This is probably not a good time to be a public school teacher in America — and yes, I am deliberately avoiding the term “United States” as a descriptor for that bitterly divided and misled country south of our border.
Best we take a look at the consequences of a general acceptance of the increasing politicization of public education there and make sure the same thing does not happen here.
Just when American educators thought that things could not get any worse, they did.
State officials and elected lawmakers in some states promote book banning — To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaids Tale, even The Diary of Anne Frank in one jurisdiction.
Teachers and administrators face politically motivated demands for revisionist history, often accompanied by harassment and threats against school boards and teachers who refuse to bow to these demands.
On top of all this organizational chaos in a system long obsessed by testing, testing and more testing as a substitute for actual progress in education comes the news that, according to a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for American nine-year-olds fell between 2020 and 2022 by a level not seen in decades, a foreboding sign of the state of American education two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Even though post-pandemic math and literacy scores have been slipping, however, more significant questions are being asked about core purposes of American public education — namely, the failure of American public education to play a role in stabilizing a now seriously destabilized nation.
Some critics go so far as to ask whether mistakes in prioritizing only those aspects of a child’s education that can be tested may have played a role in the Jan. 6 brainless, misguided, disgraceful, riotous attack on the Capitol and the democracy it once represented.
Why is any of this of interest for Canadian parents, teachers and policy developers in public education? Reason number one would be because it is all way too close for comfort when we see a similar playbook based on the politics of division becoming appealing to the least-thoughtful sectors of our population.
That playbook even seems to be finding a home in some sectors of our own national political framework.
The good news is that this point, Canadian kids are doing well academically. Overall, in reading, math and science, Canadian schools have performed well above average as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests for 15-year-olds.
In the 2018 round, out of 78 participating jurisdictions, Canada ranked sixth in reading, 12th in mathematics, and eighth in science
But what about the more important reasons we have public schools? Will Canadian public education lose sight of it goal of honing the ability to think critically and logically across a broad range of current societal issues — the absence of which certainly afflicts American public education, resulting in a deeply divided and misguided population.
The development of what we call “critical thinking skills” in our Canadian classrooms may, in the long run, affect students’ lives much more than testable knowledge.
Developing the ability to think beyond the superficial is now key to education, mainly because of the increasing availability of new communication technologies and virtual media sources that can be used to mislead and overwhelm emerging powers of thinking and rational decision-making.
There is justifiable speculation that these new tools have poisoned political discourse, polarized democratic electorates, and been leveraged by would-be authoritarians to con voters and gain political power.
While tests in math, science and literacy remain important elements of the continuing pursuit of successful teaching and learning, Clyde Herreid, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Buffalo, describes the greater value of helping our kids learn the value of thinking critically beyond the glib posturing and promises of those who crave power: “If I had to choose one general characteristic of critical thinking that cuts across smart people it would be skepticism — the ability to ask oneself and others if the conclusions and data are correct.”
As the old saying goes, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
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