I’d like to thank the member from Thunder Bay–Superior North for her presentation and also speaking to her expertise in the field of education. Myself, I am also a trained educator.

When we hear this government use terms like “back to basics,” it really does betray an ignorance about education itself. When discussing special education learners or, really, education at large, often the analogy is used of animals: You can’t teach a fish to climb a ladder nor can you teach a giraffe to swim. But there is the concept of Gardner’s intelligences, whereby each student learns in very different ways, whether a visual learner, an auditory learner, a kinesthetic learner.

What concern me the most were member’s comments and the government’s discussion about ideological sameness across boards. Is this similar to the notion of disrespecting individual learners and expecting sameness based on ideology rather than reality?