Not Left To Chance

Today I started into The New Press Education Reader. The beauty of the new blogger’s labels is that it can keep together notes on my sporadic reading. I might not need to change my reading habits after all. I read the Preface today and had some reactions. I’ll put those down right now, and then after reading the articles, I’ll see how my thinking has changed. The first sentence "…a book I wish I’d had before I started teaching so many years ago,.." I’d bet a lot of teachers would say the same thing. Teachers are under-educated/under-qualified. I’m about to go through the process of qualification here in BC, and might document it, but that process is bureaucratic and has nothing to do with the qualities a person needs to teach children. I think there’s a science of learning that can be taught. Unlike medicine or engineering, teacher education is a real in-out experience. The qualities a teacher needs can’t be developed in 8 months. In Part One, "On Teachers and Teaching," there’s an article about"how to educate not only teachers but children of color." When I see this I wonder why there would be a difference. Part Two, "Combating Racism and Homophobia" Here’s the line that caught my attention:

Antiracism, Pollack writes, "requires not treating people as race group members when such treatment harms, and treating people as race group members when such treatment assists."

It caught my attention. It’s just a silly thing to say. Racism is a collection of ugly emotions in an actor. Imposing the concept of race on children… Why not teach creationism..? And then to impose it willy-nilly like Pollack suggests…. silly. Part Three, "Advocates for Equality:"

Victoria Purcell-Gates offers her considerable expertise to illuminate what we need to do to build the language skills of [children in poverty]

This is something that interests me. Children in poverty, a group that is colorless, need more than faith. Language skills are retarded in poverty. There is a process of language acquisition, that can be observed. What I’m wondering is how the process is affected by delay. I’d like to believe that through providing proper nutrition and stimulation an elementary school could prepare any child for high school. Is this happening? I’d like to know what we need to do. Part Four, "Parent, Family and Community Involvement:"

William Ayers reminds us That "teaching, like organizing, is an act of faith."

At this point I’d propose a Project for a Scientific Education (like Freud’s proposed Project for a Scientific Psychology.) An internet search brought this up which seems interesting and current.

A couple days ago John Ibbitson wrote “Native education is in crisis, and it’s everyone’s failure” in the Globe and Mail. In the column under the pretense of education he pushes for a move on native governance. He writes, “Provincial governments know how to deliver education, and would do the best job of running native education programs.” I’d suggest Ibbitson look a little more critically into the ideas on which he so comfortably rests. Provincial governments are failing to educate children from lower economic situations. There are studies that show this. So sending provincial programs into these economically deprived areas will only reveal our education system for what it is. Today native education is modeled on provincial programs. That’s why it’s failing. Studies show that children of university graduates are more likely to go to university. Others show that children who are read to daily perform better in school than children who are not. And children in low income situations are less likely to have an educated parent. Those low income children are also less likely to have a parent who reads to them. It’s clear that a child’s success or failure can be accurately predicted by what is happening outside the school. That’s because provincial schools simply exercise the education children receive at home. A child who isn’t educated at home will not succeed in school. So what exactly is happening in schools? Our education system doesn’t work. It fails to educate the poorest students in the provincial system, and as it is modeled in native communities it fails there also. If you look at the professions that matter, architecture, medicine, law, for example, and compare their training to the eight months a teacher sails through, you can see that teaching doesn’t stack up. Qualification, in the case of teachers, does not translate as ability. The reality is that ability to teach isn’t necessary for qualification. Kids come to school with the skills that are being exercised in the classroom, or they fail. There is no teaching. And when these kids fail, we are all failing. Imagine an architect who’s been hired to build on poor soil. Our society needs building to stand up so we’ve got a collection of over-educated constantly learning professionals working to rigid standards, who are strictly judged and highly regarded for what they do. If the building fails, the architect and the engineers fail. Because of this there are a variety of building techniques for building on a variety of surfaces. That the tools to educate are traditional as opposed to scientific, that the duration of teacher training is about an eighth of the highly regarded professions, and that standards of education slip while the standards in other professions rise speaks more strongly to the crisis in Native education, the education of Canada’s underclass, than any allocation of funds. An analogy would be throwing money at front line doctors to cure a disease before the treatment has been developed.