How has education in Canada changed?
Are the youth of today better equipped to face the challenges of society?
Or are progressive learning techniques detrimental to our nation?
In January of 2013 a small event became national news across Canada.
Professor Judith Adler, at Memorial University of Newfoundland, had grown concerned that
many of her students might be lacking awareness of geography that would enable them to comprehend
course issues about global cultural traditions.
She gave her students a quiz consisting of a blank map of the world, with instructions
to indicate where places and features such as Africa, Europe, Great Britain and the Atlantic
Ocean were.
To her surprise, many students had not the most rudimentary geographic awareness.
Some did not know where the Atlantic Ocean was, even though they could see it from their
university.
The nation was horrified.
How could it be that high school graduates could complete schooling and have such a knowledge
deficit?
Yet this was not the first sign of trouble in the nation's schools.
In September 2007 MacLean's Magazine ran an article reporting on a study released by Craig
Alexander, deputy chief economist of TD Bank Financial Group.
The Canadian economy could enjoy a $32-billion boost if literacy rates were improved by only
one percent...
It represents an extraordinary drain on our economy...
. "What is really disappointing is that there
has not been any significant improvement in literacy since the 1970's," said Alexander.
The report noted that four in 10 high school youth have insufficient reading skills...
We need to make sure that every single person that gets a high school diploma is literate.
The public assumes basic knowledge and skills are in place in the upcoming generation.
The evidence however indicates this assumption is a fantasy.
In Canadian schools there is a growing knowledge deficit.
How can this be the case?
Canada is one of the world's richest countries, with a well-established and very well-funded
education system, and a tradition of scholarship.
Many excuse the present problems in education as a result of poverty and a host of other
social maladies.
But in the early part of the 20th century Canadian schools, indeed schools throughout
the western world, were educating large numbers of poor students, many of whom became extremely
successful both in a financial and scholastic sense.
The problem is not money or poverty.
History shows throwing more money at education does not create better results.
For example no quantified studies exist that link investment in computer technologies to
improvements in student achievement on standardized assessments, yet billions continue to be spent
on an assumption.
Beginning in the 1970's a new education fad called "Progressive Education" began finding
its way into school systems.
Writer Andrew Nikiforuk describes the impetus for this:
The American philosopher John Dewey, the modern father of this form of pedagogy, ... reacted
to the extreme formalism and rigidity of schools in the 1890s .... Dewey...believed schools
should "adjust" children...He viewed schools as instruments for social change...
Deploring the traditional emphasis on reading and math, he called for "learning by doing."
Interpreters of Dewey now design curricula mined of knowledge objectives, to allow time
for process skills.
No one will argue the importance of process, but the "progressive educators" devalue the
knowledge component of learning.
This is done under the banners of Child-Centered Learning, Constructivism, Whole Language,
Cooperative Learning and other labels.
The concept of the teacher as expert, passing on information society has determined to be
essential, is thus deliberately undermined.
Universal education in the west was funded to ensure that the youth would become knowledgeable,
and thus continue the nation's capacity to create wealth, and enable culture, history,
traditions and norms of civil behavior to be passed on.
Yet today society's role has been usurped by a small band of self-described educational
experts.
Progressivists rejected this role and ridiculed the explicit teaching of phonics, the code
on which reading is based, because they object to teaching rules.
Formal spelling has largely been dropped as a requirement in most Canadian and American
schools.
Given the absence of the phonetic code, combined with the inability to spell, should we be
surprised that many students do not learn to read?
Handwriting is no longer taught in many most classrooms, despite its known importance in
developing both sides of the brain, as well as providing a vital skill.
Thus another educational industry is created, helping students "recover" what they could
easily have been given with explicit instruction.
Even the new definitions of "literacy" do not refer just to reading and writing.
Under the new definition the works of Tennyson and Longfellow become literary text along
with World Wrestling Federation shows.
Memorization, the greatest single tool for developing attention span and facilitating
rapid recall and analysis, is spurned.
The flaws of "progressive education" have long been known.
This notion that students will sense when they need to learn something and chose to
learn it is a fallacy.
No less a scientist that Dr. Steven Pinker, former Director of the Centre for Cognitive
Neuroscience at MIT, a leading expert on the human brain, raises concerns over modern approaches
in the classroom.
The ascendant philosophy of mathematical education in the United States [and Canada] is constructivism...Children
must actively construct mathematical knowledge for themselves in a social enterprise .... The
teacher provides the materials and the social milieu but does not lecture ... Drill and
practice, the routes to automaticity, are called "mechanistic", and seen as detrimental
to understanding...
The better curricula explicitly point out connections ... Mastery of mathematics is
deeply satisfying, but it is a reward for hard work that is not itself always pleasurable.
Without the esteem for hard-won mathematical skills ... the mastery is unlikely to blossom.
Sadly, the same story is being played out in...reading instruction.
... Old-fashioned practice at connecting letters to sounds is replaced by immersion in a text
rich social environment, and children don't learn to read.
Modern western education is on a path to render its youth unable to compete on a global scale.
When well educated graduates of those nations come to the west, their multilingual ability
and superior knowledge base will see them rise higher and higher, and those educated
here will fall lower and lower.
This is eerily similar to an ancient predication made 3400 years ago in Deuteronomy 28:43.
Caring parents now need to augment children's education helping them know history, geography
and good literature.
The war against knowledge and traditional western culture in our schools reveals another
threat.
As reading ability falls, books which hold the cultural heritage of the western world
will fall into disuse.
This includes the inevitable loss of the histories and stories of the Bible, the foundation of
western cultural thought.
Perhaps it is time that parents, and indeed all those who will be impacted by the de-education
of our children demand that education no longer be the preserve of the extreme far left to
experiment with our most precious resource and the future of our country.
I'm Stuart Wachowicz for Tomorrow's World Viewpoint.
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visit our website at TWCanada.org
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