Volume 7, Number 17

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The Student Voice of University of Prince Edward Island

Could Our Schools Make The Grade?

For two months or so I’ve been staring, from time to time, at a sentence uttered by Brian Mulroney in his speech on ed- ucation in September. “I want to see,” he said,“Canadian ed- ucational standards that match those of our toughest competi- tors.” Why did the prime minis- ter make a statement that anyone acquainted with the subject knew was absolutely outlandish? Per- haps Mulroney would indeed like to see our Standards in math, lan- guages, physics, etc. match those of competitors such as West Ger- many, Japan, and France. Who wouldn’t? We’d also like to win more gold medals than’ anyone else at the Olympics, and cre- ate a wine industry that would put France’s out of business. But Mulroney will never see either of those accomplishments. Nor will he see Canadian educational standards come anywhere near those of our toughest competi- tors. On the basis of our perfor- mance to date, it seems likelier that Mulroney will see our com- petitors pull farther away from us, indefinitely.

This is not to condemn our education system. ‘The system has many fine qualities, like the society it reflects. Many teachers do valuable work. But Mulroney was talking about standards - and standards, in education, are what we lack.

We and the Americans (whose

educational ideology we have copied) don’t believe in worrying about standards. If we did we~ would have uniform exams, ad- ministered across provinces and

across the country. That way, if small-town Quebec students were writing French less well than big-city students, or if Ontario students were falling behind Al-

Basketball Flourishing in PEI

Island’s charms help uni- versity lure outsiders.

Charlottetown

Dennis Smith knew Anne of Green Gables — at least he saw a bit of her on television, but no casual viewing of that tale could prepare him for this. His plane was dropping fast and he looked out the window below him he saw only an alien land.

“At first I thought the plane was landing for a refill, because I couldn’t really believe it,” he says. “When I was flying over, I

never saw no buildings or noth- ing. I just saw houses and red dirt and water. So I thought we were stopping for fuel and then they said we were in Charlottetown.”

Smith had grown up in the Toronto area, in North York, in the neighborhood around Jane and Shepard, which is decidedly urbar., highrise-laden and pre- dominantly black. He had come to Prince Edward Island to play basketball, having been seduced by the words of a coach named Geozge Morrison. The univer-

sity population was only 2000, the island’s population was only 120,000, the black population was — well, there might be 10 families. And the gymnasium, two years after that rough landing, is still a bit tough to believe.

Soon, the University of Prince Edward Island will have a beau- tiful new field house, but for now, Smith and his teammates prac- tice and play in a place that cries out for a Christmas pageant. The stage sits ready for such a drama, the basketball surface seems an

berta students in math everyone would know about it and try to get it fixed. Similarly, we would regularly compare Canadian ed- ucation with that of other coun- tries. This is the way Japan, West Germany, etc..., manage things. This is what “standards” means.

We can’t do that, largely be- cause we believe that rigorous testing is emotionally unhealthy. Benjamin Spock, who hasn’t yet done enough harm and is still at it, put the case clearly in Octo- ber: “Parents should avoid com- parisons between .... their chil- dren and others. To diminish the competitive atmosphere in schools I believe grades and ex- aminations should be. dropped. They mainly test docility and memory anyway.”

Spock literally believes that encouraging rivalry for good grades is unwise on exactly the same grounds that encouraging sibling rivalry is unwise. This is nonsense, and has proven to Spock doesn’t care to know that ev- eryone’s life is necessarily com- petitive in many ways — per- haps he even thinks there can be more than one pediatrician billed as “America’s most trusted doc- tor.” Worse, he classes memory with docility. Surely a good ed- ucational system trains memory, then tests its training.

be dangerous nonsense.

Not America’s though, and

afterthought and a too aggres- sive charge to the hoop leaves the shooter headed into a wall at one end of the court and out a door at the other.

There are 14 players working our, nine of them are black and most are from Toronto and envi- rons. In their midst, Morrison, who teaches high school during the day and has lived here all his life, barks out instructions.

That unlikely mixture has

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January 18, 1990

not Canada’s. Any fool under- stands that “rote learning” by itself is meaningless, but par- ents now also know from sad ex- perience that when an educator comes out against “rote learn- ing,” it means there’s trouble ahead. Speaking in code, the educator is announcing that the next generation won’t be able to spell “receive,” won’t know what caused the Second World War, and won’t be able to say whether the Renaissance came before the enlightenment. Americans have now aoolished rote learning so successfully that in a survey con- ducted this year, 42% of college seniors couldn’t identify the Ko- ran as the sacred book of Islam and 44% couldn’t say who wrote Moby Dick.

In Canada, as in the U.S., the educational bureaucracy tend to agree with Spock. The result is that public school is a crap- shoot — it might be superb, it might be dreadful. George Rad- wanski, after conducting a survey for the Ontario government, re- ported that in reading and writ- ing, the expectation place on a child “varies dramatically, only from school to school and board to board, but from teacher

not

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