WHAT CHILDREN NEED TO LEARN

 

I just read a Facebook post by an organization supporting the Saskatchewan government’s proposed legislation relating to gender curricula in primary schools. As a retired teacher, I’m convinced that a new and serious rift between homes and schools will occur if the tone of the resulting conflict is not dampened. It’s quickly turning ugly.

First, let’s make just a few observations about the life conditions humanity would most likely agree to as ideal, an environment worth striving toward, in our homes and in our schools:

In the best world we can imagine, the air is clean, the water is clean and clear, the nights are peaceful and quiet and there’s no good reason to lock your doors and windows. Children walk to school hand in hand, unaccompanied by adults, and are secure in their homes, in their schools and on the streets and playgrounds. There are challenges aplenty to whet the imagination, variety and inviting prospects enough to allow everyone optimism about the future, celebratory social events enough to bind neighbour to neighbour.

Everyone has access to sufficient safe and nutritious food without charity; clothing and shelter to suit the climate are general, health and emergency services are in reach when illness, bad weather or disasters strike. The prospect of war and the need to divert resources to prepare for it no longer exists; crime is rare because the desperation of poverty no longer drives individuals to theft and violence.

To keep and maintain such a world, the training and education of the young is as vital as it is among lions and tigers where the survival through adulthood is completely dependent on the ability to stalk and hunt in cooperation with others. What do human children need to learn, what skills need to be rehearsed again and again so that we together nudge our common humanity toward the best we can be?

To this end, I offer some thoughts that bear consideration in what is fast shaping up to be a fight about parents’ rights vs. public schools and curricula. The struggle for control of what children shall be taught is as old as education itself; an example among many is 1) below. 

In the late 1950s, Nikita Khruschev sought to promote atheism, obliterate religion and in that campaign declared that, “… all Soviet children belong to the Soviet State.”[i] The Nazi regime similarly targeted youth with its most strident propaganda campaign. State monopoly of educational curriculum development seems to be a very bad idea, especially when it falls into the hands of totalitarian regimes. Is it equally true that a laissez-faire, democratically-elected government leaving education matters completely in the hands of local administration would be a mistake of another kind?

We probably shouldn’t avoid talking about the changes that have led to a rancorous dispute about sexual/gender issues in school curricula. I took my elementary and middle school public education in 1947 to 1956. Gender and sexuality where not on the curriculum at all, references to it didn’t appear on radio or TV, parents were loathe to even allow their children to be present where animals were breeding or giving birth. Today, verbal and visual references, even explicit depictions of sexual matters are accessible to small children, can hardly be avoided in a home with TV and internet. A seventy-year-old approach to preparing children for the sexual/gender realities they’ll need to face simply won’t answer to the need. We must engage in many conversations that aren’t “them against us,” but are “all of us for all the children.” To this end, I offer some thoughts that bear consideration in what is fast shaping up to be a fight about parent’s rights vs. public schools and curricula. By no means exhaustive, I hope it can get at least one or two conversations started.

 

1)   In the 1920s, hundreds of Mennonite families left Canada and moved to Mexico because they were unwilling to enrol their children in provincial schools. They’d set up their own schools where rudiments of language and arithmetic were taught, and the bulk of the curriculum was Bible-centred. The national mood was overwhelmingly for compulsory citizenship education and conformity to a national standard, and both the conservative Mennonite community and the Indigenous people experienced the practice of forcing assimilation via public education.

2)     Today, under the umbrella of multi-culturalism, a citizenship-oriented public education remains mandatory, but separate schools, home schooling are permitted, even financially supported in some cases so that cultural/spiritual values education can form part of children’s education alongside the public schools’ curricula. Is there a downside to a child being schooled with different value sets in the classroom and the home? An upside?

3)     As with the exiting Mennonites in 1) above, the 2023 backlash against gender issues as part of public education is bound to evoke comparisons to the force-feeding of values to captive children. The “revolt” of parents was completely predictable in the case of the Mennonites as it is with parents in Saskatchewan today who deem a conservative, home-based approach to sex/gender values to be “right,” considering the sensitivity of the subject.

4)     It seems overstated to assert that “the state” has the right to determine what education its citizens must have in the interest of maintaining a peaceful and prosperous democratic nation. By the same token, it seems simplistic to assert that parents alone have that right, given that children very quickly become independent adults with the necessity of functioning in society as opposed to in family or in school. In a democracy like Canada, a citizens’ education would likely be developed if it didn’t already exist, while at the same time, our multi-cultural, multi-faith society demands a more liberal approach to education content than that of the Government of Saskatchewan in the 1910s and ‘20s.

5)     For a percentage of parents to demand and be granted as a right the addition or subtraction of material from a provincial curriculum automatically usurps the equal right of dissenting parents, and vice versa. Can disagreement on what’s allowable in public education and what isn’t succeed if settled by a zero-sum combat?[ii]

6)     As a teacher, I was trained on what rights and responsibilities I had and didn’t have over and for students in my classroom. I had a right to protect the integrity of the learning environment by evicting a disruptive student, for instance, but not to administer corporal punishment. As a teacher, touching a student, even supportively, would put me in danger of violating a student’s rights. If I observed that a student coming to school appeared to have been physically abused, it was my solemn duty to report it—not to the parents—but to the police and/or social services. If a boy of twelve were to have asked me to use the “they” pronoun for them, but not to tell their parents, would that have been a dilemma for me that I as a classroom teacher didn’t deserve?

7)     Using rights as an argument in these situations is fraught with problems. Teachers, parents are not equally competent; most teachers nourish and educate, some occasionally neglect or abuse students and are struck off; most parents nourish and teach, some abuse and/or neglect their own. Whose rights matter here? Who needs the protection of rights? Would it be truer to the current conflict to speak of school responsibility and parent responsibility as relating to the children?

8)     Many Canadian parents entrust their children to organized sports programs. Some, of course, seek to influence how coaches make decisions affecting their child, castigating a hockey coach, for instance, for not giving their child more ice time. If we decided it’s one parent’s right to exercise some control at that level, then it would surely become ALL hockey-parents’ right. Would it then be possible for a coach to form and direct a team?

9)     Suppose a government were to decree that school curricula at the, say, Grade Six level, must include training in the use of firearms and the martial arts. How would Quakers, Doukhobors, Mennonites and other pacifist-bent groups respond, and how might that be comparable to protests over the gender studies curricula happening today?

10)  Historically, how have protests regarding public education content been resolved? Allowing children of non-Christian families to congregate in a separate area during opening exercises that included The Lord’s Prayer and Bible reading was one response. Eliminating sectarian religious activity in public education is the current approach. Neither response has met with universal approval, as you’d expect. Bill 137[iii] if passed will require that schools inform parents of the scheduling of sex/gender class instruction and that provision be made for children to be excused during those times if parents request it. Where will they be while excused, and what will they be doing and under whose supervision might well be the relevant question.

11)  I can imagine an eight-year-old pretending to be copycat trans-gendered as a way of fulfilling some need for acknowledgement, although it’s not easy given the negative response to gender difference generally in this country. And if an eight-year-old is struggling with a gender identification issue, how would a loving, nurturing parent not already know this before it manifested in school? Does gender dysphoria in children really only exist because the education system has promoted it? If it is, what would be the motive behind it? By what means would all educators have planned such a program and kept the planning secret?

12)  If a student asks for non-gender-specific pronouns in school, is it logical to assume that the school has groomed that student to a trans-gender self-appraisal? And if a teacher is faced with a request for secrecy vis-e-vis the parents, is it logical for that teacher to assume a relationship breakdown in the home? Is it more reasonable in such a situation to refer the student to professional counselling whose object would be to involve the parents with the student’s consent, as prescribed in Bill 137?

13)  Private indebtedness and public indebtedness are both serious issues in Canada. Imagine that the federal and provincial governments were to decree that much more intensive consumer education must be offered at every grade level. Imagine further that many schools would end music or art programs to free up resources for consumer education. How do we decide what is essential, what is “nice to have but not essential,” and what is unnecessary as part of public, citizenship education?

14)  Is it possible for public education to present a comprehensive social studies curriculum that excludes or restricts sexual/gender relationship matters?

15)  Is sexual interference against children enough of a problem in Canadian society to warrant teaching even the youngest to identify and defend against paedophilia, child pornography and related abuses of the young?  And is the environment of classroom and playground relevant to how any such teaching should occur? (See Pedophilia - Wikipedia for related information.)

16)  Education has become much more integrated, more confluent than formerly. Roughly, simply visualized, Industrial Arts and Arithmetic can be taught as less-separate subjects, and theoretically, “Industrial Arithmetic” could take on the aura of an entity which advances both disciplines simultaneously. Teaching “the whole child” is a common catch phrase. If parents sincerely and consistently seek to pass on values that may not be shared by the majority of citizens (recent immigrants, members of minority religions, for instance) does that mean that there are “parts of a child” public education has no business addressing? If so, what are they?

17)  It’s been nearly half a century now since public educators began searching for better ways to tailor teaching to individual learning strengths. Earlier on, education required every student to rise to an average standard … or “fail.” Individualized learning, however, can never reach its apex; that would be one teacher teaching a class of one student. (In this sense, a parent is an excellent choice as a teacher of that child, given the skill and perseverance of a parent in the nourishing arts.) Although class sizes have improved somewhat, and teacher-aides have been hired in some places, we still lack the resources to do our best for, particularly, special needs students whose special need isn’t physically obvious. Do we accept that gender dysphoria constitutes a special need in some children, affecting learning?[iv]

18)  School classrooms and playgrounds develop cultures that take the shape of their adult leadership, their facilities and the children themselves. Friendships form, cliques develop, prejudices spread like viruses, pecking orders are established, all under the umbrella of children’s need for acceptance in a culture over which they have little or no control. A microcosm of the world in which their adult stage must make its way; a practice run for maturity. Does a child who’s “gender different” stand a better chance of acceptance if all children on the playground are taught that gender identification differences exist and are “normal,” or are they better off if gender identification is not broached in primary and middle grades, and they attempt—and sometimes succeed—in hiding their difference? Are there home environments in which a child’s uniqueness is denied, such that some children seek it in places where it’s recognized … in school, for instance?

19)  Assuming “parental rights” are fundamental rights like freedom of conscience, freedom of religion or freedom of speech, would such a “parental right” include surgically removing the foreskin of baby males or the clitorises of baby females in obedience to a religious dictate? Would it mean that children are completely subject to their parents’ choice regarding vaccinations or medical treatments like blood transfusions? Is the application of corporal punishment to correct behaviour a part of “parental rights?” Could there be a conflict between parental rights and human rights applying to the child, and how and by whom would such rights conflicts be adjudicated?

20)  Much of a child’s life is legitimately regulated by parents: sports participation or not, family moves whether the child approves or not, bedtimes, table manners, music lessons, etc. Failure to raise a child to accept guidance and to live peacefully and cooperatively with others and, yes, to bend to authority and the rule of law, could surely be chalked up to parental neglect, school and community neglect, or both. How important is it that a child is being guided toward the same set of values by his/her/their teachers and parents? Are there forums for home/school values discussions?

21)  In ancient times, school curricula revolved around community faith and life, standardized content enabled by the fact that mono-culturalism made common views on values and life skills likely. In a diverse, multi-cultural, post-modern nation like Canada, values coinciding can’t be taken for granted. The strongest thread binding us together is our citizenship; our common celebrations relate to nationalism, not to religious or cultural observances. If correct, what does this say about the process of determining educational content?

22)  Suppose that you, a parent of an eight-year-old, see in your child’s homework an emphasis on saving money that in your eyes communicates a message of which you disapprove. You would rather see generosity given at least equal time with wealth accumulation. How would you proceed in the best interest of your child’s well being? Is it possible to supplement the school’s curriculum with your values regarding money in such a way that the child benefits from the combination? or do you protest to the teacher? or is it more important that you as a parent begin to teach your child that life is about competing visions, and in your family, this or that value is king?

23)  Do we know who wrote the Grade Five curriculum on sex and gender? Do we know how it was vetted and approved? Are we willing to find out before reaching a judgment about whether it’s conceived and delivered appropriately? Are we prepared to go beyond “all or none” to possible tweaks of whatever previous work on the subject has produced?

I’ve tried with this to generate at least some public thought about the current division shaping up regarding sex/gender education in the public school system. We live in a world where increasing hard-line division has become a real concern, and the fact that public, aggressive demonstrations for and against proposed legislation on the subject threatens to increase the sense of “them vs. us” in an era that can ill afford further hardening of opposing positions.

A liberal vs. conservative worldview has always existed and always will. Saskatchewan citizens have alternately elected more-conservative and more-social-democratic governments, and this pattern has served us well. It’s when we become convinced that it ought to be one or the other, fulltime, that we begin to see the other as a cohort that must be defeated, and our elections become zero-sum games.

We can’t afford that in education. Our resources can’t possibly stretch to accommodate the myriad points of view and diverse value sets represented in the broad range of political, social and faith persuasions. In my opinion, opening up every detail of public education curricula to close scrutiny would end up making us all conflicted and angry: should there be music or no, and if so, what kind of music, and at what grade levels? A dozen in conversation around a table, a dozen opinions. Every choice a compromise … or heated separation. More STEM education, less social studies? The other way ‘round? A dozen in conversation around a table, six of one opinion and half-a-dozen of the other. Somehow, we must engage in a conversation across worldviews about how educational content will be developed and how disagreements will be arbitrated … and honour whatever decision we’ve arrived at.

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[i] Friesen, Leonard G. Mennonites in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022, p. 261

[ii] Zero-sum is a term used to describe sports games particularly. In simple terms, it means that there must be a loser for there to be a winner. A conflict or game without a loser would be a win-win conclusion; in this case, it’s hard to imagine such an outcome without dividing children into the “gender education” and “non-gender education” groups, possible now via separate schools or home schooling. Dividing a single playground population has its own effects (see #17), a reminder that “win-win” can turn out to be “lose-lose.”

[iii] "The Parents' Bill of Rights outlines a number of different rights that parents have regarding their children's education, including:

• act as the primary decision-maker with respect to the pupil's education;

• be informed on a regular basis of the pupil's attendance, behaviour and academic achievement in school;

• consult with the pupil's teachers and other employees of the school with respect to the pupil's courses of study and academic achievement;

• have access to the pupil's school file;

• receive information respecting the courses of study available to the pupil, including online learning, and to make decisions as to which courses of study the pupil enrolls in;

• be informed of the code of conduct and administrative policies, including discipline and behaviour management policies, of the school;

• be informed of any disciplinary action or investigation taken by the school in relation to the pupil's conduct;

• if the pupil has been expelled from school, request a review and reconsideration of the expulsion after the expiration of one year;

• be informed and consulted in relation to the pupil's school attendance problems;

• be consulted in or request a review in relation to the pupil's capacity to learn;

• excuse the pupil from participating in the opening exercises;

• be consulted before any medical or dental examination or treatment is provided to the pupil;

*********

• if sexual health content is to be presented to pupils in the school:

o at least two weeks before the sexual health content is presented to the pupils, be informed by the principal of:

§ the subject matter of the sexual health content;

§ the dates on which the sexual health content is to be presented to the pupils; and

§ if the parent or guardian so chooses, withdraw the pupil from the presentation of the sexual health content by giving written notice to the principal;

• if the pupil is under 16 years of age, provide consent before the pupil's teachers and other employees of the school use the pupil's new gender-related preferred name or gender identity at school; and

• be a member of the school community council or the conseil d'école, as the case may be, of the school.

[iv] “Dysphoria is a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction. It is the semantic opposite of euphoria. In a psychiatric context, dysphoria may accompany depression, anxiety, or agitation...” (Wikipedia definition)

Meeowww

Like this sign, we tend to see the world in yes-no categories. Why not "Please avoid trespassing unless you have a very good reason." Of course, that would take a bigger sign!

The conversation was about “furries,” kids who identify as animals and the schools who allegedly allow them to carry this identity into the classroom, the playground and the washroom, even to the point of providing litter boxes so cat-identifying kids can pee like cats.

Way back in the 1950s, I identified as both the Lone Ranger and his horse, galloped across the pasture with my bent-stick six-shooter under my belt, drew my horse to a rampant stop in an imaginary cloud of dust and shot the eyes out of an evil bandit before he could say, “Mennonite non-violence.” On other days, I identified as an engineer, damming up rain runoff in the yard, creating new rivers and lakes. Built bridges. Later, I’d pick up the family guitar and identify as a country singer like, well, take your pick.

My school never provided my horse-me with a stall and a manger of hay.

Identifying as something you want to be or wish you were, is a general phenomenon. Some men dress up as women, use makeup in the way glamorous women do. Some women dress in a way that projects an anti-effeminate, physically active identity. Performers preen images, politicians are only fluent when they have teleprompting, courting adults “put on the Ritz.” Hiding our shortcomings while projecting an image is commonplace.

In children, pretending, mimicking, identifying-with are learning tools. The object of “furries” identification, of course, can be disconcerting if it’s relentless and goes on and on. And granted, kids could certainly mimic behaviour to the point where it appears to spread like a virus. Schools had to ban “fidget gadgets,” after all.

People have been saying, “she/he/they thinks she/he/they is a cat, or dog, or boa constrictor.” Well, no. The only way you can see yourself in a mirror and register “body of a cat” is if you’re hallucinating, and hallucinating is symptomatic of brain trauma and cause for medical intervention. It’s far more likely that an ongoing cat-identification has to do with mimicking cat behaviour and demeanour, and that lying, walking and even “speaking” like a cat fulfills a social/mental need. Cats project calm; the world is stressful, possibly.

But that brings us to the charge that educators are accepting, even encouraging, such behaviour. I’ve read numerous credible reports refuting every one of the “litter boxes in the washrooms” stories. Given the nature of the children I’ve known, being caught by your peers sitting on a litter box in a washroom, even using an especially designated litter-room for cat-identifiers, would render every other part of school life a living hell for that individual.

As closely as I can gather from my reading, the “litter boxes in schools” propaganda dovetails with the abundant doubts being expressed about our educators, particularly via social media. Schools tend to be progressive, in part because their clientele live at the very frontier of whatever changes post-modernity is bringing to humanity. Your local principal and school staff have all had years of training bent toward educating children to live successfully in the world as it is and likely will be, not in a world seen through rose-coloured nostalgia. Keeping balance on a moving train rather than gluing yourself to the platform is an appropriate analogy.  

Reaction to change is always a given, and conspiracy theories serve nicely as tools for attacking progressivism in, in this case, education. The essence of the propaganda is this: homosexuality, transgenderism, “furries” identification, are products of the education system, which is therefor not to be trusted on any level. Misinformation can be bad, but the end goal here is to return education to the imagined past, and that’s important enough to make “the end justify the means.”

Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has stated that “schools should leave LGBTQ issues to parents.” This “simple question, simple answer” solution couldn’t be more naïve in its conception. The “LGBTQ issues” march through schools, churches, workplaces, politics as surely as through homes, and if gays are being bullied, for instance, it’s possibly not in the home but in the school where it will become immediate and urgent. For a school to ignore discussion of human rights—of which gay rights are one item—avoiding both the social and the biological science surrounding gender/sex subjects would be a blatant derogation of duty.

It's hardly surprising that in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, sitting governments feel compelled to take sides in questions of what should and what shouldn’t be addressed in the public school system. Among Christians, the creation allegory has Adam and Eve noticing that they are naked, right after sinning against God. In my growing-up generation, sexuality vs. biology was resolved through denial, voluminous covering of the female body, a cloak of silence and euphemism, and a tacit agreement to live in the pretense of sexualities non-existence.

That’s what all this is about; a fear that liberalizing the discussion to include frank education on sexuality and gender will—poetically put—result in our looking down at last and discovering that we’re naked, or even deciding, “Wow. Is that how it’s done? Looks like fun! Let’s do it.” This conservative push toward silencing liberalization in the area of sexuality and gender is strident and persistent … and the attempted repetition of a huge mistake.   

Parents have every right and responsibility to be guiding, nurturing influences in the development of their children. Teachers are charged with preparing them for the responsibilities, rights and privileges of citizenship, and for providing them with the tools to allow them to succeed as independent adults. The roles obviously overlap in many ways, and in an ideal world, differences in philosophy or practice would lead us to negotiate, not to demands for the resolving of differences through government decree.

Therein lies the biggest challenge I see. First order, of course, is to consult with, read reliable sources so that we know sex/gender, pedagogical subjects before firing off, or re-posting, half-baked opinions on social media.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring[i]:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again. (Pope, Alexander, in An Essay on Criticism, 1709.)

 

 

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[i] The source of knowledge

 

Tell me a Story

Premier Scott Moe was asked by a reporter about the evidence on which the decision to require—by law—that teachers must inform parents of any student’s expressed wish to be addressed with gender free pronouns. The new directives also legislate that any parent will have the right to withdraw their child from a sex education program if they deem it inappropriate, plus a few other provisions claimed to be "parents' rights" supportive. 

His response[i] to the reporter cited a survey of some 3000+ people, the majority of whom agreed that any student’s request to have a name change or to be addressed with gender-neutral pronouns in school should be reported to the child’s parents.

It’s easy to word a question that will elicit a positive response in favour of parental rights regarding children. Of course, the people who manage the household in which a child spends most of his time are justified in claiming greater authority over that child than does a neighbour. Not the government nor his teacher can set a bedtime for my boy.

There are a number of factors that make of the premier’s defense of the policy a naïve and hopelessly incomplete. Some that come to mind include:

First: in in loco-parentis law (local parent), the adult in legitimate supervision of that child has the responsibility of a parent, and by the same token, the biological or adoptive parent cannot maintain parental supervision while his/her/their child is in a classroom or on the school playground. Are we clear about what that means in this case? As it stands, a teacher's relationship to a student's parent is not like that parent's relationship to, say, a babysitter. 

Second: “Parent,” as used in the survey for instance, conjures good, responsible, thoughtful, informed mother and father who live together and plan and cooperate in the teaching and mentoring of their children. Parents out of Dick and Jane readers, sort of. Meanwhile, every teacher knows that some minority in their class are coming to them from dysfunctional homes. It requires four years of pedagogical training including internships and regular evaluations in order to become qualified for the in loco parentis role. Heated copulation in the back of a Nash Rambler is all that’s required to make of yourself a “parent.”

Third: Is “parental rights” the appropriate term for what we’re talking about? In general, human rights are our way of defending the basic well-being of individuals, not of classes of people. If a child is badly injured and doctors determine he/she/they require a blood transfusion to survive, would an ability of the parent to overrule the doctors—in obedience to a religious tenet, say—be a legitimate right? Or is it the child’s human right to life that is in question? Likewise, if a teacher senses a danger to a child if the child is outed to the parent(s), would that be like the doctors following the parents’ wishes in the blood transfusion case if the teacher is forced to inform? Do human rights of the individual extend to, say, a ten-year-old child who has already decided that coming out to parents will bring him/her/them harm?

Fourth: Saskatchewan once had a premier whose grasp of issues went well beyond political or religious calculations. Tommy Douglas would say things like,[ii] “We are all in this world together, and the only test of our character that matters is how we look after the least fortunate among us. How we look after each other, not how we look after ourselves. That’s all that really matters, I think.” There’s no arguing that people with same-sex orientation or gender dysphoria’s manifestations form a minority in Canadian culture. Do their unchosen natures fit them into Douglas’ “least fortunate among us” category? If so, is Moe’s new legislation an attempt to “look after” their well-being? Or is it another too-hasty reaction of turning the dilemma of being born different into a simple question-simple answer, solution?  

Five: Is there any part of pitting teachers and parents against each other that can be logically justified? If a teacher is attacked verbally, pejoratively and a school is ordered by a parent to otherwise engage their child when a provincially authorized sex education curriculum is being taught, what outcome should we expect for the well-being of the child, either in school or at home? Isn’t the sex education curriculum already carefully tailored to match the students’ developmental ages? Is parent education on these curricula lacking? Are there better ways of doing Home and School?

Six: The legislation curtails schools’ utilization of outside resources in sex education instruction. Are we remembering that this all started in Saskatchewan with a Planned Parenthood presentation to a school class in Lumsden whose participation there wasn’t criticized, except for having left behind a brochure that a parent found offensive because of its explicit illustrations? “Is the decree proportional to the problem?” I ask myself. And myself answers, “No, it’s not. It’s too much like banning all people under the age of twenty-five from owning Pitbulls because one twenty-two-year-old in Melville had such a dog that bit his neighbour twice.”

Finally, opinion surveys are not research; for one, responses are far too subject to the phrasing of the question. Also, we know full well that, “the majority think so” doesn’t necessarily make an assertion wise, true, or even practical, although it can help a political party plan its election strategy. Lastly, a society that heeds Tommy Douglas’ statement on what matters, and is therefor proactive in defending the rights of minorities, by this same impulse can’t help but be a defender of every child: yours, mine, the neighbours’. Sexual behaviour affects everyone; education to help all of us get it right is key; surely the timing and content can be arrived at in better ways than through arbitrary and hasty legislation.

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[i] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-poll-policy-1.6949760

[ii] https://www.azquotes.com/author/4101-Tommy_Douglas

Teach the Children Well ... or else.

 

David - Michelangelo

This morning’s (April 1, 2023) Global News app is reporting the resignation of the UCP’s election candidate in Lethbridge West, Alberta. Apparently, the United Conservative Party determined a video she posted online—including a claim that teachers were showing pornography to their students and influencing them toward gender ambiguity—was harmful to their party’s chances in the next election. She is said to have resigned her candidacy without apologizing for the unsubstantiated claims in the video. 

I recall another story of a principal, I think, who was fired over a question of whether one of his teachers should be disciplined for showing a picture of the full-frontally-nude David statue by Michelangelo.

Both stories lack a great deal of what’s called context, but that won’t prevent us from dividing into camps on the subject matter, which is typical of the great culture wars plaguing our politics these days. For one, the telling evidence of what lesson plan included the displaying of the David photo, or what pornographic imagery and teaching happened in which classroom and by which teachers, none of that seems necessary enough to be entered into the question which could—and here’s an important consideration—be real concerns. 

Teachers (not unlike police, businesspersons, doctors, airline pilots, etc., etc.) are drawn from a diverse population and sooner or later, a pedophile, a misogynist, a sociopath or a poorly- informed-and-so-incompetent practitioner will creep into the mix of the profession. At the same time, the child-guiding prerogatives of biological parents versus schools and teachers provides a greenhouse for the growing of conflict: it always has. 

Good public schools educate for citizenship in the country in which they exist; they teach about ideologies but don’t indoctrinate their students in any but the one under which teachers, students and administrators are governed at the time. 

Based on the content of a single news story, do I have the right to an opinion on its meaning, let alone to repeat my interpretation online or to people I meet? If I spread a biased interpretation of an event, a person or an idea, am I doing the same thing as the people who fired that principal, or who made a video about teachers teaching pornography and gender fluidity? Rushing to judgment, that is, while either neglecting or discarding context?

What would have happened if the UCP candidate for Lethbridge West had gone to the local school principal and said, “I have a concern about how sexuality and gender are being taught in this school. Can we talk about that?” What if she’d done that before making the accusatory video, and if the principal had called the involved teachers to a meeting with this person to explain their curriculum choices on gender-related subjects, thereby giving both positions a context?

Agnes and I were in Belfast for a few days during the “troubles” period in the 1980s. Our MCC colleague there told us that the teenaged boys particularly were addicted to conflict. If a week should go by with no smashing, burning, fighting, etc., they would invariably fill the gap with some act of violence; the previous week, a group of them had tossed a transit driver out of his bus, driven the bus out to an open area and set it on fire. 

Addiction to conflict can be as real as a dependence on cocaine.

There’s much in our era in the West urging us toward a combat of wills, undoubtedly fed by a tendency to seek out incidents—unsupported by evidence, if need be—that act as bullets in the culture war: woke against not-woke and vice versa, for instance.

I have acres of sympathy for the people whom we’ve mandated to educate our children in such a time. I imagine myself a music teacher in a smalltown elementary school. A faction of the population listens to classical music and considers country music beneath them. Another group maintains that this is a country-music kind of town, and the music curriculum should reflect that in its choices. Most parents are indifferent to either faction.

As the music teacher, I’ve felt the pressure both ways, and having my own tastes and my unique training and history, I can’t for the life of me think of a way to satisfy both sides. Banjos or flutes? Violins or guitars? Surely teaching kids to understand and appreciate music doesn’t boil down to this kind of choice, does it?

The principal calls me into his office and relays the concerns—primarily those expressed by the loudest faction—and proposes some 50/50 arran…

… but I’ve stopped listening, daydreaming about how I might live a relaxed life by giving private instrument lessons and playing in the city orchestra….

“... what do you think?” he says.

“I think I quit,” I reply.

And I do.

 

Our grandkids will p*ss on our graves.

A PARABLE:  An elementary school initiated a new way of evaluating student progress after observing that the individual students’ grades were being compared, that students with low grades were being taunted, and parents were pressing for medal awards to students with the highest marks. Teachers were beginning to recognize that a negative atmosphere was permeating the school after testing times as a consequence.

               The plan they came up with was to put the focus on group—rather than individual—achievement. They switched to numbered scores on tests, then added all the scores and gave the school a total score made up of all the student’s numbers. What was hyped via a huge banner in the hallway after testing times was this total score and whether and by how much it exceeded the earlier testing-time’s score. Every student’s grades contributed to a win for the student body.

               It didn’t work. Grade fours figured out very soon who contributed how much and the staff realized quickly that the achievers wanted desperately to be recognized as winners, expected their moment of glory.  Despite knowing what penalty the achievement-handicapped students had to bear so that the achievers and their parents could win gold, the staff sought other ways to reduce the zero-sum mindset these children were bringing to school with them. (Zero-sum simply means that every win must be accompanied by a loss. For instance in hockey, a win is recorded as a +1, a loss as a -1, the two added together equal zero.)

                The winner-loser mentality is endemic to most cultures, possibly at its most pronounced in Western societies. Not only sports but politics, economics, justice systems, even education are deeply affected by the win/lose mentality. Political parties shamelessly campaign to win; success in commerce is measured by profit/loss numbers with little said about a business’ community contribution. You’d think restorative justice would be embraced as a common-sense approach, but no, courts must produce winners and losers.

               A final exam in my Teachers’ College year had only two questions. I aced the one but couldn’t for the life of me get the other one, which asked me to do a basic Arithmetic operation like 2,855/75 in the decimal (base 10 numeration system) and in the binary (base 2 numeration) number systems. My mark, of course, was 50%. I’m pretty sure that the binary system (which, by the way, is the numeration system of computing) was never taught to me because my elementary and high school math teachers also got 50% on basic numeration, probably, and they couldn’t do that puzzling problem because their teachers in turn hadn’t fundamentally got it. Whether it’s numeration, or zero-sum thinking or the pros and cons of the parliamentary system of democracy, we pass our knowledge, our ignorance, and our misconceptions and biases down, generation to generation.

               I visualize here the proverbial “hockey-mom,” screaming at the coach to put her boy on the ice, screaming at the referee for putting him in the penalty box, screaming at her son later for taking a stupid penalty that cost them the game. Character building sport? Granted, this description is stark and unfairly misrepresentative of much of the hockey world, but like the teachers trying to help large classes of differently endowed students to become the best they can be, zero-sum thinking starting in the cradle isn’t helpful … not by a long shot.  

               There’s an argument of support for winning/losing in sports, in politics, even in musicianship. Zero-sum competition encourages us to become the best we can be, it says. We need to talk about that: moms and dads don’t become the best parents a child could have by competing with the neighbours; teachers don’t become the best teachers through popularity contests. Furthermore, what application follows from being the one in the whole world who can throw a discuss farthest? And let’s be honest; it’s not about fitness either, which can be had without cutthroat competition. 

            What it is about is the repeated gratification of our “zero-sum addiction.”  We satisfy our lust for zero-sum stimulation by watching winners humiliate losers in sports, mainly, but also in music competitions, elections, wealth accumulation, etc. “Take that, you deadbeats!” Movies that feature good guys annihilating bad guys are way more popular than those which climax with a reconciliation.

               There are those whose primary leisure occupation is watching sports on a big screen TV. Better that then drinking to excess in a bar that features the humiliation of women by paying them to remove their clothing, I suppose, but we ought to remember at least these two things:

·       Professional sports, the corporation-driven fleecing of fans hooked on zero-sum spectacles, is not sport, it’s commerce. A professional hockey player I won’t name earned almost exactly as much as I did in my entire 25-year career as a teacher … in one month! And when he was offered more, he moved to a rival team and left his fans crying.

·       Every Saturday night, a father of elementary school-aged boys gathers with some work friends on the rec room couch to watch Hockey Night in Canada, drink beer and eat pizza. Depending on the nature of their actions and conversation, the boys will absorb their dad’s attitude toward televised “sports.” Perhaps they will come to believe that zero-sum competition is where it’s at, bring it to school, and perhaps they’ll feel luckiest as adults when whole weekends are made up of beer, pizza and wall to wall hockey, curling, basketball and football … watching, that is, not playing.

THIS MATTERS: The future we’re facing demands that we continue educating ourselves from reliable sources; it takes time and effort to be a lifelong learner. We also need to be participants; doers more than watchers. We’ve got to put more effort into reducing our demands on the environment, curb our appetites for owning the best, the most, the “funnest” gadget on the market. We won’t save the planet for our grandchildren by frittering away our time with beer, pizza and the zero-sum crap all around us. Above all, we’ve got to stop making excuses for our indifference to events “out there.” For future generations, the historic imagery of baby boomers shuffling around the house in pyjamas because “we were just so busy, busy and so we were so tired, exhausted even.”

We’re not tired, our aimlessness and the world we’ve allowed to develop in our indolence has left us guilty, stressed, anxious and feeling tired, and we’re apparently not smart enough to know that more indolence is not the cure for what ails us.

              Our grandchildren will p*ss on our graves when the full force of our self-indulgent lethargy becomes apparent, when their world burns, then floods, then refuses to produce food, and half the planet’s surviving people are refugees. The history books they study will tell them that even when it came to rescuing and restoring the planet, our generation saw the dialogue as yet another zero-sum game. Why not? Perhaps the fossil fuel people won and went jubilantly into their dotage with their pockets full of money. Those environmentalists are such losers! +1 + -1 = 0

              “Ah, well. Forget all that. The Olympics are on. Canada’s probably gonna win a gold medal in the pool today.”

              “What?? Canada swims??”

 

There's Education, and then there's Education

RJC Class of 2014

I've spent much of this morning link-hopping. Probably wasted time, but it is informative to know which organizations see themselves as compatible enough to post links to one another. And so I began with my church facebook page which led to the Global Family Foundation page which contained a post pointing to an article called "A missional approach to education" which caught my eye because I'm a teacher and a supporter of Rosthern Junior College. The article I ended up reading is from an online magazine called World: Real Matters, and you'll find the article here.

                At that point, I began to read through the other articles in World: Real Matters and discovered that it’s stridently advocating for stances we've come to associate with "the Christian right:" pro-life, anti-gay, etc., much of it pretty vitriolic. An article called "The Most Deviant Frontier" attempts to make the case that pedophilia as a legitimate orientation will follow right on the heels of equal rights for LGBTQ. Another article calls those supporting women's right to choose legislation the "abortion cartel."

                Let me say up front that I don't want to imply that the posting of links inevitably puts all the organizations or people doing so in the same basket. Quite obviously, my church membership is highly unlikely—for the most part—to be sympathetic to the stances of World: Real Matters. At most, I would repeat the standard caution about posting anything on Facebook: when in doubt, leave it OUT.

                But my interest in the sequence of the morning's reading is primarily on the subject of education. We have supported Global Family Foundation individually; its focus on schools and educational development in poor areas of Paraguay overlaps with my church's connectedness with that country. My church has and continues to be highly supportive of Rosthern Junior College and Canadian Mennonite University, both parochial schools where the Christian viewpoint on course offerings is unapologetically advertised.

                Question is: when does the provision of an educational opportunity cease to be primarily "educational" and become "missional" in its objectives and methods? And a corollary: what do we mean when we see our schools and teaching as "missional," and does it make a difference whether the children benefitting are poor, are young and impressionable or mature enough to be capable of meaningful decision making? Is there a point at which education becomes a gift—like a shoebox full of toys—whose primary purpose is to win souls and if so, what would be wrong with that?

                We're living in a time of increasing diversity of thought, increasing mixing of cultures and liberalization of laws once thought to be immutable. Not surprising, then, that we should find ourselves at sea for a time on the question of religious freedom vs. secular law. Trinity Western University is a college that compels students to refrain from sex outside of marriage AND is seeking to establish a law school that would ostensibly graduate lawyers licensed to practice in general society. Various professional organizations have wrestled with this and have come out against credentialing lawyers with an a priori religious slant; World: Real Matters and many others argue that it's a freedom of religion issue.

                What does the future hold for religion-based education, one is compelled to ask.

                It's a new year and with it comes a time when we add up our incomes, expenses, donations, etc. in preparation for tax time. What we support and what we forego makes a difference. Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Disaster Service, Global Family Foundation, Caritas, World Vision, Feed the Children, etc., etc. are all "charitable organizations," meaning that donations to them reduce the tax collected by our governments. In effect, these organizations are therefore spending public money to do their work. What all this means is that donors should be completely clear on the objectives and methods of the charitable organizations they support.

                Canada Revenue Agency is scrutinizing charities to determine whether or not their activities are too political to merit charitable status; our obligation is to be sure that their goals are ethical.

                For believers—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhists, Hindu, Native Spirituality adherents, etc—learning what it means to be salt and light to the world as we understand it is a task we neglect at everyone's peril. Parochial schools have legacies of quality education on the one hand . . . and Indian Residential Schools on the other.

                How we do education, how we see our role individually and collectively is critical.

               

 

Go, student demonstrators, go!

School room display - Mennonite Heritage Museum

My dad's High School class (Row 2, Number 1) 1916

There were those perched in the branches of my ancestral tree who were suspicious of education, at least in the go-to-school-for-a-long-time, get-good-grades, achieve-a-certificate-or-degree sense. The thinking was that the more you knew, the more you would “lean unto your own understanding;” the less you would depend on the Word of God for guidance. Of course, opportunity and wherewithal also played into how much my forefathers and foremothers valued academia . . . or didn’t.

Jacob D. Epp - Teacher, farmer (1820 - 1890)

George Epp - teacher, non-farmer (1941 - ?)

               What knowledge and skill does the average North American need today? Well, for survival, probably not much. For meaningful employment, quite a bit. For contributing creatively? Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?

               By the time I got to make choices between finishing high school or not, getting a post-secondary education or not (this was around 1960), the scales in my culture were tipping in favour of formal education, even for those going into church-related careers. The state had been pushing mandatory, universal education through compulsory attendance in a public school system for some time by then, so basic literacy was a given except for the developmentally challenged. But in a primarily agricultural context, the assumption that Grade 8 was enough for most practical purposes persisted; the pressure for more was half-hearted where I lived.

               Historians and anthropologists could tell us how the nature and content of education has evolved but it’s clear to me that both the said nature and content ought to change in step with the transformations in the world in which we live. Simply put, the maintenance and repair of ox carts might be learned in one day; competence in the repair and maintenance of the cars of 2012 demand a lengthy apprenticeship and numerous courses, for instance.

               At one time, Grade 8 was deemed to suffice. Then a high school education became the desired bench mark. Both levels could be had free in a public school with qualified teachers.

But a high school education doesn’t meet the needs of modern society; the complexities that are faced on a daily basis simply aren’t comprehended by a large portion of the population. We need to take the obvious next evolutionary step: the first four years of post-secondary education should be provided in the same manner as high school once was. That is, totally subsidized by the state.

Quebec, we’re told, has the lowest university tuition rates in the country. The Charest government is planning to raise these fees to “a more realistic” level and the resulting student demonstrations are dragging on into their twelfth week. What position should the public take on this? I’m firmly on the side of the students (although entirely out of sympathy for the hooligans for whom any demonstration is an opportunity for creating mayhem). The demonstrators are at the leading edge of a much-needed next step in the evolution of our education system. The bench-mark is relocating upward; free post-secondary education needs to become as commonplace as free high school.

It can’t come soon enough. Be brave, students! Carry on!

And while I’m at it, another observation: education has two parts; one is the preparation for employment, the mastering of skills that can be sold to an employer or applied entrepreneurially; the second is the development of wisdom and understanding sufficient to being a good neighbour, a good parent and a contributing citizen. Public education has swung too much toward the career-training part of the equation; the balance needs reconsideration.

I’d propose, for example, that Logic and Rhetoric be reintroduced as basic components of high school education and continued in all post-secondary programs. A Grade 12 student I talked with a few nights ago was exhibiting a picture of a Kalashnikov he’d manufactured on his computer. Since it was done in a Peace and Justice unit of a Christian Ethics course in a Mennonite school, I asked him if the course had done anything to make him reconsider his stated intention of joining the military after graduation. His reply—haltingly expressed—was that he could further peace from within the military!

The prosecution rests.