13 Comments

A testament to the power of one and a beacon of hope to a society visually impaired by cognitive myopia. Thank you Carolyn for your brave and progressive actions.

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I am most grateful to N. Invictus for mentioning me in the same breath as Carolyn and Chanel: “Teachers like Carolyn Burjoski, Chanel Pfahl, and Jim McMurtry are exemplars. Open your eyes, teachers! Look up to these heroes and stop sheepishly believing, adapting, following, and imposing all the top-down ideological policies on your students.”

From the beginning I saw teachers line up like elephants in a parade behind the dumbest fads, such as knocking down classroom walls (“open-classroom concept”) and throwing out spelling books. So many ideas that are top-down are indeed ideological and serve the careers of high-paid school leaders and seldom the interests of children. Woke equity/communism or D.I.E. may be the dumbest of all.

Chanel and I will likely never teach again, so I understand teachers who stay in the parade. But look what Carolyn has accomplished. With her precedent, she has given all teachers better protection against the woke mob.

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Jim, I'm struggling to catch up on some of my substack reading, and thought of you when I read this (wondering if you've seen it?): https://tarahenley.substack.com/p/weekend-reads-the-perils-of-presentism (Nov 26, 2023, on Tara Henley’s Lean Out substack). Guest host Harrison Lowman interviews Canadian history teacher J.D.M. Stewart.

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I will go to the site, Joan. Thank you for thinking of me.

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Just read it. Excellent insight. History is complicated and never black and white.

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Jim, much like Carolyn, Chanel, and the late Richard, you are imparting lessons of resistance, integrity, and speaking the truth to an entire population. These lessons carry greater significance than those found in the standard school curriculum and reach a much broader audience. Thank you all for that.

Naturally, there will always be individuals who remain oblivious and willfully blind to these crucial teachings, just as some students may choose to do the same. Indeed, there is nothing any teacher can teach someone who is not willing to learn. Keep fighting.

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What a kind comment. A teacher's desire to teach never dies. We just grow old.

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Excellent. Carolyn is a genuine Canadian hero. This ruling puts all Canadian school boards (and authoritarian busybody activists) on notice that weaponizing 'human rights' codes to shut people up is a non-starter.

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Well, they will only be put on notice if someone actually puts them on notice :-) The lefty media probably isn't reporting on this, right? So lefty school boards will remain blissfully unaware and highly prone to similar fascistic behavior.

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So far some of the usual MSM suspects aren't reporting, but a few are. Especially because there is a pay-out (and the defamation case hasn't even started) prudent school boards will be paying attention, strictly due to liability issues. The word will get around. I will personally make sure my local board in Ottawa is aware of these new circumstances.

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Thanks, N. Invictus. I second your thanks to Carolyn and would like to also thank Judge Ramsay:

“What happened here should not happen in a democratic society,” Ontario Superior Court Justice James Ramsay said in the case of now-retired teacher Carolyn Burjoski. . . .“The Human Rights Code does not prohibit public discussion of issues related to transgenderism or minors and transgenderism. It does not prohibit public discussion of anything."

Another name we should acknowledge here (along with Jim and Chanel) is the late Richard Bilkszto.

So I guess Carolyn Burjoski's defamation case will proceed, which means she's really just getting started on this legal nightmare. I wish her strength and support her all the way.

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Thank you for adding Richard Biklszto who paid the ultimate price for the dog piling tactics of the woke mob. Where are the unions in all this? The most admirable quality of unions was their support of their individual members in times of trouble. Now they ironically support the woke mandates of school boards not their members! They are in an ideological bind - they've fallen and they can't get up!

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Yess - cheers!

:-)

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