I’ve been writing my Reality Check column in various forms now for almost five years, and I’ve noticed a pattern in the responses I receive from readers. By far, the topic that elicits the most emails is our public schools. Parents are desperate. Quite often they feel the teacher or the principal is the problem, but worry that if they complain they’ll be labeled as a trouble-maker. So they try to make do, and the kids are the ones who suffer.
The second largest group to write to me about education issues are teachers, and they’re frustrated, too. I know some teachers aren’t great, but a lot are. They genuinely care. And they’re frustrated because they feel their hands are tied on so many issues. They can’t properly discipline anymore. Too much is being added to the school day. Kids are out of control and there’s no way to maintain order.
One of my friends is a substitute teacher who works at several difficult schools. A few of the full-time teachers are just burnt out, and she fills in when they take rather frequent stress leave days. What she’s found is that in each of these classes not one but a handful of children have been labeled with behavioural problems, and the teachers can’t cope. It’s hard to blame them. Everybody, it seems, is just trying to hang on.
Another friend who wishes to remain nameless is bugged most by two things: first, her kids aren’t learning the basics; and second, they have so many projects to do, far more than she had growing up, and they can’t do them on their own. So she stays up late helping, night after night, sacrificing some relaxing family time everybody would much prefer, to do a project which she feels has marginal educational value. But then she waits, with bated breath, to see what the mark will be. And when it’s good, she proudly marches into work, proclaiming, “I got an A!”. Because that’s what it feels like. She got it, not just her child. The whole thing is a farce.
Her children, who are mostly getting B’s, do not know their multiplication tables. The school didn’t bother to ensure the kids learned them. When the children were younger, my friend made sure she taught them how to read herself, since the school wasn’t big on phonics. But she feels like she and her husband dropped the ball on math, and now they’re trying to pick it back up again. “You can’t trust the school to teach them anything important,” her husband told me. “You’ve got to teach it to them yourself.” If that’s true, then what’s a school for?
I know another dear little boy who received a glowing report card with all A’s last year in grade one. But one day, when he was over at our house, I did some math investigations with him for fun to keep him busy. This little boy did everything on his fingers. He couldn’t even do plus ones or plus twos in his head. I took some time to teach him and now he’s fine. But I find myself wondering, what, exactly, did the school teach him in grade one? And what are they teaching him now in grade 2? And why can’t parents sue the government when schools do such a pathetic job?
Now I don’t completely blame the schools for their failures. This is a multi-pronged problem that I don’t know if we can ever completely fix. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the whole way we do public education—sticking twenty kids at all different intellectual levels and learning styles with one teacher—isn’t the best way to do it at all. And so I wonder, at some point, are people going to say, “enough is enough”? We have to go back to the drawing board? I don’t know very many people who think that it’s really working. And when it comes to our kids, can we really continue to drop the ball?
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