‘How would I like my child’s school to be? Just like it was when I went there myself.” The young mother had been invited to an interview as part of a rural district reorganization project on which I was consulting.
It was an epiphany for me, a sudden realization that the path to progress for public education is always hampered by the fact that almost everybody has been to school and holds, for the most part, a rosy “the way we were” memory of that experience.
Any proposed change to the structure of public education — the what, where and how teaching and learning happen — moves some people from a position of understanding what exactly schools do now to a place of “schools just aren’t what they used to be.”
That unsettles and scares them.
Progress and change in the practice of medicine or law passes, for the most part, without much public comment. But not public education.
So we see the frequently expressed concern that B.C.’s Education Plan is, for example, going to replace content with process. Students will emerge as thinkers with nothing to think about.
One recently published commentator referred to the new education plan as an “anti-knowledge” approach to curriculum of “edu-babble,” citing a 1925 educational theorist as evidence of the wrong-headed approach to the public-education construct.
OK, let’s just all take a breath.
First, knowledge about facts, the fundamental content of curriculum, is not being de-emphasized. Not at all. Curriculum content from kindergarten to Grade 12 is still firmly based in the content of what teachers will teach and kids need to learn.
The problem is that the documents available on the Ministry of Education website tends to be a dense and confusing read. Let’s take English grades K-7, An Integrated Resource Package, which is not a package of resources or content at all.
The K-7 IRP includes 42 pages about the theoretical and philosophical bases for teaching English language arts — the “why and how” but not the “what” of elementary-school language arts.
The document outlines goals, curriculum organizers, pragmatics, semantics, graphophonics (whatever they are), syntax and “Correlation of the B.C. Performance Standards for Writing to the Traits of Writing.”
That’s heavy, muddy going and not accessible to anybody except people trained to teach language arts in K-7 classrooms.
Easy to call it “edubabble,” but then, the content of a medical text could be called “medibabble.”
If we want to find more about the “what” of language arts, we need to look at another document: Learning resources, English Language Arts K to 7.
A recommended resource called Crossroads 7, published by Thomson Nelson, “offers a large selection of Canadian materials complemented by a variety of international texts.”
The document goes on to explain: “The student anthology features a wide range of selections with an emphasis on Western Canadian texts, including aboriginal and multicultural perspectives.”
The point of all this is that despite the frequently and publicly expressed concern that substantial curricular content has been lost, the evidence of curricular content does exist — but it takes some patience and background as an educator to find it.
There is an attractive B.C. Education Plan ministry website that focuses on the philosophy of education but mentions, only briefly, that “for all students, reading, writing and math skills will still be emphasized and students will still be required to meet core learning outcomes.”
This brief reference to content might not reassure doubters.
Under the interactive feedback “What You’ve Said” section of the website is the sub-heading “Basic skills vs. new competencies,” as if skills and learning competencies are a mutually antagonistic, either/or choice.
As any experienced teacher knows, newly learned skills become new competencies once learned.
B.C.’s education plan is a major step forward into 21st-century teaching and learning, but in terms of general acceptance is being seriously hampered by a poor, even confusing sales job.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
