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School Funding in the 2007 Provincial ElectionCategory: Politics When I was growing up, there were some people in our neighborhood who were different. Sure, they looked like the rest of us, but we just didn't associate with them. What was different about them? They were Catholic! Even when I was in high school and came into contact with people of different religions, the kids who went to the Catholic high school were still looked down on. Later on, of course, I came to understand that Catholicism wasn't really that different from other forms of Christianity. But by then, I had long given up on most forms of organized religion anyway. What's my point? It's just that having separate schools for different religions fosters religious intolerance. People learn their prejudices at an early age. And when our kids are segregated on the basis of religion, they don't get a chance to meet or understand people of different faiths. Public funding of separate religious schools has become a major issue in the current provincial election campaign. The leader of the Conservatives, John Tory, argues that providing funding to private schools is a matter of fairness. After all, public funding is provided for the Catholic school system. The problem is that we need more contact between people of different faiths, not less. There is a lot of misunderstanding between people, and it would benefit all of society if there were more points of contact between different peoples. In the current campaign, there's only one party that advocates just one publically funded school system. Unfortunately, under the current electoral system, the Green Party is not likely to gain any seats in the provincial parliament. In my heart, I'd like to support the Greens. However, my riding (Scarborough-Guildwood) is considered a close call, and so I will probably vote strategically for the candidate most likely to defeat the PC candidate. Hans path: /Politics | permanent link to this entry  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
