An old but nonetheless still prescient piece of pop wisdom says: “When you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.”
To those of us who have been around public education for a while, it seems ironic that, once again, there is some talk up there in the corridors of power about a need for a second commission to look into the workings of public education.
It seems only last week that commissioner Barry M. Sullivan, Q.C., was appointed to the last Royal Commission on Education, on March 14, 1987. He subsequently submitted his report entitled A Legacy for Learners: Report of the Royal Commission on Education on July 15, 1988.
Quick work, but the content of the report was not just something that Sullivan, brilliant organizer and leader that he was, cooked up with a few like-minded associates.
Never one to do anything by halves, Sullivan travelled across B.C., and held 66 public hearings and 54 meetings with teachers. He took part in 23 student assemblies. Sullivan also wrote that “the commission received almost 2,350 written and oral submissions, from individuals and groups all over the province.”
That was 29 years ago, and what emerged from the Sullivan Report was then-education minister Tony Brummett’s Mandate for the School System, which, in turn, was worked into a detailed program called Year 2000, describing what and how students would learn at each stage of their education.
The Social Credit government of the day accepted almost all of Sullivan’s and Brummett’s recommendations, although many educators thought that the Year 2000, while dazzling as a peek into the future of public education, might be a document perilously in danger of inviting public adjudication too far before its time.
Which, as it turned out, is exactly what happened.
Some of the Year 2000 details, once translated from philosophy into practice, came as a shock to parents and teachers, who said: “We should just be doing what we know as we have always done it.”
Government, in the person of then-premier Mike Harcourt, received “huge complaints” about, as one example, the new “anecdotal” report cards that, parents thought, didn’t adequately quantify students’ progress — as if the complexity of student progress could so easily be represented by numbers and/or letter grades.
Notwithstanding that it has always served the purposes of a few university professors to complain about the woeful unpreparedness of first-year students, government also received an earful from some inhabitants of those lofty towers.
I recall being berated personally by a physics prof who accused those of us speaking on behalf of the Year 2000 of being without conscience and “experimenting with kids.” I reminded him that as educators, we probably knew more about the consequences of changes in classroom practice than either Albert Einstein or Enrico Fermi, the architects of the nuclear age, did about setting off the first nuclear device at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1945.
Fermi, possibly only half seriously, had offered to take wagers among the top physicists and military officers present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and if so, whether it would destroy the state or incinerate the entire planet.
Was the Year 2000 experimenting with kids? Not at all.
But, inevitably, in the face of opposition from people who had not read the Sullivan commission’s report or even the Year 2000 proposal, the whole thing came close, except in a few schools, to dying a natural death.
As writer Crawford Killian put it: “Educators, politicians and the public simply lost interest and threw the whole project down the memory hole.”
But enough history. Here is a practical suggestion: Rather than launch into a second commission (and, yes, the expectations of and about public education have certainly changed in 29 years), why not conduct some kind of “appreciative inquiry” (in the classic definition of the term).
Let’s figure out what happened last time.
Gervase Bushe, a researcher on the appreciative-inquiry process, contributed to the Encyclopedia of Management Theory the notion of “collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.”
In other words, even though 2017 suggests a need for some thinking about how different the current educational context is from 1989, common sense suggests first we should have a structured conversation among politicians, teachers, academics, parents and business leaders about “what did we learn from last time before we jump in again?”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
