West Wing of Wednesday Night #6

More on West Wing

We look forward to welcoming you again to that delightful monthly evening of great discussion – next week Wednesday Sept 10^th 6:30PM and to our new guest participants – welcome! 

For the September edition, how appropriate that we examine our views on one of the topics we have been looking to tackle for a while – while the kids are back to school, we’ll focus on “the state of education” from school to university to post-university.
What are the issues?
What are the real issues?
Does anyone really care?

To get you all in the mood, have a look at this great performance by Taylor Mali on “What teachers make” –  or in a neat slide-show format on the SlideShare website 

The other topic that has been held back by popular request till the summer absences were over, is the whole issue of citizenship in our day and age.
What is “global citizenship”?
What is the meaning of an election where only 500 people vote (Liberal party membership in Vancouver-Fairview which will elect the Liberal candidate for this by-election), or 117,000 of the registered 450,000 people vote (last municipal election in Vancouver)?
Is it the right thing to do to mandate a female candidate with no nomination vote (e.g. NDP’s Jenn McGinn in Vancouver-Fairview by-election)?
How does one hold any organisation accountable nowadays?
How do our civic and political structures need to evolve to respond better to our needs?
And while we are on the topic, I hope we’ll spend some time on elections – in the US, in Canada, municipal and provincial – fun is to be had across this great continent!

We do look forward to seeing you and exchanging views on the issues and news.

Details on the format for any who may need them are in the post-scriptum below or on our website under “about” –  .

If you can’t make it this time, keep in mind Wednesday October 15th is the next iteration.

Last but not least, please do consider bringing along a book you have read lately that impressed you or changed you somehow. I am perennially starved for good book suggestions and if you can bring the book for us to pass around and you could very briefly relate why you liked it, this would be greatly appreciated. We’ll do a lightning round on this, as I do not want to take away from the discussion/debate part.

Happy Wednesday to all,

Alexandra (& James)