From: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian)
Subject: Re: Re: EDUCATION, MONEY, AND THE FACTS OF LIFE
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1992 18:16:32 GMT

Herman Rubin asks:

I ask Mr. Killian how many schools are there in which parents have a choice
of 3, or even 2, flavors of learning mathematics?  There are high schools
in which what used to be the standard college-preparatory mathematics can
not even be found for the best students.  No, there is nothing adequate to
replace it.  In most school systems, there is lock-step at least below the
junior high school level.  And the lock-step is well below what the average
child can do.

I would not blame it all on the school boards, however.  Too much of this is
state mandated.  The school boards have little authority to fire actually
incompetent teachers.

Here in British Columbia we are (rather hesitantly) implementing a new system
called (rather unimaginatively) Year 2000. While it might not supply several
flavors of math learning, it definitely rejects the lockstep approach.
Students are expected to move at their own pace through the material,
starting in primary. Those who move faster will always find material that
challenges them--if necessary, college-level courses delivered by computer
from college and university faculty. (This is in early stages of preparation,
but the provincial government is eager to see it happen if only to reduce the
murderous crush on our post-secondary facilities.)

When Herman refers to "state-mandated" problems, I think he's tacitly
accepting my argument about 39 flavors--because the state mandates what the
voters demand.

A certain cultural lag is also at work here. Schools' function was for a long
time to identify a small number of academically apt people who could take on
the relatively small number of information-based jobs in an economy based
primarily on resource extraction and assembly-line manufacturing. As that
economy evolves into one in which information is itself both raw resource and
finished product, we can no longer consign our failures to the mines and
mills; somehow we have to find a way to train a very large number of students
for information-based jobs. The students suffer cultural lag also: they don't
yet always see the need for the skills such jobs require, and dismiss those
jobs as fit only for "computer nerds." This tedious anti-intellectualism
doesn't help matters.

While I think the schools (at least in Canada) are doing a reasonable job
under difficult circumstances, I have to concur with Herman and other critics
about the slowness of change when a teacher turns out to be manifestly
incompetent. My own daughter, now in grade 12, is having to drop her history
course and to take it by correspondence because the teacher is seriously
illiterate, spends class time putting overhead projections on the screen
while students copy the material into their notebooks, discusses nothing, and
asks for virtually no essay answers. He also brags that his students do very
well on the standardized provincial exams. A history professor I know, seeing
an example of this teacher's handouts, said it at least explained why his
lower-division students care only about dates and names.

Although I'm a former school trustee in this district, and pretty well-known
thanks to my education column, I haven't had much satisfaction in the
resolution of this problem. Yet.

--
Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
Internet: ckilian@first.etc.bc.ca