by Eva van Loon Teaching systems inherited from Britain used to fulfill the expectations of most parents and allowed most children to succeed. The students failed by this system were often those not born into English, European or “Western” culture.
Today teachers try to tell us that this inherited system doesn’t work anymore, because children aren’t much like those of half a century ago.
The phenomenon of “special needs” has ballooned since the 1970s. Returning to the educational jungle in 2001 after a 20-year absence helped me realize how much has changed, not in the school system, but in school populations.
Many toddlers and young children are now cared for by non-parental adults in daycare, preschool and kindergarten, while their parents work. We have never examined how that difference may affect children’s early learning.
Taking first nations children out of their homes to accustom them to “Western civilization” by means of residential school was a sociological, cultural, multi-generational disaster. Yet we fail to notice or study any parallel with children farmed out in their tender years to foster care or non-parental care.
Before and during my childhood, many children came to school prepared for content learning at relatively homogeneous levels. The system appeared to work for the majority of children who mattered to so-called Western civilization. It could be argued that the politics of colonization failed to supply a real education to the colonized except for extremely determined individuals.
The school system has never realized that functional learning generally happens most effectively on a one-to-one basis, although content learning can happen with a homogeneous group of virtually any size (dependent on some other factors).
Children born into a non-English or non-European culture often come to the school system without a sense of how the 43-plus sounds of the English language appear in print. The tools of our school system—phonics, sight-say and even ESL—are of limited use in creating that sense.
Children do not have the feeling for how numbers relate to one another. Relying on calculators and computers, they fail to master functional math learning like arithmetic and thus higher math concepts entail struggle for them.
Many students are addicted to sugar in all its forms. They are not living healthy lives.
Many students are addicted to electronics use to the exclusion of face-to-face experience.
Exposure to TV and other screens, increasing since the 1960s, has impaired many people’s visual and auditory processing, now a multi-generational problem. Ubiquitous WiFi may also prove to be an insidious health problem, affecting everyone but most of all the developing brains of the young.
These are serious cracks in the educational pillars of a collapsing society. Teachers are telling us, “We can’t hold this edifice of learning up by ourselves any longer.” A school system modelled on the 19th century is not up to the vastly different 21st.
Why shouldn’t teachers talk about truly basic issues like funding one-on-one functional learning in an increasingly diverse community? About empowering parents to take part in early-childhood education? About rewarding seniors to add their valuable presence to schools? About ensuring that schools are physically healthy and safe environments? About ensuring that our children are fed healthy food? About ensuring each child’s access to the education he or she is entitled to?
Revolution? Nothing less is required to fit today’s youth for tomorrow’s world. Listen up, Christy Clark et al. Your teachers are speaking truth to power.
Powell River cognition therapist Eva van Loon focuses on remediating learning problems of children and adults.
