Pandering on a Prayer

Great column in the Star today, on the Tory initiative to give parents vouchers to send kids to private religious schools.

Now, Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory has embarked on the same venture. In an apparent attempt to lure religious minority communities to vote for his party, he is dangling the carrot of funding their private, segregated religious schools.

Who can blame him? After all, we all live in an era when winning elections is not a means to an end; it has become an end in itself. Securing the votes of religious minorities through their clerics' backing, even if it reverses the progress we have made as a country through public education, seems worth the price.

If John Tory has his way, this is what a school system of the future will look like in the riding of Don Valley West, where he plans to unseat Education Minister Kathleen Wynne: Imagine an intersection, say Thorncliffe Park Dr. and Overlea Blvd., with a Hindu school on one corner, a Sikh school on another, a Greek Orthodox school on a third corner and, of course, a Shia or Saudi-funded Wahhabi school on the fourth.

.. A John Tory government, through its proposal to fund and promote faith-based private schools, will create a two-tiered system. Instead of assisting diversity, private religious education will simply nurture narrow-minded segregation, isolating an already marginalized and vulnerable Muslim community to send their children to poorly funded schools.

The desire on anyone's part to restrict their children's education to their own values should not be supported by public tax dollars. Most Muslim parents wish their children to grow and become educated in a climate of diversity, where they can learn to respect and understand the faiths of others while being exemplary ambassadors of Islam and peace.

Cheers to Tarek Fatah and Salma Siddiqui on this one. They are emphatically right – this is nothing more than a misguided ploy by opportunistic politicians pandering to the ethnic vote, with the potential for disastrous consequences.

I’m a strong proponent of public education. Going to a public school in Toronto exposed me to people of different backgrounds and creeds. I grew comfortable relating to people that didn’t look like me, because I sat-by-side by them and befriended many. Moreover, it taught me that while we may look different and worship different gods, at the core we share a basic humanity. A strong public education system – one that imbues tolerance and respect for others – is IMO all the more important today, at a time when we live side-by-side with people of differing creeds.

If you’re a devout religious parent, then teach religion to your children at home. Send them to Sunday school. Or send them to a religious school, and foot the bill for it. I don’t want my tax dollars funneled to schools that in its essence are divisive and are preaching who-knows-what, especially given the geo-political climate today – do we really want to breed more little jihadis?

Public funding for private religious schooling is emphatically the wrong way to go. If this is in fact part of John Tory’s platform, then I will emphatically refuse to vote for the Tories in the impending Ontario election - I feel very strongly about this. I pray they don’t win.