Canada has a lot to be proud of when it comes to education. We rank well internationally, our schools are filled with intelligent, passionate educators, access is free and the majority of our youth graduate from high school to join a diverse and primarily peaceful, well-functioning society. Many of us, however, have a niggling suspicion that something isn’t quite right. When you can’t think of a single teenager who enjoys school and is excited to learn – something is wrong. When teachers can’t possibly use teaching strategies that support deeper learning because the curriculum is too crowded – something is wrong. And when we have increasing rates of youth violence, apathy, depression and suicide – something is very definitely wrong.
Problems in education are not because of incompetent teachers, lazy or apathetic youth or misguided administration. The crisis is increasingly the result of a system that was developed to meet the needs of society over 150 years ago, using the information (or misinformation) available at the time it was created. Our world and our understanding of human learning has changed exponentially, while our schools have only changed incrementally.
The explosion of information and communication technologies have altered the very concept of knowledge and the way we process and use information. Changes to the structure, involvement and influence of family and community have affected how children are raised and what we expect out of our schools. The economy, global interconnectivity and the complexity of our world demand the development of radically different skills. And developments in everything from neuroscience to evolutionary psychology allow us to understand more about how the human brain learns than ever before. So why is it that so much of how we educate our children stays the same? Children are still required to sit, listen and acquire facts for later testing. Subjects and grades remain clearly separated and learning continues to be primarily theoretical not experiential.
There have, of course, been numerous attempts to make things right. But the majority of educational reform has been based on short-sighted and politically motivated efforts to implement “higher standards” and increase “accountability”. Many of these initiatives go directly against what we now know about how kids learn. In fact, over the past 60 years there have been so many movements in educational reform (often contradictory) that even well researched and potentially effective attempts at change can feel like one more ‘flavour of the month’. Educators have become wary of the pendulum swings in both directions and increasingly resistant to short term changes that are not adequately supported or implemented with long term vision.
Inside Out and Upside Down: John Abbott on Schools
Persistent (and costly) efforts at educational reform, implementation of innovative initiatives and even the efforts of effective and inspiring teachers can’t fix a system built on a faulty foundation. We need to stop patching and start rebuilding. The system itself needs to be redesigned for the 21st century based on what we now know about how kids learn and develop. It needs to be re-envisioned, redefined and re-aligned. Let’s stop applying bandaids and get to work resetting the broken bones.
Although Canada has one of the best rated education systems in the world, something is clearly wrong when we see growing youth disengagement1, increasing dislike for school with each passing grade2 and rising rates of teenage depression3 and suicide4. Expansion of both home schooling and private school enrollment5 also indicate dropping confidence in public education and recent studies show that many of our students are leaving the system without the basic skills or problem solving abilities needed to function in today’s economy6. Minority and low income students are the hardest hit7. Read more.
The structure and foundations of public education in Canada was built and then shaped by diverse forces. Our British heritage, the efficiency movement in production during the Industrial Revolution, behaviourism (think punishment and reward) and the phenomenon of the American teenager – to name a few. Read more.
Because changing large systems is difficult. Because when you grow up and succeed within the traditional system, it’s hard to see what’s wrong and it’s even harder to imagine that we can do it any other way. Perhaps we have also failed to fully recognize that what happens to our children affects us all. Read more.
Endnotes
1 The McCreary Centre Society, Healthy Connections: Listening to BC Youth. Highlights From the Adolescent Health Survey II (Vancouver: The McCreary Centre Society, 1999).
2 William Boyce, Young People in Canada: Their Health and Well-being (Ottawa: Health Canada, 2002).
3 The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation Teenage Depression and Suicide—The Facts
4 The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation Teenage Depression and Suicide—The Facts
5 Claudia R. Hepburn, The Case for School Choice: Models From the United States, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden, Critical Issues Bulletin (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, Sept. 1999).
6 Canadian Education Statistics Council, Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005 (Ottawa: Canadian Education Statistics Council, 2006; Statistics Canada Catalogue 81-582-XIE).
7 Canadian Education Statistics Council, Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005 (Ottawa: Canadian Education Statistics Council, 2006; Statistics Canada Catalogue 81-582-XIE).
Canada has a strong history of investment (both philosophical and financial) in public education. Over 40 billion dollars is spent annually on getting our children from kindergarten to grade 121, yet public opinion polls show confidence in the education system is at an all-time low2, home schooling is growing exponentially and the percentage of children attending private schools has doubled in the past 25 years3. Although public education certainly appears to work for a percentage of our children, an increasing number of factors point to a deeply flawed system.
Recent research on early leavers indicates that school-based factors such as irrelevant curriculum, passive instruction, disregard for students’ learning style and lack of support all contribute to youth dropping out4. Students are disengaging from a process that does not meet their needs or support their successful transition to independence throughout adolescence.
What’s evident is a pattern of growing disengagement, dissatisfaction and disconnection as students progress through the educational system into adolescence. Instead of inspiring children to learn, we are somehow turning them off of education and extinguishing their innate curiosity and desire to make sense of their world. Engaged kids learn, flourish and become passionate about life – their own and others. Disengaged kids don’t learn, tune out and look for connection elsewhere, often with consequences that are detrimental to themselves, others and society at large. We see this failure reflected daily on our streets, in our malls and in the news.
Heather MacTaggart on Losing the Love of Learning
Despite decades of educational reform and the efforts of countless dedicated educators, the indicators of systemic problems continue.
On the basis of graduation rates alone, almost 25% of our children are failing to attain the minimum educational currency required for success in our society. Many youth are leaving school without having the crucial skills (cognitive, social and attitudinal) necessary to succeed and to flourish as independent adults in an increasingly complex world. The system as it stands can’t fulfill its most basic mandate—to prepare all of our youth to function effectively in their culture as they grow up to face the challenges of adulthood.
Paramount to Canada’s democratic foundation, public education is provided to ensure that every child, regardless of birth or circumstance, has equal opportunity. Yet Canadian students from higher socio-economic families show stronger literacy skills and perform better in math than students from families with low socio-economic status15. In fact, statistics show that being a child in a low-income family in Canada means having a diminished readiness to learn in preschool, reduced chances of attending university and increased likelihood of living in poverty as an adult16. In a shocking example from Winnipeg, 77% of the students from high-income families wrote and passed the standardized grade 12 Language Arts Exam—compared with only 27% of the students from low-income families17.
It is not just children from low-income families that are at higher risk. The flaws of the current system are reflected in lower graduation rates for certain ethnic groups18 and staggering differences in graduation rates and performance on standardized tests among Aboriginal youth.
The system, it seems, has failed our First Nations children more than any other group.
If education has the power to shape lives as well as our society, we are simply not doing enough to ensure that all of our children have effective learning opportunities that help them maximize their own life trajectories. A system that fails its weakest members perpetuates cycles of poverty, the marginalization of minorities and the loss of human potential in this country.
Endnotes
1 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
2 CTV’s Canada AM, Canada AM Education Survey (conducted Sept. 6, 2006). [8% of respondents gave Canada’s education system an “A” rating.]
3 Claudia R. Hepburn, Fraser Insitute bulletin: The Case for School Choice: Models From the United States, New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden , Critical Issues Bulletin (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, Sept. 1999).
4 Community Health Systems Resource Group, Early School Leavers: Understanding the Lived Reality of Student Disengagement From Secondary School (Toronto: The Hospital for Sick Children, May 30, 2005).
5 Patrick Blouin, A profile of elementary and secondary school principals in Canada: First results from the 2004-2005 Survey of Principals Centre for Education Statistics, Statistics Canada.
6 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
7 William Boyce, Young People in Canada: Their Health and Well-being (Ottawa: Health Canada, 2002).
8 The McCreary Centre Society, Healthy Connections: Listening to BC Youth. Highlights From the Adolescent Health Survey II (Vancouver: The McCreary Centre Society, 1999).
9 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
10 Andrew Biemiller and Donald Meichenbaum, Nurturing Independent Learners: Helping Students Take Charge of Their Learning (1998).
11 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
12 Claudia R. Hepburn, “The Case for School Choice.” The Fraser Institute,
13 Report – State of Learning in Canada: No Time for Complacency. Canadian Council on Learning, 2007.
14 Patric Blouin, A Profile of Elementary and Secondary School Principals in Canada: First Results From the 2004-2005 Survey Of Principals in Education Matters: Insights on Education, Learning and Training in Canada, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, June 2006).
15 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
16 Education Indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program 2005. Canadian Education Statistics Council, Statistics Canada.
17 Grade 12 Performance by Winnipeg SES Group, Language Arts Standards Test, 2001/02, as cited in “Making Our Kids Successful” (presentation delivered at The Learning Partnership National Dialogue for Children at Risk, Feb. 27, 2006, by Bruce Ferguson, The Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto).
18 Francine Kopun, “Immigrant Teens More Ambitious,” Toronto Star, April 6, 2006.
19 Statistics taken from Comparative Information on Education, Exhibit 4.2 in 2000 Report of the Auditor General of Canada (Ottawa: Office of the Auditor General of Canada, April 2000), and from ‘Aboriginal Report: How Are We Doing?’ Demographics and Performance of Aboriginal Students in BC Public Schools, 2001-2002 (British Columbia Ministry of Education, July 2002).
20 Louise Brow, “Ontario’s Forgotten Children: Making the Grade. Gap Between Native, Non-Native Schools Growing:
Students Don’t Get the Support They Need to Learn,” Toronto Star, April 25, 2005.
21 Statistics taken from Comparative Information on Education, Exhibit 4.2 in 2000 Report of the Auditor General of Canada (Ottawa: Office of the Auditor General of Canada, April 2000), and from ‘Aboriginal Report: How Are We Doing?’ Demographics and Performance of Aboriginal Students in BC Public Schools, 2001-2002 (British Columbia Ministry of Education, July 2002).
22 Ibid.
23 Michael Mendelson, Aboriginal Peoples and Postsecondary Education in Canada (Caledon Institute of Social Policy, July 2006). Available from Caledon Institute of Social Policy
24 Statistics taken from ‘Aboriginal Report: How Are We Doing?’ Demographics and Performance of Aboriginal Students in BC Public Schools, 2001-2002 (British Columbia Ministry of Education, July 2002).
25 Office of the Auditor General of Canada, in 2004 Report of the Auditor General of Canada – Chapter 5—Indian and Northern Affairs Canada—Education Program and Post-Secondary Student Support (Ottawa: Office of the Auditor General of Canada, November 2004).
Have you ever wondered why we have separated elementary and secondary schools? Why schools are broken into subjects? Why our schools look suspiciously like factories? It’s often more a result of inherited practice, political and social forces and economic influences – than because we know it’s best for our children.
By the 1930s, many regions across Canada offered a four year (grades 9-12) high school program. Once again, however, we looked back to our British roots and based these new schools on the English grammar school system that had been serving to educate and enlighten the elite. The traditional academic curriculum had been designed to prepare a small percentage of the population for university study. This format was applied to all students, though it was not particularly suitable for those with other goals6. You can still see the struggle between academic and applied studies evident in our high schools to this day.
Canada is a land of immigrants and we carried much of the culture and tradition of the United Kingdom with us to Canada’s shores. Our first elementary schools reflected both the influence of the church on education and the idea that intellectual pursuits were primarily for the upper class. They also replicated the English public school experience and its reliance on the three R’s as a standard teaching strategy. Students were expected to receive, retain, and return what they were taught1, a concept that can still be seen at work in our schools today. Surprisingly, the push for mass public education was not so much about democracy and equity, but primarily a response to industrialism’s need for an educated workforce. These early public schools were designed not only to teach the basics, but to encourage certain habits and behaviours that would be useful in a manufacturing workplace – respect for authority, punctuality and reliability2.
When Canada was founded in 1867, only about 40% of Canadian children attended any kind of public schooling3 and as in Britain, formal education ended for the majority of children around the age of 12. Instead of going to high school, most youth would go out into the world to apprentice with adults on farms, in shops and in workplaces. A very small percentage of people (mostly the elite) went on to further schooling. And that schooling was based on an academic approach that can be traced back through the United Kingdom into early European history. It was based on formal teaching, classical Greek education aimed to ‘train the mind’, the preservation of status and the education of clergy and clerics. For much of Canada’s developing years, there were two distinct ways of educating past elementary school – practical, real-world learning for the masses and theoretical, taught learning for a select few.
How Did We Get Here? John Abbot Speaks
Over a hundred years ago American psychologists started to define the “rebelliousness” of adolescence as a ‘disease’ and an aberration. Psychologists and educational bureaucrats agreed that something had to be done to prevent teenagers from going awry. The immediate answer was to promote the placement of adolescents into formal, structured school environments for longer periods of time4.
In the 1930s, the push for free public secondary schooling gained momentum when the great depression hit and unemployment skyrocketed. American politicians recognized that having teenagers in school would take them out of the job market and leave more work for adult wage earners. Moreover, the training and hiring of new teachers created additional employment opportunities5.
While mass public education and the introduction of secondary school became more widespread, their structure was shaped by two key movements that began in the United States. One was the introduction of scientific management in manufacturing and the other was the rise in popularity of the theory of behaviourism.
John Abbott Discusses Why Our Schools Operate As They Do
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, factory owners were frustrated that new manufacturing capabilities were not translating into higher production at the rates they had anticipated. Frederick Winslow Taylor observed this phenomenon in his father’s business and set about examining the problem by applying objective scientific data to models of human labour. By using his stop-watch to measure exactly how long a task took, Taylor effectively invented Time and Motion studies. Taylor gathered his scientifically-based insights on efficient work strategies and used them to tell everyone in the factory exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Thinking people, he argued, risked disrupting the system. And it worked magnificently. Productivity soared. And workers became interchangeable widgets.
Taylor’s success at merging scientific management with the process of industrialization had a profound effect on the relationship of learning to education, and how education systems were to be organized7. In 1907, Henry Pritchard, president of the highly influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, proclaimed that, “It is more and more necessary that every human being should become an effective, economic unit. What is needed is an educational system that is carefully adapted to the needs of the economy. A system that sorts people efficiently into various positions that need to be filled in the stratified occupational structure8“. And so the factory model of education took hold – a system with efficiency and economic productivity at its core, a system designed to sort students according to ability and potential usability – not nurture them as individuals to reach their full potential.
The early 19th century saw the rise of behaviourism and its scientific approach to predicting and controlling human actions. Anything that couldn’t be measured, either did not exist or was not significant (an interesting parallel to many evaluation strategies promoted today). From Pavlov’s dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell to the Skinner box where rats ‘learned’ to press a lever for food, the application to human learning was both appealing and influential. Reducing the messy, complicated task of learning into programmed responses to outside stimuli meant that educating our youth was simply a matter of creating the right combination of reinforcement and punishment.: gold stars and red ‘X’s. Renowned behaviourist J.B. Watson went so far as to claim that he could take any 12 healthy infants and, by applying behavioral techniques, create whatever kind of person he desired. Schools that do their job properly would be bound to achieve the desired outcome. The echo of this approach is still visible in educational reform based on standardization, efficiency and measurable outcomes and also in the one size must fit all approach to learning.
The Western education system as we see it today is more a culmination of various historical, political and economic influences – and not so much the outcome of measured, considered planning based on our beliefs about the purpose of education or best practices. The system has also been shaped by some very faulty assumptions about learning and human development: that children are blank slates, that human motivation to learn is the same as an animal’s motivation to act, that school is primarily a sorting mechanism for our economic needs. It’s time to re-assess our goals for education and re-envision how we educate – based on what we now know about human learning.
Endnotes
1 Jane Gilbert, Catching the Knowledge Wave?:The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2005.
2 Katherine F.C. MacNaughton, The Development of the Theory and Practice of Education in New Brunswick, 1784-1900: A Study in Historical Background, University of New Brunswick, 1947.
3 Statistics Canada, Historical Statistics of Canada, Section W: Education, F. H. Leacy Editor. Click here to view the revelent page on the Statistics Canada website.
4 John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
5 John Abbott and Terry Ryan, The Unfinished Revolution. Network Educational Press Ltd., 2001.
6 Jane Gilbert, Catching the Knowledge Wave?:The Knowledge Society and the Future of Education. New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press, 2005.
7 John Abbott, Master and Apprentice. Read unpublished manuscript (Note: look at the entry for June 20, 2007 on the What’s New page)
8 As cited in John Abbott, Master and Apprentice (see footnote #7 for more details)
Changing large systems is difficult. When you grow up and succeed within the traditional system, it’s hard to see what’s wrong and it’s even harder to imagine that we can do it any other way. Traditional schooling models are entrenched in our collective psyches and in our culture and, as a society, we have invested a great deal in keeping them the way they are. Sometimes, it’s easier to rally behind the very loud voices of “educational reform” than to dig deeper, think longer term and contemplate a complete re-envisioning of the system as we know it.
Perhaps we have also failed to recognize that what happens to our children affects us all. Chronic educational under-performance threatens Canada’s social cohesion, economic prosperity, democratic principles and quality of life. The cost of doing nothing grows with each child that leaves the education system without having challenged the limits of his or her own possibility. If we continue in failing to maximize the potential of every child, we can never hope to meet the significant challenges we face entering the 21st century – climate change, global inequities, rising rates of violence, to name a few. We will pay for our inaction with new prisons, higher expenditures for social assistance and the increased costs of maintaining a fragile public safety.
John Abbott on Why Typical Educational Reform Isn’t the Answer
Decades of “educational reform” calling for higher standards and a return to the basics have served only to drag an already out-of-date system even further in the wrong direction. These types of simplistic and short-term bandages directly contradict what we really know about the circumstances and opportunities that children need to learn, flourish and succeed – as individuals and as a society.
We know two things with absolute certainty; 1) that in 20 years, even 10, our world will look very different, and 2) that the decisions and actions we take today will significantly shape our emergent future.
Eric Young, in Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed