The Avon Maitland District School Board is on a very mindless and destructive course, hell bent on destroying communities and down-grading our education system.
Tiny minds tend to focus on one thing at a time in order to simplify a complex issue. The AMDSB board and senior staff are illustrating this tendency. They are focussed on the numbers - numbers of children and numbers of desks, classrooms, and schools. Don't talk to them about other facts or issues no matter how relevant they may be. They just can't handle more that one facet at a time.
They have told us that they are not interested in what happens to our communities or their economies even though closing a school damages a community and its economy. "We are concerned only with children and their education. The community and its economy are not our concern." Never mind that these children live in these communities and are affected by their economies.
What a surprise to learn that they have already picked a site for a new school and the plans are all drawn up! Well not quite all the plans. They are not sure where the roads are going to be to get to the new school in Wingham.
They must have scoured the entire countryside to find architects that are equally adept at ignoring facts that confuse tiny minds. When asked about where the roads will be placed to handle traffic to and from the school, the architect replied, "We don't build roads; we build schools". With any luck the new school will remain inaccessible and we we will have to fall back on our previously condemned schools.
In the meantime, we will be further increasing our carbon footprint by having to run buses for almost every child in the county.
The eighteenth century satirical novel by Johnathan Swift describes our school board quite well. In Gulliver's Travels, the hero finds himself in the land of Laputa. It is a country ruled by a king and noble persons whose minds are totally immersed in numbers and music theory. So enrapt are they that each of them requires two servants to accompany them to remind them of what they are doing. The servants carry a kind of rattle to tap on the noble person's mouth, ears, or eyes to remind them to talk, listen, or watch where they are going. When Gulliver was talking to the King, for example, the latter would forget what they were discussing and who he was discussing it with, until the servants would apply their rattles.
While the nobility are constantly and mentally solving complex equations, they lack the ability to actually apply the results to any real project. As a result their buildings are unsound and their tailored clothing never fits.
The rulers live on an island that floats in the air. It is a perfect circle, four and a half miles in diameter. They are able to raise, lower, and move the island in any direction within the boundaries of the country below. The common people live on the land below, and they provide the rulers with food and whatever else is needed to live.
If any community on the ground does not contribute support, or is in rebellion, the rulers will move the island over the offending town, and if they still fail to comply, the island is slowly lowered onto the community crushing all of its buildings and its people. End of revolt!
Like AMDSB, the Laputans are obsessed by numbers to the exclusion of all other matters, they don't listen well, they are disconnected with the reality of the area for which they are responsible, on a whim they can crush any community they wish, and they answer to no one, and they tax their people without representing them.
