This attached photo was taken just after the TCSA finished putting the display up and now, two days later; it has yet to be corrected. Perhaps the grammatical error was done purposefully (you know, to highlight the decreasing quality of our education). However, I somewhat doubt it, and I have to say it makes the propaganda from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) appear even less professional than it already does.
I agree tuition is drastically rising, and not contrary to popular belief, those of us who don’t support CFS are not crazy about having to pay more either! However, there are far more effective options for us to pursue. Furthermore we also know how to spell! Perhaps because we actually spend our time in class, and studying, instead of trying to disrupt the lectures and study areas, which (as the protesters point out) are prohibitive in cost.
Granted some of these protesters perform these actions as an act of rebellion, for they come from privileged backgrounds and can waste an entire summer or a semester protesting because their parents are the top 15% of society. Not all of us are that lucky. More, regrettably, pretend to be the most knowledgeable and least apathetic of all students but are far from it.
Instead they present an automated mindset replete with a handful of facts and statistics, rather than an in-depth understanding of the issue and its causes, let alone the capacity to create proposed solutions that are more specific than ‘reductions’. Suffice to say many are unable to answer either the ‘how’ or the ‘why’. Their leaders are more than willing to allow them to remain so, after all the masses will more readily believe a big lie than a small one (hopefully I need not mention who said that).
Students like those who actively participate in CFS and the Revolutionary Students Movement, among others, make an effort to apply their resources to a diversity of worthy causes and pressing issues; all under the guise of “student issues”. This is not an inaccurate moniker; we should have a say in many of the issues they bring up, particularly international relations and the environment.
Yet focus on such issues by our student representatives and with our money is a waste of resources as there are already definitive bodies which represent these things and are the experts who should be looking after them. So let us leave it to them and instead focus on issues which more directly relate to us; for when we don’t it decreases the effectiveness of our efforts on those topics.
Think of CFS as the student who tried to do too much (sports, music, theatre, clubs, a full course load, honour roll, and a part time job)! I was that student. Many of those students are here, we are all passionate about a diverse number of things but we can’t do everything because we burn out; we start failing at everything because we’re overextended and collapse into a writhing heap that used to be a person.
Having a tantrum didn’t work for us when we were five. The way CFS and the Revolutionary Student Movement are going about protesting, it appears to the passerby that we are spoiled, whiny brats.
No student group has submitted a petition against the tuition increases to either the Ontario Legislature or to Canada’s Parliament. Little effort has been made to hold discussions with government ministers and members of shadow cabinets and very, very few students bother to write Letters to the Editor about their issues or try to get articles published in any newspaper, wherever it is from.
Get your facts together, calm down (grab a dictionary – newspapers don’t use the language of text messages) and compose an articulate, well-argued letter to The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Hill Times. Collect the signatures necessary to have a petition submitted to a legislature. Rally to elect students to government; for we do represent a significant portion of society.
If you want to beat the system you have to actually use the system or at least make an attempt to do so. If you’re going to protest, you should have a thorough understanding of what you are doing.
Spelling tuition as ‘tuiton’ is not a great starting point for that, and only increases our apparent immaturity in the eyes of other demographics of society.