Let’s talk about children and education

Opinion

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This article was published 04/01/2024 (644 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was great news to hear that the provincial government is discouraging the use of out-of-school suspensions as a disciplinary and learning device.

It is my hope that this action is just the beginning of a much larger, and necessary, public conversation about children, their education and schools.

Suspensions have been employed primarily in two situations: to manage behaviour, including giving adults’ respite from the actions of some children; and, for older students, also as a deterrent for absenteeism.

The second seems ultimately illogical, “denying children attendance for not attending.” The first is more complex — other children and teachers do need a break from the violent behaviour of some children, but those children also need a break from their conditions.

Removing children from a violent situation is only a temporary solution to deeper, longer term, concerns — something which, quite frankly, we lack good answers for and need to keep working at for the sake of those children and the rest of us. And absenteeism in schools across North America is epidemic.

When parents are asked what their hopes are for their children’s education, they inevitably say they want them to be happy and safe and, if we’re honest, all of us do.

By safe, they mean emotionally as well as physically; by happy, they mean feeling fulfilled and worthwhile. Chronic absenteeism suggests that they are feeling neither: that should give pause for reflection and the avoidance of quick fixes. Education is obviously more than academic achievement and graduation.

Most healthy children and young people like to be with their peers — to go to school, to belong, to get along, to be noticed and appreciated for who they are — even if they do not excel academically.

In fact, for many children, that’s what makes school bearable. And still many media and politicians act like mathematics achievement on one-shot international tests is the measure of educational success. Failure to achieve curriculum mastery discourages children and often contributes to their deliberate absences.

We would recognize that children learn as much or more about how to be happy, engaged, and do well at mathematics from how their teachers care for them, and how their teachers model healthy relationships, than from teaching them algebra, how to conduct an experiment or how to shoot a basketball. While those are useful and desirable achievements, tools and skills, given that many people live happy successful lives without mastering any of those, we might be a little more tentative about our expectations and judgments about their worth.

We should also profess that we really don’t want to control children’s lives so that they all realize the same “outcomes”; that we really don’t want to force our children to become “schooled” conformists, predictable robotic automatons or clones of their parents or some other adult.

Making our children turn out as someone had predetermined they should would require the most inhumane, tyrannical, dogmatic, and manipulative regime and system of education we could possibly imagine. It would be a fate worse than death for both children and adults and spell an end to education and democratic freedom as we know it.

Equally, it is time to set aside the misbeliefs that teaching and learning are mainly technical and technological.

If every child really mattered as an individual, we would not be so quick to employ business terms like “best practices” and “deliverables” to their education, as if there was one answer and one method which works for all children. We would be less eager to buy some copyrighted, pre-packaged program which promises that every child will learn how to read if the prescribed steps are followed.

This is not to say that we should not also emphasize academic subjects, but only that we should keep them in perspective. Using an ever-changing school curriculum as a resource for helping children understand and make meaning out of the world they inhabit and developing disciplined minds has served us well, but they are the means to an end, not just an end in themselves.

Compulsory attendance in public schools with caring teachers is an equally important means.

When children are absent from school for whatever reason, they miss engaging with their peers, the presence of caring adults in their lives, and the opportunities to learn the habits of mind we think will serve them later in life. We need to keep working at getting and keeping them there.

“What is it we really want for our children as a result of their spending 12 or more years of their early lives in schools? What do we want them to experience in school in order to become healthy, contributing adults?” “How do we reach and teach students for whom our conventional systems don’t work?

Reducing the incidents of suspension is only one step in the right direction. Not losing our minds over test scores or curriculum mastery is another. Looking after children so they won’t need or want to be absent is the greater imperative — that calls for deeper understanding and no easy fixes.

I would encourage the government to initiate a renewed and continuous public dialogue about the purposes of education, the roles of schools in society, and ways to assist, engage and care for children who are not currently being served well. Then we might understand better why they don’t attend or succeed or, conversely, why some do very well against all odds.

It’s a conversation that’s long overdue and, until we take each child’s education seriously enough to take the time it deserves, we will continue to fail many of them to the detriment of us all!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.