I have come to the rather aggravating conclusion that something about the WiFi of SUNY Geneseo, or at least in my dormitory (which, admittedly, may be a facet of its being “the oldest dorm on campus,” as if that was a good thing) does not agree with my desire to update our WordPress site. I have yet to have an issue when writing these blog posts, but the internet seems to have some problem with me when attempting to put new text into our site. This is incredibly upsetting, but I suppose it is what it is. Directly prior to the writing of this post, I was in my preferred coffee shop off of Geneseo’s campus, where I was able to work on and update our site as I am meant to be able to with (relative) ease. This is an excellent excuse for me to waste more money on those rosemary olive bagels I so love, one supposes.
I just completed what will turn out to be one half of the religion page on our website, discussing the history of publicly funded Catholic schools in the Canadian province of Ontario. We did not have an obvious place to put this, so I decided that it would be a subpage under religion, as will be the actual religious controversy around The Golden Compass book and probably movie. Of course, the internet decided to go down in that cafe directly before I was able to actually link that bloody page properly, so it now exists in WordPress without being able to be accessed from the public site. Joyous.
The history of public Catholic schools in Canada follows some similar lines to the discrimination against Roman Catholics in the United States, with the whole “allegiance to a foreign power” and “they are undermining our (Protestant) way of life shticks. Though, astonishingly from my American point of view, because the “normal” public schools in Ontario were very much if a Protestant origin, compulsory religious learning for all students was not abolished in what are now Canada’s secular schools until 1969. This is absolutely a product of my own American biases from our history of pretending that we have a separation of church and state. but that seems astonishingly recent to have stopped forcibly propagandizing children into religion. This also gave me an excuse to reference the fact that Irish and Irish-Americans attempted an invasion of colonial Canada in order to get to leave the British to leave Ireland, which is fantastic (the Fenian Raids, for reference).
I also wrote up the description of our COPLAC course this week, although I intended to do more, though I have been doing more unwell than I would like. Regardless, enjoy thine day, dear reader!