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Back to School
9-06-2017
It’s back to school time. Throughout the province, classrooms are once again filled with students, eager for the upcoming year, or not. While students pay for their education in time and effort, the rest of us pay for it in taxes. Although the NDP government won’t announce their budget updates until after this article is printed, it is safe to assume that they will match or increase the 13 billion dollars allocated to education by the Liberals. Slightly more than one-quarter of the 50 billion dollars spent on BC’s operating expenses goes towards education. Only health care receives more money - $20 billion in the Liberal budget equaling 40% of expenditures. Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution, education is one of the biggest consumers of public money. Schools, like hospitals and prisons, have been accepted by our collective psyche as indispensable institutions of civilized societies.
So, what do we get with our educational dollars? What is the goal of formal schooling? Are we satisfied with the results? Will even more money solve the problems? Is our return on this massive investment worth it?
According to the BC Ministry of Education, “The purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable the approximately 553,000 public school students, 81,000 independent school students, and over 2,200 home-schooled children enrolled each school year, to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.”
This rosy statement makes the goal of education seem straightforward. We put our young through school for at least 13 years so that they can be good, productive citizens. Simple as that. But Dr. Kieran Egan, a distinguished professor at SFU, urges us to look at the situation from a more refined perspective. He claims there are three main purposes enmeshed in modern education systems – socializing our youth, shaping academic minds, and fostering developmental growth. These three diverse goals are fundamentally incompatible, constantly competing against each other, leaving the system unable to do any of them well.
Socialization: Egan states, “The process of socialization is central to the mandate of schools today. Our schools have the duty to ensure that students graduate with an understanding of their society and of their place and possibilities within it, that they have the skills required for its perpetuation, and that they hold its values and commitments.” A stance endorsed by the Ministry of Education’s maxim. He continues, “The central task of socialization is to inculcate a restricted set of norms and beliefs – the set that constitutes the adult society the child will grow into. Societies can survive and maintain their sense of identity only if a certain degree of homogeneity is achieved in shaping its members.”
Unfortunately, as Egan reminds us, “If we are really successful in socializing, we get someone who is indoctrinated. Now most people tend to be very acute at recognizing the ways in which “others” indoctrinate their children but are largely oblivious to the forms of indoctrination they deploy themselves—“they” indoctrinate, “we” educate.”
This socialization aspect of schools is one of the arguments used to pit public school supporters against independent schools. The fear is that unless everyone mixes together, people won’t learn how to get along. Distressingly, the rise of hate groups is a tell-tale sign that the socialization aspect of modern schooling is not working.
Academic Mind: Egan traces this side of schools, back to Plato. Ideally, education is, “The ability to reflect on ideas, to pull them this way and that until some bedrock of truth and certainty is established…Only by disciplined study of increasingly abstract forms of knowledge, guided by a kind of spiritual commitment, could the mind transcend the conventional beliefs, prejudices, and stereotypes of the time and come to see reality clearly.”
As lofty as Plato seems, Egan reminds us, “We include in the curriculum a range of subject matter that we assume will do something valuable for students’ minds and give them a more realistic grasp of the world…We teach division of fractions, algebra, drama, ancient history, and much more which most students will never have a practical need.”
The recent massive revisions of BC’s curriculum indicate that we are still struggling to determine what is the best knowledge for children to learn. Egan optimistically says, “The conversation of what to include is now one of immense richness, wonder, and diversity.” But I dare say, after attending class for only a couple of days, many students are already bored and frustrated with their studies.
The answer to this boredom would be to follow a developmental approach to education. In our next column, we’ll explore this view and learn the suggestions Egan gives to revamp education in order to make sure our investment, financial and otherwise, gets us the results we depend upon.
Zainab Dhanani is a life-long educator. She can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
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