim kids pray in the school

School administration take part preparing the Cafeteria and making it into mosque every Friday and no one but Muslims can use the Cafeteria during the Islamic prayers on Friday.

And there are a number of other incidents involving Islam and other anti-Christian issues that I complained about, including a white convert to Islam who was a supply teacher and who openly promoted Islam and bashed Christianity last year!"

More HERE





Jobs gloom for a third of recent British university graduates as they languish in posts that do not require degree

More than a third of recent graduates are unemployed or languishing in stop-gap jobs that do not need a degree, official figures show. Students have been running up debts only to find themselves jobless or doing work for which they are over-qualified. One in ten of last year’s graduates – 20,000 – are unemployed and more than a quarter are in dead-end jobs.

The figures, published yesterday by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, will raise serious concerns about the value of getting a degree at a time when tuition fees are to rise to £9,000 a year.

Researchers analysed the destinations of 213,390 full-time first degree graduates who left university last summer. Some 133,940 were in employment only – equivalent to nearly two thirds. This is up from 59 per cent the year before. The remainder were unemployed, in full-time further study or a combination of further study and employment. Just 56 per cent of those employed were in an ‘occupational job’. Some 17 per cent of graduates were in further study.

The average salary for last year’s graduates was £20,500, the figures show – just below the £21,000 threshold at which they will have to start repaying their tuition fee loan from next year.

Michael Ossei, personal finance expert at uSwitch.com, said the situation left potential students facing a dilemma. He said: ‘Going to university used to be the norm, but it is now becoming a catch-22.’

Universities minister David Willetts said: ‘The graduate jobs market is showing encouraging signs of improvement. However, graduates still need to work hard to maximise chances of success.’

SOURCE




Britain may at last have the education boss it needs

Since becoming Education Secretary last May, Mr Gove has scythed back the powers of the state. He has displayed shrewdness about the politics of deficit reduction. In short, he has been, by some distance, the most impressive member of the Cameron Cabinet.

The quirkiness has not disappeared entirely. Within hours of his appointment, he wandered into Downing Street and stepped on something slippery. Whoaa! He went head over tail, his pratfall being caught by the cameras. It was a very Govian moment and he responded by hooting with laughter.

At the Commons Despatch Box, similarly, he is never dull. He twirls words and phrases like a drum majorette with her jewelled stick, explaining the deficiencies of the educational Establishment.

Mr Gove has gone about his task with precision, loosening the grip of egalitarianism on our schools. By egalitarianism I mean the creed of state-imposed homogeneity — the socialist belief that people’s life chances are best met by government ordaining everything from the centre.

This Left-wing idea has, Gove believes, betrayed the poor whom the Left always claim to want to help.

Mr Gove speaks with a personal experience rare in the upper reaches of Cameron’s Conservative party. Adopted as a baby, he was reared a world away from Eton. His adoptive father worked in the Aberdeen fish trade.

His humble background means that Labour are unable to smear him as some Cameroon ‘toff’.

And yet the teaching unions were complacently pleased when he landed the job. They thought they would soon ‘have’ this pigeon-chested figure. He came across as a Keith Joseph de nos jours. You surely remember Joseph, the croaky, bafflingly intellectual prophet of Thatcherism. Mr Gove seemed to be similarly unworldly; a bit funny to look at on TV; his mouth full of words but his feet not always on planet Earth.

They soon wondered that had hit them. Within weeks, Mr Gove pushed through Parliament an Act which created Free Schools and more Academy schools (semi-independent state schools).

Wham. It was done even before the old stocks of Education Department notepaper, with Labour’s dumbed-down logos, had been replaced by something more dignified.

Labour screamed that Mr Gove was ‘rushing’ his policies — but what on earth was wrong with rushing? Children grow up fast. The ‘take more time’ argument is always used by enemies of change. What they mean is: ‘Give us another year of fat salaries and juicy pensions.’

Under the last Education Secretary, the dogmatic Ed Balls, a philosophy of ‘every child matters’ was a euphemism for a relentless bias against excellence, pursued with almost Iron Curtain zeal.

Mr Gove immediately set about dismantling the power of the state-ists. He gave teachers protection, allowing them to retain anonymity in allegations of abuse by pupils.

This was not some small gesture. The statistics were terrifying. A third of all teachers had been accused of mistreating pupils — an absurd situation which was pretty obviously the result of unruly teenagers trying it on with a weak system.

Mr Gove, who has never been troubled by the guilty conscience of privileged liberals, called the bluff of the school bullies.

He also encouraged a return to discipline, uniforms and more rigorous schoolwork. Out went many Mickey Mouse subjects. In came the English Baccalaureate to encourage a greater breadth of learning.

He allowed teachers to ban pupils from bringing mobile phones and worse into the classroom. He demanded a return to ‘proper’ history teaching which gave youngsters an idea of British heritage.

More HERE

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