INSTEAD of making students memorize a bunch of useless facts, we should help them think like scientists and historians. This is best accomplished by an inquiry-based approach that allows students to guide their own learning process.

Does this reasoning make sense to you? It probably does if you’ve recently attended a faculty of education where teachers are trained. This is also what teachers are often told at their professional development sessions.

The problem is that this approach is wrong. Not just wrong by a little, but by a lot. Despite claiming to be based on solid evidence, the real science of learning points in the opposite direction.

In fact, students learn best when they are immersed in a content-rich learning environment that builds up their background knowledge. Practice is also a key part of helping students master new skills. Learning is hard work, and for this reason alone it is important for teachers, not students, to set the direction in the classroom.

People with disabilities have to fight for basic accessibility every day – and it's exhausting! I live with a disability that requires me to use crutches to get around. I work as a dance educator with students that have various disabilities. I’ve learned first-hand that "accessibility" is a word that is thrown around plenty but largely ignored in practice. It’s time this changed.

We live in a society with so much abundance of knowledge and experience to create accessible spaces for all, yet we are still so far behind. Accessibility is a basic right, enshrined in the Accessible Canada Act, adopted in 2019 to create a barrier-free Canada and enable the full and equal participation of persons with disability in all aspects of life.

Canada also joined the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to protect and promote the rights and dignities of persons  with disabilities “without discrimination and on an equal basis with others.”

Yet I still encounter inaccessible spaces almost every day.

ON Sept. 12, 1977, the Carnegie Council on Children concluded that “The single greatest harm to children is poverty.” I believe this to be an apt description of the greatest threat to the education of a large number of children in Manitoba.

It remains worrisome that, even with the demise of Bill 64 (the Education Modernization Act), the most serious matters facing education are still off the table, and particularly so when it comes to the issue of child poverty, which presents probably the biggest challenge to any government wanting to achieve meaningful and lasting school change.

It’s the end of September. Children and young people are back at school for another year. This includes the children of the poor. The schools know who they are by now. They know they’ll have to pay special attention to these young people because they face challenges most of their other students do not.

Teachers will lie awake at night trying to think of new ways to mitigate the educational consequences for these children. They need help with this formidable task.