I spent three weeks last summer at a Kenyan orphanage, home to 850 kids from birth to grade 12. A fully-functioning school operates on the campus. It has tattered textbooks, a blackboard for each class, and little else. No toys, no manipulatives for math, no microscopes for science. And these kids, many of whom were former drug addicts, living on the streets, outperform 98% of students in government schools across the country.
Why? Because they want to learn. I asked a group of kids who were all between the ages of ten and twelve what they wanted to do with their lives. No one mentioned becoming an actor or a professional basketball player. They all said things like doctors, nurses, teachers, pilots. And they can definitely do it, because the children’s home is always raising money to send those who are admitted to university there.
When we wonder what’s wrong with the Canadian school system, we often point to teachers, or the system in general. I know I’m guilty of that. Or we say it’s because there’s not enough money. These Kenyans have no money, though, but their kids are learning harder math in grade 4 than ours are. When I showed them some donated Canadian math textbooks, they didn’t think they were rigorous enough for their children. Perhaps our kids can’t learn because Canadian parents don’t parent well enough? Again, this could be a factor, but these Kenyan children have no biological parents to care for them, and nobody reads to them because they have no books other than textbooks.
There’s always one group of people we never seem to get the blame when schools do poorly, and that’s the kids themselves. Why don’t Canadian children hunger to learn? Why are Canadian children so wrapped up in popular culture and video games that they ignore the importance of understanding math? I do not mean to excuse the school system, which has many problems I’ve already written about, or parents who seem so busy and distracted that they don’t become engaged with their kids’ education. All of these things do play a role. The school system, for instance, focuses too much on self-esteem and not enough on the rewards of hard work, but that’s another story. And ultimately, children themselves need to take responsibility for their own futures.
Today too many of our children are growing up self-absorbed with very little ability to set goals. William Galston, who studied poverty and its causes, has found that most kids expect that they will live in comfort when they grow up. They’ll have the cars, and the television sets, and the trips to Mexico, but what they’re missing is any concrete plan to get them there.
Perhaps I’m guilty of generalizing too much, though, because some high schoolers don’t try for very good reasons: they’re bored stiff. I know several gifted teenagers who get just atrocious grades, largely because they think school is stupid. And they’re right. One high school boy complained that he was being given extra marks for colouring the title page on his report. “I’m not in grade two anymore”. Another girl, a brilliant, sweet friend of mine, became cynical in grade nine when she realized she could spell better than her English teacher, and that her history teacher had no knowledge of what happened during any war before World War II. If you know more than the teacher, why bother listening at all?
The difference between these two groups, though, is that the gifted group will likely still succeed as adults. They know how to get things done, they have little tolerance for inefficiency or stupidity, and they are capable of finishing tasks. If they can start a business, or get a job in a fast-moving environment, they’ll still do just fine, even if their school experience is pathetic. It’s the other group, the ones that thumb their noses at learning in general, that worries me. Certainly parents must take steps to prevent their kids from getting caught up in our poisonous youth culture, but it goes deeper than that. At some point, these kids are going to have to decide for themselves. I just hope they realize it before they, like my little friends in Kenya, hit rock bottom, too.
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