The academic performance of Canada’s high schools came in for another round of criticism last week when it was disclosed that the University of Ottawa had hired two statisticians to check first-year registration applicants and discover, among other things, whether they can write a sentence in the English or French language, or for that matter in any language.
The statisticians, by examining entrance test results, hoped to catch those who can’t, and direct them into special courses intended to provide what 12 years of high-cost public school training did not provide.
The problem is certainly not confined to the University of Ottawa, nor to Canada. It’s chronic, I’m told, throughout the United States as well.
Students can put a chain of words on paper, but whether they represent what the old grammar teachers called “a complete thought” is beyond their comprehension. Indeed, the very notion of “thought,” whether complete or otherwise, is something they have never before encountered.
“I have seen students present high-school English grades in the ’90s, who have not passed our simple English test,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the University of Waterloo (Ontario) English language proficiency program. “I don’t know why.”
There lies the difficulty, of course. Nobody seems to know why. Various possible culprits are identified – grade inflation in the high schools, the fact that we’re becoming a “visual” rather than a “verbal” culture, high-school courses so overloaded with diversities there’s no time to teach the “basics.”
Like many aged journalists, I have been writing, editing and reading stories on the failure of the public schools to teach the “basics” for at least 30 years. It was about that long ago that the University of Alberta, following the example of numerous American colleges, began offering “remedial” courses to teach first-year students what the school system hadn’t. Vintage teachers tell me that over the years the situation has grown worse, not better.
Some of those teachers, however, have a very clear idea as to “why” – why, in particular, the problem never seems to be solved.
It goes back, they say, to the great educational revolution which in the last century transformed the North American school system. The changes introduced new assumptions about human nature, they say, and the problems arise because those assumptions are wrong.
They rest primarily on the dogma that there can exist no such thing as a “truth.” You have your belief; I have mine; he has his – but in the end all are mere subjective opinion. Nothing should be taught as really true, really good, really right, really wrong. There is no real anything. All that matters is the individual’s subjective feeling, and the purpose of education is to enable the child to “get in touch with his feelings.”
Above all, the child must be dissuaded from looking to “authority.” He must become his own authority. The teacher must no longer be an “authority figure,” but a guide to the child’s self-discovery. So the curriculum must change. History must be discarded because it offers and interprets “facts.” Since facts suggest the existence of a reality, history must become an adjunct of sociology, and be called “social studies.”
To the revolutionaries, grammar was particularly distasteful. It had always been taught, not primarily as an aid to composition, but as the introduction to logic, to the process of thought. In order to have “a complete thought,” you must have a subject and a predicate, an “action word.” Then you could make a sentence. Without both, you could not. To the new educator, such “rules” were an abomination – they positively encouraged the child to think structurally, to consult “the rules.” The very object of education was to abolish “rules.”
The great bastion that stood in their way was mathematics. Two plus two continued to equal four, no matter how heart-felt the feeling that it might equal something else. The attempt 20 or so years ago to introduce “new math” was intended to demonstrate that mere arithmetic was only one of many possible systems, thereby suppressing the concept of an inviolate “authority.” It didn’t work. One system was as much as most of us could handle.
In fact, the whole thing hasn’t worked. Whatever we may teach our children, within the confines of human experience realities do exist, and if we fail to impart them, we will not produce an idyllic new society, only chaos and destruction. But the “new” philosophy is deeply entrenched in almost every education faculty, and getting rid of it has so far proved impossible.
