Time to Glare Disapprovingly at the Canadian High School System

Yet another addition to the nightmare scenario we call 'higher' education:

"Time to Shrink the University" by Heather Mallick
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/02/27/f-vp-mallick.html

The notion of raising fees to improve the quality of an university education seems so hopelessly backwards to me that I can't fathom anyone would honestly back the point... so I propose we step back to gain some objectivity, and recognize that the problem with education in Canada starts at least at the level of the high schools.

Time to Glare Disapprovingly at the High School System

This January, Dr. Anton Allahar and Dr. James Cote of UWO gave a regretfully under-attended talk at the University of Guelph regarding their 2007 book 'The Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis' where they discussed a number of factors that have come together to decrease the quality of education in Canada in the last 10 years.

Their overall thesis was that a combination of disengagement and entitlement have come to characterize undergraduate-level university students. They’re disengaged because they don’t want to be there. They're in university because they've been told that they're nobodies with no future if they don't come. They feel a sense of entitlement because the high school system doesn't have the heart to tell them what their abilities are (for example, in 2006 over 40% of Grade 12 graduates from Ontario High Schools were labeled 'Ontario Scholars' and rewarded for 'earning' 80% + GPAs. This does not represent the increased capabilities of contemporary high school graduates, it represents a system-wide dumbing-down of curriculum. In fact, I strongly suspect that the high school system doesn't even consistently teach kids what a thesis is anymore, as is astoundingly evident made evident by the majority of students I TA).

In any case, what you get is a university system laden with students who not only believe (a) that they're hot intellectual shit when they can barely tell the grammatical difference between homophones, and (b) that they deserve marks for the difficult feat of attending class, but they also expect profs to WOW them with material--and profs want to engage them, so they adjust! This is turning the enterprise into a 'lite' version of what it once was as it takes cues from MTV and turns education into 'edutainment'.

In any case, what is most troublesome about this phenomenon is that, rather than correcting the monstrosity they've begun to create, our high school system is forging full-force ahead. What was once a great national socializing tool that provided kids with the skills to operate in the world of business post-grad – not to mention a sense of shared ‘Canadianness’—has begun to cater to sloth. Kids don't have to hand anything in on time and they don't have to take notes or learn cursive... then they get to university and realize that the rules have changed. But many of them they don't take it like adults, because they have not been trained to be adults. Instead, they clog in-boxes and office hours with excuses and complaints, and only care about improving their work as far as it can contribute to a higher grade. Massive sigh.

How these major problems could possibly be improved through tuition hikes is beyond me. What it would lead to is a drop in university attendance, selecting students higher up in the SES chain for 'higher education'. Their quality of education might increase, but the joke here is that the quality of education that the masses will be left with, thanks to the quickly plummeting quality of their high school experience, will be so laughable that our country's economy will undoubtedly start sucking more figurative balls than it already does.

Heather Mallick's suggestion (see link) that university tuition fees should be eliminated altogether is interesting, but I'm not convinced it addresses the whole of the issue, which, to restate it, is that the quality of ALL education has decreased in recent years. Why should we continue to invest universities with the full responsibility of shaping kids into adults? Why can't we take hold of the horrible shape of our high school system as well, correcting it to emphasize a value on professionalism, giving kids a dose of the benefits AND consequences of the independence that increased age grants them, rather than letting them run the show? Why can't we do that in high school anymore? Or is it because the vast majority of newly graduated high school teachers who are holding the torch for the future are themselves not equipped to teach what kids need to know by the time they graduate high school? Has it gotten that bad?

A great piece of advice that I was given a long time ago went something like this: surround yourself with people you admire, and you'll work to improve to their level, but surround yourself with people who admire you, and you'll sink below your capabilities. We need teachers who can show kids WHAT to admire, and a system that is built on professional mentoring rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator for the sake of feelings, so as not to rob anyone of their 'right' to feel 'special'. Yeah yeah, they're all beautiful snowflakes.

The point is, once egos get left at the door then maybe our education system will regain its capacity to positively influence the lives of students, teachers and the nation.... and allow professors to keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge by attending conferences and editing 'obscure journals', regardless of the specialized nature of their field.

If we expect professors to stop inquiring in order to bring their students up to speed on things they should have learned in high school, such as sentence structure, grammar, spelling, punctuality and attendance, then they won't have time to produce any of the material that 'higher learning' used to refer to. We will have lost sight of what the entire enterprise of ‘The University’ was intended to do in the first place.