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Michael Furdyk
Joined: Aug 12, 2000
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Toronto Situation
April 10, 2001 - 01:44 AM
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Right now in Toronto, all public school support staff are on strike. The schools are a mess, and I caught this well--thought out editorial by Margaret Wente in Saturday's Global and Mail:
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Up the road from me is a vast and crumbling pile of bricks erected in the '40s. The janitors (now known as "support staff" are on strike, and trash is piling up inside. It's the same story all over Toronto, where high-school life has lurched from bad to worse. Delinquent students have strung toilet paper from the trees. Some schools have closed because the teachers can't or won't go in to teach. Others are experiencing "hygiene issues," as the school board delicately puts it.
If this keeps up, all the high schools could shut down by Easter.
We should be so lucky.
Modern high schools are the most dysfunctional institutions yet devised by the developed world. They deaden the souls, confine the bodies and bludgeon the spirits of the inmates. They incarcerate young people in their prime and trap them into the cruel hierarchies of adolescent society. Their intellectual climate is unspeakably banal, and their life lessons are all wrong. They are a breeding ground for every kind of teenage pathology, from bullying to bulimia. They're bad for girls, and even worse for boys.
The kids who are trashing the schools "aren't necessarily politically conscious," one 18-year-old told me. "They just hate the place."
I don't blame them. I did, too.
"From the schools' point of view, they have thousands of adolescents who must be controlled and kept like barn animals," says Judith Kleinfeld, an American expert on schools and adolescence. The 50-minute bells, the homework checks and the hall passes are all essential means of crowd control. And they're more or less guaranteed to breed contempt for authority. "The lock-step atmosphere irritates adolescents whose psychological task is to establish independent identities," she says.
When I was 13, I entered one of the biggest and richest suburban schools in the world. It was endowed with highly competent teachers, a superb sports program, and every extracurricular activity you can imagine.
It was, of course, a living hell.
"What happens in these large comprehensive high schools is that you get tremendous social hierarchies," says Dr. Kleinfeld. "It's tied to kids' need for self-definition. Each group trashes the one below it and maintains the boundaries of exclusivity -- especially the girls." In a climate of relentless sexual competition, the vast majority of girls are doomed to feel ugly and inadequate. And so they compete to see who can be the most dysfunctional.
But don't envy the boys, especially those (and there are many) who haven't learned to read. We lock them up and torture them for their entire adolescence. They are not good at order, compliance and inactivity, all the traits that schools reward. Male role models are scarce, and the teachers are too harassed to pay attention to them anyway.
High schools have largely suppressed masculine culture, except for the sports teams that only the elite boys get to play on. Inarticulate as stones, the un-smart, just-average boys are the ones the schools fail most.
Big high schools were invented in the industrial age. (No wonder they look so much like factories.) Unlike every other institution, they haven't changed since. They were perfected in the 1950s, when the pedagogic wisdom was that bigger would surely be better.
As the tiny rural schools closed down, high schools bulked up to 1,000 or 2,000 kids or more. Teachers specialized, and class sizes grew, and school boards hired more and more janitors and support staff to keep the plant maintained. Principals morphed into personnel directors and safety wardens. The age of mass production had arrived.
"High-school teachers want to do a good job, but they really can't with five classes of 30 kids," says Dr. Kleinfeld. "They can't possibly grade that many long essays a week. So the kids don't work, and the teachers don't make them. It's an intellectual bargain with the devil."
And it endures for years. We keep kids in school far past the age when they're ready for autonomy, spooning them full of the innocuous, inoffensive, utterly unchallenging material that constitutes most of the high-school curriculum. The best thing you can say for high schools is that they keep the inmates off the streets.
Educators pay lip service to stimulating creativity, which, we're told, is the key to succeeding in the world these days. But there's not much creativity in a factory. We need to blow up the high schools, and make them small and intimate again. We need to make them places where teachers actually know who the kids are and have the time to teach them deeply.
Serious school reformers know this. They've been saying it for years. Smaller, decentralized schools work better. "Alternative" schools have better attendance, more functional kids, lower dropout rates and higher achievement. It doesn't matter if they're art schools or science schools, progressive or strict. They succeed because they have a focus, and a purpose, and a human scale, and teach content that is stripped down and demanding.
Who could be against all this? I'm sorry to say the answer is practically everyone. Governments are against smaller, decentralized schools because they might lose their power. School boards are against them because weird, unapproved pedagogical methods might creep in. Some parents have opposed them because they'd lose their elite sports teams. Teachers' unions are against them because they might cost union jobs, or introduce a whiff of merit pay. The smaller-schools movement has met resistance almost everywhere.
In smaller schools, kids might get a sense of community and ownership. They could even help run the lunchroom, or help pick up the trash. They can't do that today, of course. It's illegal.
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I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this article. I'm going to post a great reply in the Letters to the Editor section. Anyone from Toronto have stories to share?
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Michael Furdyk
Joined: Aug 12, 2000
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Re: Toronto Situation
April 10, 2001 - 01:47 AM
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This is Adrian Ravinsky's reply to Margaret Wente's article:
Margaret Wente could not have been more correct in her diagnosis of the poor state of our high schools. Being currently enrolled in a school that seems to teach not survival skills and academic prowess, but rather the capitalist reality of a cold, Darwinian, dulling factory, this is something that I experience first-hand every day.
While friends of mine going to alternative schools receive a practical, personal education, we experience a rigid and nonsensical linear excuse for an education. While my friends are encouraged to grow artistically, we're discouraged away from belittling the sacred principle of conformity.
We need to start being progressive, using our chopping blocks on the mind-numbing bureaucracy that is the real waste of time and money -- and a waste of our nation's youth.
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Martin Kuplens-Ewart
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Alternative Schools
April 10, 2001 - 12:06 PM
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Although alternative schools have long been recognised as places where enriched education has been provided, these bastions of individuality are slowly being torn down -- if not physically, then psychologically -- by the current Ontario Government.
With the introduction of numerous education-targeted bills that legislate everything from class-size to class-numbers, to the minutest detail of material and method of teaching, the government is overtly following the scent up its rear end in an attempt to make all people in the province neatly fit into its formula.
As Margaret Wente says, students are "adolescents whose psychological task is to establish independent identities." Conforming to an arbitrary norm established in part by a failed supply teacher is not in our agenda. There is no wonder that, in recent Grade 10 literacy tests, more than fifty percent of students failed.
Someone has got to stop and realise that no, factory-schooling *does not work*; that it is damaging to young people, and that if an alternative school has over 90% of its students compared to the average of 50%passing the literacy test, then there might just be something to that...
...just a thought.
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Ellie
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Education in Cyprus
April 12, 2001 - 02:14 AM
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i'm from Cyprus and the school that I go to goes by the British system and it is supposed to be the best school in Cyprus (it's a small place). What I don't like about the British system is that it's all about the exams, there's rarely any course-work and u r not really given the chance to look into something u r interested in. the syllabus is huge, so we don't even get the chance to really look into something we're interested in. this just encourages apathy and stupidity. students r not encouraged to think, or have an opinion, or to search for knowledge. students r given knowledge, which most of the times is not even useful,and they're told that that's the only thing they need to learn for now so that they'll be able to get into a good university.
things need to change, but how? what can they change to? course-work should be more widespead, projects where the student gets to choose the subject. what about other countrys' systems? do they also encourage shallowness?
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Alana
Joined: Mar 23, 2001
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marks or merit?
April 12, 2001 - 03:57 AM
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I often struggle between whether it is better to have a school system that encourages students to really care about what they are doing or to have one where students only care about marks. I know that in an ideal world it is alwasys best to really care about what you are doing, but in our money and sucess driven society, I can't help but think that schools that only worry about marks might be more realistic in preparing students for the real world.
Ideally, it would be nice to see kids rewarded for their efforts as well as their achievements because when a kid tries hard and the "fails", it is so tough for them to get back up and try again. If a kid fails a test but still gets a pat on the back and recognition for his/her efforts, they would be more likely to still study hard the next time.
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Noam Eppel
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Education
April 12, 2001 - 12:54 PM
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FastCompany has been a great resource for articles on Education and profiles on "change agents" working to force improvements on the Education Systems. Check out the articles below:
"I'm a Saboteur. Brainpower is more important than ever, but education seems more backward than ever. John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher, now aims to overthrow the public-school establishment for which he worked for 30 years."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/40/wf_gatto.html
"Schools That Think. Everyone agrees: Education is essential for the future of the new economy. Everyone agrees: The public education system needs reform. No one agrees on how to do it. Here are four models for the future."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/33/education.html
"Education Report Card. Dogged by historically low test scores, the New Orleans Public School System flounders while nearby private institutions follow the lead of strong higher education programs in the area. Closing this education gap requires back-to-basics education reform"
http://www.fastcompany.com/feature/brandusa/education.html
"Workshop for Change. Inside a converted Berlin brewery unfolds the story of two change agents, a struggle between tradition and possibility, and one actionable vision: To craft an entirely new form of German education."
http://www.fastcompany.com/feature/change/workshop.html
"You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom. Professor Henry Mintzberg is one of the world's most influential teachers of business strategy. Now he's developing a new lesson plan: to change the very essence of business education itself."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/40/wf_mintzberg.html
"As global businesses boldly step into the 21st century, hurtling headlong in their mission to maximize profits and shareholder return and to unveil cutting-edge innovations, one basic commodity threatens to stymie their global goals: knowledge."
http://learning.fastcompany.com/braintrust/corp_ahudnut.html
"Fast Times at Hunterdon High. Superintendent Ray Farley is rewriting the rules of education. His formula: Computers, communication, and community."
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/13/hunterdon.html
More Articles at: http://www.fastcompany.com/cgi-bin/texis/search/search/?db=fcmain&query=Education+System
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Dana Collins
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Great article
November 21, 2001 - 04:24 AM
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That was a really good article, and I wish that I'd written it because I've been thinking about our backward school systems for a long time. Everyday I come home from school, having learned a few useful things hear and there, but always feeling this suffocated, tortured feeling that I couldn't place. Now I can - it's called oppression. Students these days are like rats running about a maze. We scramble about the building all day long, being told what to do and what to learn, and how to best succeed. Why aren't we pursuing our true passions? Why aren't we focusing on the important things in life, instead of the social circus we're forced into. The people who really do want to learn and focus on something meaningful are forced to interact with people who'll size you up in a glance by the color pants you're wearing. Everything these days is forced into a neat, perfectly structured box, and those who don't fit have no other place to go.
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Noam Eppel
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Change Agents NEED Apply
November 21, 2001 - 08:22 AM
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I am glad this thread is getting some attention. The educational system is just too important to ignore.
I was pleased to get an invite to do some teaching at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Toronto, where I teach Web Security.
While I am not a teacher by training, I do understand the importance of quality teachers to the education system. I feel the improvement that will have the most positive affect on our educational system has to be change to those on the front lines. Policy makers and educational leaders can do their best to design a system capable of educating tomorrow's leaders. However, that system would be rendered ineffective if teachers don't have the skills or ability to do their job.
While most any school has their fair share of some good and some not so good teachers, I am glad to be able to learn from some very caring and quality teachers at the IADT. It is easy to find flaws with Canada's schools but I am pleased to be in a position to help improve this situation.
So if I may throw this out to the group, what would you do differently if you were a teacher in today's schools? Any "Change Agents" out there?? ;-)
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