Celebrating the UN World Children’s Day and
the grassroots Youth Rights Day

Saturday, November 20th from 9 – 11am EST
Registered here: https://fb.me/e/4BPRJlz7T

Here is a perfect way for young and old who care about children and youth to show their support for young people and to raise awareness of learning environments that respect human rights.

Plan to attend this activity. This activity is provided free, online by Wondering School. By coming together on this special day we can signal that the time has come to provide young people with a rights respecting education. Consider attending with people from your community and getting together afterwards to discuss what you might do to improve the lives of young people in your neighbour.

To Registered and for more information, follow this link:   https://fb.me/e/4BPRJlz7T

Share this Facebook post: It’s time. https://www.facebook.com/groups/933351720770117/permalink/1089138708524750/

The Summerhill Festival of Childhood that wrapped up on October 5^th confirmed that we have come a long way in the 100 years since A.S. Neill founded Summerhill. Thanks to the countless pioneers of possibilities, as Derry Hannam describes them, hundreds of democratic schools and a wealth of literature now arms a potentially formidable mass of people who believe that children and youth need to be in control of their learning. It is now time for these people to use their arsenal to make change happen.

Looking back 50 years plus to the late 1960’s we find much evidence that people knew schools were failing children. One of the most significant statements supporting this view is found in the government commissioned “Living and Learning” report on the state of education in the Canadian province of Ontario. This is how the Commission described it:

“Today, on every side, however, there is heard a growing demand for a fresh look at education in Ontario. The Committee was told of inflexible programs, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization, and mistaken aims of education. We heard from alienated students, frustrated teachers, irate parents, and concerned educators. Many public organizations and private individuals have told us of their growing discontent and lack of confidence in a school system which, in their opinion, has become outmoded and is failing those it exists to serve.”

                                                                     – Living and Learning, 1968, p. 10

At least some people who were witness to those days in the 60’s will tell you today that the state of public education has changed little during the half century since the report was published. Some will even say that we are worse off today given high stakes testing and the highly competitive, dehumanizing nature of the schools most young people attend. As with “A Pilot Study to Evaluate the Impact of the Student Participation Aspects of the Citizenship Order on Standards of Education in Secondary Schools”, best known as the “Hannam Report”, “Living and Learning” is best known as the “Hall-Dennis Report”, named after its principle authors.

In “Dumbing Us Down”, John Gatto, using the language of paradigm shifts, gives insight into why schools have changed so little. He states:

“It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.” 

                                                       – John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, 1992, p. 12

Thomas Kuhn who popularized the term “paradigm shift” observed that paradigms compete and that dominants ones do what they can to keep contenders out of sight. In the absence of a clear alternative, an inadequate dominant paradigm can exist for centuries, but as was the case with the Copernican revolution, even a clear choice can be suppressed for ages. Copernicus lived in the 1500s, but it was not until the latter half of the 18^th century that writings about the heliocentric view of the universe were removed from the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited literature. With our current battle over centres, teacher-centered vs child-centered, the dominant paradigm has kept us at bay for decades, but we must take it no longer. Old paradigm thinking is seriously damaging young people on a daily basis. If we are to learn from history, as teachers in state schools urge us to do, then we will know that brilliant people can premise their behaviours and beliefs on a faulty paradigm. This tells us that if those who are perpetuating the industrial model of education have learned from history, they will be cultivating enough humble objectivity to hold themselves suspect. Disciples of the teacher-centered learning paradigm are aware that the child-centered one exists, just as people in the days of Copernicus knew of both competing views of the universe. So ingrained can be one way of thinking, however, that the task of unlearning is insurmountable for some people. Given what we know today, nobody should presume to write a high-level report about the future of education without some months of lived experience in successful democratic schools like those highlighted in the documentary film “School Circles”.

Every paradigm comes with its own set of problems. Thomas Kuhn uses the term “normal science” to refer to all of the activities the disciples of a paradigm engage in to solve its problems. We are well past the time in history when the conditions should have been established for the normal science of the child-centered learning paradigm to be conducted on an equal footing with the normal science of the teacher-centered learning paradigm. It requires providing opportunities in community schools for people to choose which paradigm they wish to experience. Initially the choice of a child-centered learning environment would be in the form of pilot programs based on Derry Hannam’s 20% idea, the free learner concept defined by Unschooling School, the school-within-a-community-school such as The CHIP Program promoted by OPERI, or the intriguing new HOPE Program being implemented by the Ottawa Catholic School Board. These programs are all scalable on the basis of change by choice where they are as equally visible and accessible to learners as are traditional programs. Some will say that operating competing paradigms under the same roof will never work, but this is a myth built on the presumption that teachers are not professional.

One of the speakers at the Summerhill Festival of Childhood was Kate Robinson, daughter of TedTalk star personality Ken Robinson. She categorized people as immovable, movable, and those who move. The movables are those who could be open to the idea that children need to be in charge of their learning and she encourages the movers to actively engage with the movables. This is where the new chapter for democratic learning needs to be begin with vigor. While the task of loading our arsenal with more examples and literature must continue, it is time for us to focus on systematically, consistently and concertedly applying what we have accumulated over the years to overcoming the people who, intentionally or not, are keeping us out of sight. We need to wake up enough people in our communities that we cannot be denied publicly funded access to our paradigm through our community schools.

A way to start this new chapter with gusto is to get behind the Youth Rights Day movement that was discussed at the Summerhill Festival. It creates the opportunity to start friendly conversations with people, many who are suffering in silence, to let them know that they are not alone in their discontent with how young people are treated in our society. Making ourselves visible to them will leave them uplifted and energized to help overcome the perpetuators of the old paradigm who are obstructing an orderly evolution to a better society. This is an opportune moment, created by COVID, to ensure the education revolution that Jerry Mintz of AERO says is finally happening does not peter out.

Imagine the question: “Do you know about the Youth Rights Day?” reverberating in communities throughout the world. It’s a simple wake-up call that could have millions take a first step towards realizing that we are ultimately driving towards securing our future by reclaiming our humanity. It is a question that provides a segue for us to talk, with the authority of the whole democratic learning community behind us, about the work we are doing individually to usher in our paradigm.  At some point, it might be appropriate to introduce the view conveyed by Carol Black in her documentary film “Schooling the World”: “If you want to change a culture in a single generation, you have to change how it educates its children.” We are at a critical fork in the story of our civilization. Will we collapse or reboot it is the question? Zak Stein sheds considerable light on this decision to be made in his book “Education in a Time Between Worlds”. For a quick introduction to his views listen to the recording of a talk he gave at the Ecoversities conference this year. There is a recognized urgency to getting this decision made as soon as possible.

The United Nations sustainability goals, particularly goal 4 about quality education can be useful to establish some credibility for what we say. It needs to be noted, however, that despite wanting to be visionary, people with leadership roles in the UN still have a foot in the old paradigm. Some are producing a document titled “The UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education” that is not as insightful as proponents of child-centered learning expect it to be. Gabriel Groiss and Katy Zago are working with others to provide a response to a draft copy of the document that UNESCO has provided in order to obtain feedback. They were at the Summerhill Festival of Childhood to inform people of how the draft falls short of recognizing the benefits to our paradigm and they urged people to provide input into the response being written. Numbers matter and they have created the opportunity for us to write together another page in our new chapter. The more signatories we have to the response Gabriel and Katy are crafting, the more likely we are to make some significant gains. To become a signatory you can email youthrightsday@gmail.com requesting to be included.

The following links are to Facebook posts intended to convey how simply we can use the Youth Rights Day to advance towards our common goal while at the same time gaining attention and support for each of our individual efforts. It is a starting point for us to get traction. It requires that we each actively become ambassadors for our cause, champions of change in our communities. Join the Youth Rights Day Facebook group for the sharing of ideas about how to make the day a success in communities throughout the world.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/933351720770117/permalink/1062217187883569/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/933351720770117/permalink/1062740884497866/

posted by Richard Fransham

Monica Truong is an AERO member known to many. She works tirelessly promoting self-directed learning in Calgary, Alberta. She founded Chinook Free Learners and is currently working with Unschooling School to establish a Calgary charter school for self-directed education.

Monica is also planning to run for school board trustee this fall and she sought my thoughts on it knowing that I was involved through Uniting for Children and Youth with the 2018 school board elections in Ottawa. 

The following is a letter I have sent to Ottawa school board trustees. It results from my conversation last week with Monica and outlines some of what we should be able to expect people will have seriously contemplated if they want to be school board trustees. We need candidates for trustee to be flooding the AERO conference coming up this month. It represents where change is happening with its impressive array of thinkers and pioneers. It is where the stewards of public education can develop a vision of how to transform schools to apply what we know about nurturing children’s wellbeing and how they learn, and how to create the kinds of learning environments that maximize community resources. 

I will be sharing the letter with Ottawa educators and parents urging them to attend the conference and to encourage their trustees and children’s teachers to attend. It is really about building public awareness that we do not have to come out of COVID to the same old schools. Anybody who can make use of the letter, or parts of it, to raise awareness of the possibilities in their communities is welcome to do so without permission from me. 

Open letter to the trustees of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board

Dear OCDSB Trustee,

If you are planning to seek another term as trustee in 2022, here is a little of what is being discussed and undertaken by people who see COVID as having created an opportunity to remake public education to suit the times and the needs of young people. I’m sending this email at this time because the AERO Conference is starting June 24^th. It has an impressive slate of speakers committed to raising awareness of educational practices that better serve young people and society. I am highly recommending that anyone concerned about education make it a point to attend the conference.

A time between worlds

The Industrial Age changed our culture. High-rise cities, paved roadways, climate change and community anonymity are characteristics of it that hint at the depth of change that occurred. Digital technology has us entering a new age that is likely to be at least as dramatically different from the one before. With the pressing global problems we face, it is essential that our leaders have a big picture view of what is happening and the urgency for bold action. Zak Stein who will be speaking at the AERO conference warns us in his talk at the 2021 Ecoversities conference that civilizations are mortal. They die if not properly managed. We have only a short time to avoid the collapse of our civilization, and Job #1 to prevent it is education. The documentary film Schooling the World conveys that if we want to change a culture in a single generation, we have to change how it educates it children. Abraham Lincoln shared a similar view when he said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

Students finding their voices.

Last November youth participated in the Ottawa Child Friendly Community conference. Resulting from it is a short video created by Wondering School titled Youth Perspectives on Sociocracy. School Circles is a full-length documentary about how to apply sociocracy in schools. An early fall, free viewing of the film is being planned and everyone is welcome to attend. Watch the Youth Rights Day Facebook group for details. The following provide some evidence of youth making their voices heard on matters that affect them: The Global Student Forum, The International Summit on Student Voice, and Up For Learning. A couple of good websites about “how to” meaningfully involve students in their education are Unschooling School and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. The global Youth Rights Day, similar in nature to Earth Day, is a new initiative created to raise public awareness of how it is critical to include youth as equal partners in decisions that affect them. 

Parents becoming more aware

There are signs of parents becoming increasingly aware that age-segregated, authoritarian learning environments work against the best interests of students and their communities. Of particular note, is the Progressive Education website, which is resonating with parents and teachers throughout the world. It is the work of Jo Symes who sent her kids to school with little more thought than: “It is what parents do.” She soon observed that something was wrong and began to look into it. The Progressive Education website presents what she learned, and in just two years her Facebook group has acquired over 4600 members. Fabienne Vailes is another parent who could not remain silent and founded Flourishing Education. Her Episode 67 podcast: Changing Our Minds with Naomi Fisher provides an example of the kinds of conversations parents are having and hearing.

Public schools are not conducive to democratic citizenship

Yaacov Hecht is another notable person who will be speaking at the AERO conference. He started the first PUBLIC school to be called democratic, and it led to a system of over 25 public democratic school is Israel, the only country to do this so far. The learning model he uses is more conducive to cultivating active democratic citizens than is the age-segregated, authoritarian learning environment with mandated curriculum that is typical of most public schools. Democracies are under attack and we need to decide if we are going to do what it takes to put them on a firm footing. This requires that students be permitted to do their own thinking and to question the authorities. People who think this leads to chaos need to spend more time developing an understanding of how democratic schools work. 

Summary

COVID has revealed problems with public education that are not likely to be forgotten. The need to emerge from COVID on a clear course to something substantially better than what we had is real and likely to magnify. We need our educational leaders to rise to the challenges in transforming our schools. The place to begin is to create avenues for the early adopters of change to undertake the required pioneering work in ways that are scalable as more people appreciate the benefits to doing things differently. See the OPERI website for an example of the school-within-a-community school approach to school transformation.

Respectfully,

Richard Fransham
rfransham@rogers.com

The Search for Truth

There is a report titled Living and Learning that was commissioned by the Ontario Government decades ago that is still viewed by some as the finest report on education ever commissioned by a government. Youth are saying: “We are the generation we have been waiting for.” The documentary “Schooling the World” challenges us to consider that we change a culture by changing how we educate our children and youth. Our democracies are in trouble. Our planet is in trouble. Our education systems are in trouble. Our culture must change and today’s youth are stepping up to make it happen. Their schools need to help them to pursue truth. Following are quotes from the Living and Learning Report.

“The underlying aim of education is to further man’s unending search for truth. Once he possesses the means to truth, all else is within his grasp. Wisdom and understanding, sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility, as well as intellectual honesty and personal integrity, will be his guides to adolescence and his companions in maturity.” p. 9

“The search for truth in a democratic society: If the loftiest ideals of truth can be sought only in a free society, then it is exceedingly important that education, the formal cradle of truth seekers, reflect an awareness of those factors in our society which can throttle the free flow of individual thought and action.

“Democracy implies the freedom to think, to dissent, and to bring about change in a lawful manner in the interest of all. Democracy does not arise as a result of imposed or structured political practices, but as a dynamic, liberating force, nurtured by the people themselves. It can thrive and flourish only when its citizens are free to search continually for new ideas, models, and theories to replace outmoded knowledge in an effort to serve an ever-increasing populous tomorrow. A true democracy is a free and responsible society, and one aspect cannot exist or have meaning without the other.” p. 21

These thoughts added to the creative thinking occurring around how to emerge from the pandemic on course to a brighter future inspire hope. The brief video “Youth Perspectives on Sociocracy” gives assurance that youth can be trusted to create a better world. They are in the beginning stages of a youth-led/adult-supported initiative to unit us all behind helping them to become the generation we have been waiting for. This solidarity is to be symbolized by the creation of a global Youth Rights Day celebrated on November 20th, the day the United Nations has designated as “World Children’s Day” to celebrate its Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Currently the United Nations is seriously considering how to decolonize education, which is essential to the search for truth. Je’anna Clements sheds light on what this means in her article referenced below.

The Easter message given in two words is – “Carpe diem!”

Living and Learning: https://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/CX5636.htm

Youth Perspectives on Sociocracy: https://youtu.be/H3EXpBWaZk0

The Youth Rights Day Movement: https://www.facebook.com/groups/933351720770117

Schooling the World: http://carolblack.org/schooling-the-world

Decolonizing Education: https://www.unschoolingschool.com/decolonizing-school.html

There is a wealth of resources about the kinds of environments children and youth need if they are to flourish. Following are links to some of these resources. The organizations are all global in scope. The list is far from complete and seen as only a starting point. It will be expanded to provide links to groups focusing on children’s mental and physical wellbeing, and the environment.

Unschooling School (Good for the quick introduction it provides to the topic.)
The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO)
The Alliance for Self Directed Education (ASDE)
International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC)

An important read for advancing the wellbeing of children and youth.

Flow to Learn: A 52-Week Parent’s Guide to Recognize and Support Your Child’s Flow State – the Optimal Condition for Learning

by Carmen Viktoria Gamper
Published in March 2020
342 pages

A question that often arises during discussions with parents is: “What do you want for your children?” A frequent response is: “I want them to be happy.” Generally, parents have in mind a deep rooted sense of wellbeing from which life can be embraced with enthusiasm and its challenges faced with strength and resilience.

Flow to Learn is a guide to preserving and cultivating this form of happiness. It addresses the questions: “Why aren’t more people happy?” and “When exactly are people happy?” We need only to look at school-age children for signs that people are unhappy. The rates of bullying, depression, mental illness, racism, hate crimes and suicides attest to this. From this evidence it can be concluded that teachers and school administrators, as well as parents would benefit from reading this book.

COVID is challenging us to rethink how our lives are unfolding, and some of the views once held as “the way things are,” are being replaced with visions of how things could, and need to be better. We need to recognize children as natural learners, biologically wired to learn what they need to know for the culture in which they live.  We need to serve as models of how to live as equals with young people in learning environments based on human rights and democratic principles. Flow to Learn helps us to understand what this means.

While teachers can serve as examples for parents of how to live democratically with children, parents can serve as examples for teachers. Unschooling School, a strong voice for public education, is encouraging parents to consider having their children designate themselves as “Free Learners”. One might ask: “What does a Free Learner look like?” The perfect answer is: “Experience Flow to Learn.”

Heather MacTaggart is the founder of Unschooling School and she used the term “responsible subversive” in the book she co-authored with John Abbott, titled Overschooled but Undereducated. Derry Hannam, author of Another Way is Possible – Becoming a Democratic Teacher in a State School, picked up on the term and in a short video he describes the kind of responsible subversive” that Free Learners need to encounter in their community schools. They are people who understand that to be happy, children need to have a meaningful say in matters that affect them, they need the freedom to find flow.

The transformation of public education requires change deep within ourselves and it takes time. Flow to Learn has been written with this in mind. It is not the type of book you read in a weekend and then put aside. It is a guide for working at changing ourselves over the course of a year. Instead of chapters, it is divided into 52 weeks. Each week is a short read presenting the theories of flow followed by a “Try this” section designed to help people develop the understanding and behaviours necessary to live with children in ways that foster their happiness. As we become better at establishing the relationships and environments recommended in Flow to Learn, we can expect to see far more children radiating a sense of wellbeing.

by Je’anna Clements
Reprinted with permission of Riverstone Village.

School was one of the primary tools used by European colonisers of Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas. While the army was used to quell physical opposition to invasion, school was used to obliterate indigenous culture and brainwash populations into obedience and subservience.

It is important to realise that the content of the curriculum was possibly a smaller factor in the colonising process, than the structure and nature of school in and of itself. School worked inter alia because :

• it removed children from community life where they would participate in traditional cultural transmission.
• it age-segregated children so that peer-to-peer education couldn’t function.
• it limited play, through which children develop confidence and creativity, and critical thinking, as well as leadership and collaborative teamwork skills.
• it prevented communication and social skills development through forbidding children’s free communication and interaction with each other, keeping them instead mostly silent, and under adult supervision.
• it enforced competition, preventing collaboration.
• it deeply undermined each persons’ sense of autonomy and empowerment and instilled a deep sense of fear and shame through micro-control practises such as preventing children from following their own physical wisdom around when to eat, drink, move around and relieve themselves, and making all of these most personal functions subject to permission from external authority.
  • All of these features typify the ‘divide and rule’ mechanism of colonial control.
  • It was necessary to use force to make children attend school, since so many indigenous people understood that this kind of ‘education’ was not in their or their children’s best interests. In many places children were forcibly completely removed from their families and communities.

Last but far from least, through the use of curricula, grades and tests, a worldview of ‘one truth’ was asserted, instilling the belief that only one dominant and dominating paradigm could be valid. Every statement, practise, thought and belief became either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Truths associated with the dominant culture became ‘right’ and any competing paradigm became ‘wrong’. We can euphemistically call this education, or we can call it indoctrination, or even more bluntly, brainwashing.

It is important to realise that when ‘decolonisers’ do nothing more than add indigenous games, stories, songs, and factoids to create a ‘decolonised’ curriculum, this is essentially just a re-decoration to disguise the re-deployment of the tool in the hands of a new ‘authority’.

To use the colonising tool of school in the same format, simply changing the content, is to take advantage of the opportunity to enculturate and indoctrinate children according to a new dominant paradigm. This is not actual decolonisation. As the saying goes, you cannot decolonise colonial systems.

True decolonisation of education must drop not only the content, but also all processes and procedures that are inherently oppressive.

Decolonised education must use different systems – systems that are not only respectful, rights-based and humane, but also consent-based. If any degree of manipulation or force ‘must’ be used against children or parents, to get children into school, we must ask why that is necessary if what is offered genuinely meets their needs and is truly for their benefit.

A child forced against their will, away from real every-day environments to sit in silence under adult supervision learning what they are told, is not free, and is actively having their mind and their being colonised – whether the subject of their studies is the glory of England, or the glory of modern day America, or the glory of Post-Apartheid South Africa.

On the other hand:

Self-Directed Education is the closest modern-day equivalent to the education system used by our common human ancestry who walked the earth in the days before the first army was ever even constituted.

Self-directed education is education that inherently supports the critical balances between diversity and cooperation, and freedom and responsibility. It allows for full individuation within a context of community accountability.

It is inherently decolonial.

Here are five good reads to kick off more exploration on this topic:

ENGLISH EDUCATION ACT 1835

EDUCATION IN HUNTER-GATHERER CULTURES BY PETER GRAY

Manish Jain: “Our work is to recover wisdom and imagination”

Three Cups of Fiction

LIBERATION FROM EDUCATION

On Friday June 26, 2020, The Quest for a Just Society petition was launched at the virtual conference of the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). The AERO conference made an appropriate venue to launch the petition. For more than three decades, it has been bringing together people from around the world who believe children are natural born learners who do best when they direct their own learning. These people dream of an education revolution, and with today’s pandemic, social unrest, and heightened concern over the wellness of children and youth the need for an education revolution has never been more evident.

It is widely believed that education has not kept pace with the times. Scathing indictments of school as we know it go back decades, as have visions of how to make it relevant, yet it remains virtually unchanged. A reason given for why environmental groups have not been more effective at getting their concerns addressed is that they have remained too disconnected and the same is true of advocates for self-directed learning – SDL. They are too busy doing their own thing that they fail to keep an eye on the bigger picture. To become a force for change, they need to unite and this is the primary function of the petition. It is a way for all those who believe in self-directed learning to raise their hands and be counted. It is an opportunity for the advocates of SDL to convey to the world that they are more than scattered fringe groups. That is Purpose #1 of the following list of purposes for the petition.

Purposes of the petition:

1. to show that we are significant in numbers
2. to convey the message that subjecting young people to authoritarian rule in competitive environments for 12 of their most formative years is a violation of human rights and not in our best interests
3. to provide the disciples of SDL with a simple conversation starter
4. to provide these disciples with an excuse to reach out to people personally to build awareness of the benefits to SDL and how to implement it
5. to have the UN reconsider its wording for its Sustainability Development Goal #4 – Quality Education

Notice that the message to the UN, which is the stated recipient of the petition is at the bottom of the priority list. The UN symbolizes human rights, so it is seen as a good place to direct it. Subjecting children and youth to traditional education is viewed as a human rights issue, but it is not what the UN does with the petition that matters. Rather, it is what everyone does with it that will make the difference.

Origins of the Petition

The petition stems from belief in the idea that Carol Black describes on the website for the documentary film Schooling the World. 

“If you want to change a culture in a single generation, how would you do it? You would change how it educates its children.”

Abraham Lincoln expressed the idea saying:

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

The petition is to be seen as a tool for the work of convincing everyone concerned with social and environmental justice that to leave unchanged what is being done to children and youth in our schools makes their work harder and the gains they make fragile.

The petition also stems from what John Gatto says in Dumbing Us Down:

“It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.”

The petition also provides a tool to help with the task of stretching the imaginations of people who have only experienced traditional education.

With the pandemic and social injustices disrupting life throughout the world at this time, it is seen as the time to seize the day. People are being urged not to drop the ball. There is concern that time is running out. Future generations may not be able to pick it up.

People are being asked to:

Sign the petition!
Talk it up!
Carpe Diem

URL for petition: https://www.change.org/quest4justsociety

by Derry Hannon

What young people need & Covid-19 opportunities

It seems to me that the crucial commodity that young people need in order to find and deepen their interests and identity, and to learn how to live with others is TIME. Time to think, time to wonder, time to question, time to create, time to hang out with their friends, time to find out who they are, time to relax and just be idle for a while – and a space to do it in.

Yet this is the one thing that prior to ‘the virus’ most state funded secondary or high schools, and increasingly, middle, primary or elementary schools as well, deprived them of. Lunch hours and playtimes/recess were shortened or cut. The encroachment into their free time was not just during the school day but also at home, in the evenings and at week-ends, with often relentless homework and test/examination revision. . . .

Read the entire proposal here: https://www.progressiveeducation.org/the-20-project-for-schools-a-modest-proposal-by-derry-hannam/.

Derry has been a long time proponent of democratic education. He is currently working on a soon to be published book titled Another Way Is Possible – Becoming A Democratic Teacher In A State School.

This is a good time to recount my brother’s story. He was trampled by riot police in Montreal. He had health problems and was unable to get back to where he was before the incident. He died a few months later, within a month of having turned 72 years of age.

Video of the elderly man being pushed down and left by police in Buffalo on June 5^th presents a vivid reminder of what happened to my brother, Bob. Ultimately, these two stories are not about police brutality and the tyrants who militarize the police. They represent our collective failure to cultivate a population that has the wherewithal and habits to create a just society. We are not raised to speak out in the face of injustice. We are trained to do as we are told.

Bob found his own way to being an activist. He had a love of history, read extensively, and became acutely aware of social and environmental injustices occurring around the world. When a demonstration was being staged to focus attention on a wrong being perpetrated, he would try to attend believing every voice mattered.

As a younger man, he had twice been the Quebec veteran provincial road race cycling champion, but by the time he fell under the feet of police in Montreal, he was a physical wreck. He had two artificial knees, hardware up his spine from several major back operations, and a mechanical valve installed during open-heart surgery. He cycled to events because he had difficulty walking, but once he got himself propped up on his bike he could move around well. On his fateful day in Montreal, he was not confronting the police; he was trying to get out of their way. The signal had been given to disperse peaceful protesters, as was done for Trump’s photo-op in Washington on June 1^st, and a wall of police advanced on the crowd. People quickly retreated leaving my brother alone in the street with too little time to get on his bike and get out of there. His injuries from the incident became infected. The bacteria collected around the metal of his mechanical valve, and he died suddenly in hospital some months later.

Another police encounter tells a different story. It was September 26, 2011 when Bob was in Ottawa to take part in the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline project. The organizers wanted to replicate a protest that took place in Washington at the end of August that year. It involved getting arrested for trespassing, but there was no appropriate place upon which to trespass. People in police services who respected the democratic right to peaceful protest solved the problem. Collaborating with organizers, they set up a barrier across the lawn in front of the Peace Tower and anyone who crossed it would be arrested. To make it easy to break the law, a makeshift structure was provided for people to climb over. When it was Bob’s turn to get arrested, he couldn’t manage the flimsy structure with his broken body. Seeing him struggle, the police quickly stepped up to take his arms and they helped him over. The image presents such an incredible contrast to the events of police brutality in Montreal and Washington – police kindly serving as accomplices to a senior citizen breaking the law as opposed to attacking peaceful protesters. It is perhaps one of the best stories of police entrapment and of respecting the right to peaceful protest.

Lately we have seen high school students take to the streets to protest climate change inaction. They have staged protests over gun laws, and in Ontario not long ago, they held walkouts to protest changes to sex education curriculum. Much could be said about whether or not these protests were allowed to happen because they aligned with the views of their elders. Much can also be said about how students portrayed themselves as deserving of having their voices heard. They gave the message that school authorities need not get nervous when students have the opportunity to express their concerns and are treated with respect.

School authorities fear losing control. If students become too assertive, the managers are apt to resort to manipulation and tokenism. If that fails, they can become heavy-handed. A big part of the problem is that the students’ concerns are almost always valid, but the authorities cannot provide valid responses, and so the lesson becomes one about obedience instead of justice. Teachers fear offending their superiors if they support the students; parents fear for their children’s futures if they do not do as they are told, and there we are. Fear is dictating our behaviour when the essence of democracy is that people do not live in fear of doing the right thing. Respecting the chain of command and toeing the line take precedence over justice.

The just society being demanded by today’s protestors is not possible without treating students as equals. Those who would have us believe that children and youth do not have the life experience or objectivity to be treated as equals do not understand equality. It is a view that breeds tyrants. If the current protests are to accomplish more than past ones, if enough is really to become enough, then schools have to change. We must demand that a determined, methodical transformation of public education to democratic practices begin immediately. The Ottawa Public Education Remake Initiative describes how to get started.

For those who wish to dig deeper into how our public schools are not “simply democracy in action,” Ron Miller’s book What are Schools For? (1997) is a stimulating read. He is powerful in how he conveys that in addition to some democratic elements, public education, as we know it, has arisen from “a host of elitist, nativist, moralist, and technocratic views that do not serve a democratic society well.” The publication date of the book does not speak to its relevance. Putting the book into context with today simply causes one to notice how deplorably public education is failing to reimagine itself.

UCY Scholarships Available for Ottawa/Gatineau Youth and Parents

The conference is virtual for the first time – a great time to check it out.

UCY is offering 5 adult and 5 youth scholarships for Ottawa-Gatineau residents to attend the AERO virtual conference from June 25-28.

For information on how to apply, email info@ucyottawa.com.

Much has happened since the UCY Advancing to Our Brave New World event held in January, and now in the midst of the pandemic, people are rethinking school with even greater urgency. UCY is working with international groups including AERO and #JustAskUs to build awareness of alternatives to school as we know it. From the UCY perspective, public education that serves everybody is a nation builder, a pillar of a just society, but as things stand it needs to move in the direction of the Self-Directed Education – SDE model that is promoted by Peter Gray and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education – ASDE. Current practices violate human rights and fail to adhere to democratic principles.

The letter below recently shared in the feed of an AERO think tank subcommittee helps to identify how schools have to change. It is in pursuit of this change that UCY is providing the scholarships to the AERO virtual conference June 25-28. This conference offers to deepen people’s knowledge and understanding of what children and youth need, and it is an opportunity to gain strength and assurance from others who are thinking hard about the schools they want for their communities. For information on how to apply for one of the scholarships, email info@ucyottawa.com. Please share through Facebook, email and Twitter the offer of these scholarships.

The Letter

Dear Parents of Our Graduates:

As you are aware, one of your offspring graduated from our high school this June. Since that time, it has been brought to our attention that certain insufficiencies are present in our graduates, so we are recalling all students for further education.

We have learned that in the process of the instruction we forgot to install one or more of the following:

At least one salable skill

A comprehensive and utilitarian set of values

A readiness for and an understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship

A recent consumer study consisting of a follow-up of our graduates has revealed that many of them have been released with defective parts. Racism and materialism are serious flaws, and we have discovered that they are a part of the makeup of almost all our products. These defects have been determined to be of such magnitude that the model produced in June is considered highly dangerous and should be removed from circulation as a hazard to the nation.

Some of the equipment that was, in the past, classified as optional has been reclassified as standard and should be a part of every product of our school. Therefore, we plan to equip each graduate with:

·         A desire to continue to learn;

·         A dedication to solving problems of local, national, and international concern;

·         Several productive ways to use leisure time;

·         A commitment to the democratic way of life;

·         Extensive contact with the world outside of school; and

·         Experience in making decisions.

In addition, we found that we had inadvertently removed from our graduates their interest, enthusiasm, motivation, trust, and joy. We are sorry to report that these items have been mislaid and have not been turned in at the school Lost and Found Department. If you will inform us as to the value you place on these qualities, we will reimburse you promptly by check or cash.

As you can see, it is to your interest and vitally necessary for your safety and the welfare of all that graduates be returned so that these errors and oversights can be corrected. We admit that it would have been more effective and less costly to have produced the product correctly in the first place but hope you will forgive our errors and continue to respect and support your public schools.

Sincerely,

P. Dantic, Principal

(1971)[1]

Following is a comment from Wayne Jennings who shared the letter:

Lest you think this fictional letter unlikely, consider the following actual letter to parents:

Students of the former Minneapolis Harrison School are eligible for classes and skills training. Students who attended the former Harrison secondary program in Minneapolis can now receive additional educational instruction, vocational training, and/or mental health assistance at no cost to them.

We are looking for people who were students for at least thirty days between September 1, 1992, and June 30, 1998. These students can be current Minneapolis Public School students, graduates, or those who have dropped out or are living anywhere in Minnesota. If you think you are eligible, call…the Minneapolis Schools at…Let us make it up to you.

Reported in School Transformation by Wayne Jennings

[1] Miller, W. C. (1971). Recalled for revision. Detroit, MI: Deputy Superintendent, Intermediate School District.

Closing thoughts
We’re all facing challenges of varying degrees right now, and each person’s trails are real for them—no less or more valid because of how they stand in relation to others. One thing we can all do, which can lessen the load, whatever our situation, is to recognize that we don’t need to pretend everything is okay for our kids. Of course we do not want to overwhelm them with our worries or fears, but we and they both benefit when we let our vulnerability show, and model for them how to not know exactly what to do in each moment and yet to face it with faith that our values and our care for each other will help guide us through. 

All my very best from me and my family to you and yours.
Aaron
Check out my blog for musings and writings.
https://edunautics.com/

Self-directed learning is for everyone. Geoff Graham takes us to the heart of the matter with a quote he posted on Facebook.

“If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn’t learn to walk without going to school.”

“I was such a great learner and then I went to school,” is another quote we often hear that speaks to the issue. We make children dependent on teachers and then we point to that dependency to justify commandeering their learning. It is done by most with the best of intentions, but it really is quite misguided. The focus needs to be brought back to what Peter Gray describes as mother nature’s pedagogy. It is that young people will, of their own volition, learn all that they need to know to survive well within the culture into which they are born.

People who defend conventional schooling are often heard to say, “Some kids need structure,” implying that they need teachers to structure their learning. This is not what produces the independent, lifelong learners who are described as those who will be successful in the Digital Age. It is what turns out high school graduates who are aimless, sometimes for years, trying to find themselves. Learning environments need to provide students with the opportunity to become masterful at directing their own learning, and so we need to be looking at the full gamut of skills and attitudes that lead to people making successes of themselves. This article presents one set of these skills and attitudes that address the problems of self-discipline, willpower and procrastination, all of which contribute to how people structure their learning. A story told by a professor of electrical engineering at a Canadian university sets the stage.

It was the mid 1980’s when computers were finding their way into k-12 schools. The professor had undertaken to give teachers a mini course on digital electronics and his story was about how he had come to be teaching the course.

He had obtained his electrical engineering credentials before digital electronics had established its foothold. He graduated knowing all about analog electricity, but he knew little about digital electronics. At the time, his knowledge of analog was sufficient for him to get his prestigious professorship, but it was not long after that digital electronics was rising to dominance and he was feeling the need to bring himself up to date. He procrastinated, but as digital technology became more prominent, he became increasingly concerned. He felt like a fraud masquerading as a professor of electrical engineering when he knew little about digital electronics.

The more he procrastinated, the more uncomfortable he became with himself, and finally he decided to act. He went to the library and signed out a number of beginner books on digital electronics and he headed home determined to dedicate time every night to learning what he wanted to know.

He described how he diligently kept at the task for about two weeks and then his resolve began to weaken and soon the books were collecting dust. That is how things remained for a time except that his need to learn digital electronics intensified and he decided that sheer self-discipline was not going to be enough to get the job done. He had to create some condition where he could not fail, and his solution involved his family.

He had young children and his wife was a stay at home mom. Money was not plentiful so it was a significant when he went to his wife asking to use $800 of family money to buy a deluxe, “everything you need to know” kit on digital electronics. It would provide the motivating power of hands-on activity and he would have the added pressure of not wanting to disappoint his wife. She approved and one day soon after he arrived home with the kit.

You would think that this would be the end of the story, but not so. That first night at home with the kit he worked late into the night. This continued for about six weeks, but by then the novelty effect had worn off and his effort began to wane. A wife’s scorn is something husbands learn to take in stride. It didn’t have the desired motivating power and as with the books, the kit began to collect dust before he was even close to achieving his goal. He had to somehow up the ante, to find some way to back himself into a corner that gave him absolutely no choice but to succeed.

What finally worked for him was the idea that if you want to know something – teach it. He went to the dean of his faculty and asked to be assigned to teach a first year digital electronics course. He figured he had too much pride to look incompetent to his students, and too much concern for the reputation of the university to permit himself to fail. The dean granted his request and each week he scrambled to stay a step ahead of his students. Week-by-week he completed the course without disgracing himself.

It is said that you have to teach a course at least three times before you feel that you have mastered it. The professor taught the course a number of times and then went again to the dean, this time asking to be assigned to teach the second year course. By the time he was teaching the mini course to the teachers he had accomplished his goal. He had mastered digital electronics, and his self-esteem was restored.

This story is that of a self-directed learner. The professor chose to learn what he saw as essential to live well in his culture. The learning was relevant to his life and the knowledge he acquired was self-taught. He lacked perseverance with the daily work of learning, but he had the willpower to pursue the conditions he needed to succeed, and he never doubted his ability to conquer the learning challenge. He recognized his weakness and he backed himself into a corner that gave him no choice but to succeed. It might be said that he coerced himself to learn, and that is a major distinction between teacher-directed and self-directed learning. Traditional education operates with external coercion robbing students of the opportunity to gain experience in how to coerce themselves.

There is a tendency to think that professors are brilliant individuals, the superstars of society to whom learning comes naturally, but this story tells us otherwise. Learning may come more easily to some people than others, but it takes work, and it takes knowing oneself to compensate for weaknesses and to build on strengths. Young people permitted to direct their own learning stand a better chance of gaining these insights, and there is an attitudinal difference that also needs to be taken into account. The more that students can experience the fruits of their own decisions and hard work, the more likely they are to understand and have confidence in their abilities, and to appreciate the profound satisfaction that comes from conquering tough, meaningful challenges. These are deep-seated attitudes that have a big impact on people’s ability to succeed in life and on their sense of wellbeing.

The 4C’s come into play with self-directed learning. These are creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication, the skills employers say are essential for success in today’s world. Rather than cultivating these skill, traditional schooling may actually be working against their development. For example, considerable attention has been focused on creativity with millions of people having watched Ken Robinson’s Ted Talk about schools killing it, and a study by NASA scientists concluding that “Kids Are Born Creative Geniuses Then Schools Destroy Imagination.”

The professor’s story reveals that he was applying the 4C’s with his learning. He had to exercise creativity and critical thinking to create the conditions needed for him to accomplish his goal. His was a somewhat superficial application of them compared to what people wanting to overcome bigger problems such a weight loss and drug addiction would have to exercise. We see also that he had to collaborate and communicate to accomplish his learning goal. Effective learning is more often than not a community undertaking where people are helping each other, but in public education the atmosphere tends to be competitive with everyone out for themselves. The 4C’s cannot be well honed by people unless they have a high degree of autonomy within a community of learners where everyone is a learner and a teacher.

We do young people no favours by coercing them to learn and providing them with structured learning that is not of their choosing. It is a disservice to graduate students who are dependent on teachers to run their learning agendas. Children and youth need the opportunity to learn about themselves and to develop the self-management aptitudes that are required for independent, lifelong learning. This does not rule out enrolling in formal courses as a way to tap into expertise and force themselves to learn. The difference between choosing to take a course that is seen as useful and one that is mandated to gain a credit for one’s transcript is immeasurable. There is an image used by a renewable energy co-op that helps to make this point. In two side-by-side almost identical photos, a farmer is staring out his window at a close by wind turbine that could be seen as spoiling the view. In one photo he has an angry look on his face and underneath is the caption, “Corporate Owned.” In the other he is smiling and the caption reads, “Co-op Owned.” The implication is that the farmer is happy when he has some ownership. Happy students, meaning students with a strong sense of wellbeing that results in good relations with others requires that they have ownership in their education. For those who need structure, they need to become the architects of the structures that work best for them. Coercion and oppression are the enemies of healthy communities. Clues to how a small steps transformation of public education can be orchestrated in order to provide students with ownership in their education are found on the Ottawa Public Education Remake Initiative.

One day two grade twelve boys approached their teacher to make a proud confession. They were students in a pilot program that eliminated the bells. It was a program that ran as a school within a community high school and included a cross-section of 25 grades 10 to 12 students from the overall school population. The students stayed together all day and worked as self-directed learners on mandated ministry curriculum. It was their choice to participate in the program and there were only two criteria for them to be accepted. They had to be coming to school to learn and they had to agree to help build a learning community where everyone was a teacher and a learner.

That day the boys confessed they had only pretended to be willing to help build a community of learners. They said they enrolled in the program so that they could work on computers all day, just the two of them, and they intended to have nothing to do with the “little grade 10 kids.” The thing that prompted their confession was their revelation that “we don’t even notice the age difference anymore,” which they presented to the teacher with an elated air of having discovered their humanity.

By being together all day with the freedom to run their own agendas, the students in the pilot program got to know each other. The atmosphere was more like a playground than a classroom, and as happens on a playground, the younger kids learn from the older ones, often just by watching. The two boys with their enthusiasm for programming computers were like masters of the playground. They attracted the attention of other students who were often clustered around them peering in awe at the magic the boys were creating on the screen. In was one of the way the environment nurtured an understanding of others and helped to eliminate discrimination.

A second story from the program gives the same message. There was a boy who had felt rejected and isolated in the school before enrolling in the program. He indicated that he rejected those who rejected him by dressing in dark Gothic clothing with a black trench coat being part of his constant apparel. The word “shunned” described how he appeared as he walked through the halls of the school. He consoled himself with his art creating from within his protective shell paintings that were as dark as his clothing, but this changed within the program. His paintings remained dark, but he came to be known and respected as a human being, and the students declared him their resident artist.

By placing students in learning environments where they can discover each other’s humanity, the celebration of diversity happens naturally. The story of a Vietnamese boy in the program exemplifies how people from less dominant cultures in a school can integrate, as opposed to being assimilated.

This boy was struggling to learn English and he was not unlike the Gothic artist before he enrolled in the program. He was miserable and had a permanent scowl on his face that warned others to stay away. He wanted to be anywhere other than where he was and he enrolled in the program hoping it would provide him with some form of escape.

Within a month of entering the program he was radiating sheer joy. He had made some friends with whom he beamingly jabbered much of the day, which resulted in his spoken English improving dramatically. As the holiday season approached he asked if he could organize the class Christmas party and the students enthusiastically agreed. From a life of self-exile in a crowd, he became a social co-ordinator.

The party turned out to be a public transit ride to his uncle’s Vietnamese restaurant. For some mysterious reason the boy did not ride the bus to the restaurant with the other students, but the mystery was solved when they arrived. He was already there dressed to be their maître d’. He most graciously greeted them and as he ushered them to their tables he described in amazingly good English the non-alcoholic drinks that had been prepared for them. He was the perfect ambassador for his people with his friends enjoying a memorable evening with Vietnamese culture and cuisine.

Traditional schools have been described as competitive and dehumanizing, yet these stories indicate that with no additional resources or disruption to family life, schools that cultivate a sense of belonging, wellbeing, and a celebration of diversity are well within our grasp.

These stories come from The CHIP Program that ran in an Ottawa high school.

by Richard Fransham

Table of Contents

• The Formally Scheduled School Day
• School Closures Are Casualties of Timetabling
• Course Selection Injustices
  • Devaluing the Human Being and Snuffing Out the Joy of Learning
  • Time Is More Than Money
  • Discrimination Against Minority Interests
• Other Injustices
• What Is the Alternative?
• Footnotes

The Formally Scheduled School Day

Have you ever considered how the traditional school schedule works against equity and inclusion, and how it impedes student learning and alienates them from their humanity? We have become so accustomed to age-segregated classes of students being marched to the bells that we tend to give it no second thought. More and more, however, in large part due to the growing visibility of Self-Directed Education (SDE) and the accessibility of video statements like those by Ken Robinson, Prince Ea and Suli Breaks, people are realizing that schools can and must become different.

Larry Rosenstock, a founder of the High Tech High network of charter schools, identifies the practice of timetabling school days as the single greatest impediment to educational innovation.[1] When we hear this, we are apt to think that it is all about student learning, but it is about much more. Timetabling violates students’ rights. It amounts to systemic discrimination making it virtually impossible to achieve equity and inclusion in our schools, and it reaches beyond race, religion, and gender. It demeans and discounts any students who do not fit the mold or do not perform as expected. Even the view that the system works for some students cannot be taken at face value. How is it working for them; what is their sense of wellbeing; whom are they trying to please, and to what system is it being compared? From the following, one can conclude that even the students who are perceived to be excelling in a timetabled system are victims of it.  

School Closures Are Casualties of Timetabling

A starting point for a study of the injustices of the traditional school schedule is the closure of high schools that have low enrolments. In 1981 the former Ottawa Board of Education developed what it called a “foundation programme.” It defined 122 course options as the minimum that a high school should offer its students.[2] Without special funding it becomes impossible for schools to offer this number of options if their enrolments drop much below 800 students. In 1985, for example, Rideau High School had only 655 students and it provided only 114 course options.[3] Enrolment at Rideau was down to 418 students in 2015 with projections that it would remain around the 400 mark until at least 2020.[4] Due to the economics of timetabling, Rideau High School was closed in 2017. Its students lost their community hub and started having to ride buses to school. Some people say the students are better off because they have more course options, but they aren’t taking into account the humanitarian loss, the lost sense of community and the hampering of people promoting healthy living through groups like active and safe routes to school, and those fighting climate change by putting more buses on the roads. There clearly needs to be greater effort to come up with a better solution.

The end of the one-room schoolhouse is lamented for the loss of the sense of community it created. Smaller schools of up to 250 students are often appreciated for that same quality that develops when groups are small enough for people to get to know each other. The number 250 has been suggested as the maximum enrolment number for learning communities that are free of the bells and age-segregation, and where everyone is a learner and a teacher. It is a number based on a balance between diversity and anonymity. Diversity is celebrated in a climate where all students are viewed as having their own unique gifts that can enrich the lives of others. The more students there are in a school, the greater its diversity and the more there is for students to learn from one another. It is thought however, that if the number of students grows beyond 250, anonymity begins to creep into the learning environment. If students start to feel anonymous, which translates to feelings of being unappreciated, we need to see it as infringing on their right to belong. Feelings of anonymity also result in students establishing subgroups, cliques and gangs that often discriminate against others. In a private conversation, Daniel Greenberg, a founder of the Sudbury Valley School, said that where students enrol at a young age and there is little attrition, a school might be able to operate with as many as 450 students before anonymity becomes a problem. It is interesting that this number of around 400 results in timetabled schools being closed while it is the high-end number for schools designed for humanity.

A study of school closures also reveals that calculated injustices stem from the systemic ones of timetabling. Adjustments to school boundaries and special programs that attract students from outside those boundaries can be used to keep numbers up in a school to avoid it being closed. Affluent communities with influential people and the resources to fight school closures in their neighbourhoods tend to encourage these tactics to save their schools. Schools are more likely to be closed where people are less empowered to fight for them. The solution to this injustice is not to seek a more just balance. By ending the practice of timetabling there would be little need to close schools because of low enrolments.

Course Selection Injustices

The systemic injustices of timetabling run much deeper than school closures, however. They touch every student personally and contribute to the kind of cultural genocide depicted in the documentary film Schooling the World. An inspection of the typical high school course selection process reveals the deficiencies.

Before a school year is even half over, planning for the following year begins. Enrolment numbers are projected and the course options to be offered to students are determined, sometimes in consultation with students, sometimes by just staff. To provide students with a range of choices, the list of options is greater than the number of courses the school can run. It is usually in February that students fill out their option sheets where they indicate the courses they want to take the following year. If a sufficient number of students select a particular interest course it will run, otherwise it will be cancelled.

This practice for deciding which courses a school will run in any particular year is a disservice to students at the outset with its presumption that the best way for them to obtain a good education is to sit them through days and years of teacher led classes, but beneath the surface there are numerous other injustices.

Devaluing the Human Being and Snuffing Out the Joy of Learning

Compulsory course requirements eat up so many of the options offered to students that the non-compulsory electives are small in number. The amount of real choice they offer does not begin to address the broad range of students’ interests. The larger the school, the more options it can offer, which has led to the creation of big comprehensive high schools. Timetabling has produced these factory schools that put students on polluting fleets of school buses, sometimes for hours a day, but even the biggest of them fall well short of providing for the interests of all students. No matter what size the school, students are having to endure classes that to them lack relevance, and they cope by tuning out in class, studying just enough to pass a test, and forgetting what they learned soon after. The problem is so widespread that it is difficult to find anyone who has not suffered through courses they did not want to take, and the problem is actually worse.

A typical high school course credit is based on 110 hours of class time. It results in even students who are in courses they choose to take, complaining that they could accomplish the required learning objectives in far fewer hours. The boredom that can set in may be enough to cure a student of ever again wanting to pursue a topic that was once of interest. It creates a narrowing of students’ views of what the world has to offer, which is obviously not in their best interests and therefore needs to be understood as an injustice.

A look at how math is taught leads to a better understanding of how scheduling works against the interests of students. It is considered to be a rigorous subject, but when you examine what really happens during a typical math class of 70 minutes, you are likely to find that the new material can be learned by motivated students in 10 minutes or less. A blog post found on the Uniting for Children and Youth website titled A Lesson About Math paints a picture of a math class where a concept is taught and retaught and retaught again. To fill the time, students are then assigned exercises to do that often amount to busy work with little learning value. It is a routine that makes it inappropriate to apply the concentration a person brings to bear with a deep learning experience. It discourages students from getting into the highly focused productive state that Mihály Csikszentmihhályi calls flow, a state that can leave a person feeling energized and refreshed. If the learning exercise is dragged out there is no incentive to apply the high level effort to learn it efficiently. Brain research is in its infancy when it comes to the psychological and attitudinal effects of having students spend endless hours half engaged or less in regular classes, so we need to be careful when drawing conclusions. One controversial study receiving attention found that brain activity during lectures is lower than during sleep. There is not enough evidence to declare it as true, but it seems reasonable.

A regular class can have the effect of alienating students from what interests them, of numbing them and killing their joy of learning. These classes can condition students to mark time as a habit and they give rise to the accusation that schools are dehumanizing, of which there can be no greater violation of human rights. With so little opportunity to freely explore the full range of topics the world has to offer, students are graduating from high school not knowing what to do with their lives. Their creativity is diminished; their critical thinking skills are under developed, and employers complain that graduates stand around with little initiative waiting to be told what to do. Award winning teacher John Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, has claimed for years that schools are designed to keep people infantile, as opposed to providing for them to be active players in life striving to reach their full potential. The devalued state of a human being produced by formal scheduling is something that we must not keep perpetuating.

Time Is More Than Money

The waste of student time resulting from taking courses that are of no interest to them, or requiring them to spend hours learning things they already know or could learn in minutes, may not be officially defined as a human rights violation, but it does amount to personal disrespect which when institutionalized is a systemic injustice.

We say time is money, but that is not true. It is far more than money. It is the currency of life. It is all that we really have and to waste someone else’s time is to be abusive.  We have made it taboo to steal people’s money, but we haven’t exercised the sophistication to make squandering a person’s time unacceptable.

Discrimination Against Minority Interests

Traditional schools have been described as obedience schools designed to produce uniformity and conformity, the goal being to turn out manageable factory workers who can tolerate boring days. That alone is bad for humanity, but it also runs counter to creating schools that are equitable and inclusive, schools where the celebration of diversity is genuine and natural.

The formally scheduled school day is one of the constructs that produces the uniformity and conformity that results in bullying those who don’t conform and which ultimately contributes to cultural genocide. The course selection process discriminates against minority interests. A foreign language course or a history course given from the perspective of another culture or race may never run because there are never enough students who opt for it. It is a fault of the design that the courses delivered tend to be the ones preferred by students of the dominant culture. Courses preferred by minorities are more likely to be cancelled, if they are even offered. When they are cancelled the students who opted for them are then slotted into second or third choices, or courses of no interest, which are most likely to be those preferred by students of the dominant culture.

This aspect of course options is not only bad for cultural or religious minorities. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth,” and for the white student whose truth is that his or her interests do not fall within the course options, his or her lived experience at school will have some similarities to what other minorities are suffering. Anybody, whatever his or her origins, who in some way does not fit the mold will experience what it is like to be discriminated against for being different.

Other Injustices

The above introduces how formal scheduling is inextricably bound up with social injustice, but it only begins to define the problem. An effect of the age-segregation created by it has students positioned as human beings in waiting, not invited to make their natural contributions to others, particularly the young. Pages could be written about adverse effects on young people’s brains when they are confined to seats in classrooms for endless hours and days. The impact on teachers and students by routinely assigning teachers to teach courses they know little about produces serious injustices. The possibilities for employers to provide quality co-op opportunities for students are a mere fraction of what they could provide if they were not so constrained by school schedules. Even the possibilities of something as simple as a field trip are minimal because of the concern that students can’t miss other teachers’ classes. With the changing world and employers calling on schools to do a better job at cultivating the 4Cs, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication, which cannot be properly addressed by a lockstep school model, and the growing awareness of children’s rights, schools really have no choice but to change.

What Is the Alternative?

The Self-Directed Education (SDE) model is gaining visibility. Boston College professor Peter Gray has defined it as Mother Nature’s Pedagogy and an organization he cofounded, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE), is spearheading the popularization of it. In his book Free to Learn, he argues that children are biologically wired to learn of their own volition everything they need to know to survive in the culture into which they are born.

The ideas he is bringing to our attention have been around for years, but they have largely been kept out of sight by proponents of the dominant school model or refuted by them with little second thought. His views reflect those of John Dewey who wrote about experiential learning and they appear influenced by the work of A.S. Neil who founded Summerhill. They radiate the compassion and sensitivity towards children that are trademarks of John Holt who is consider by many to be the father of homeschooling, and they reinforce the views of Jerry Mintz who founded the Alternative Education Resource Organization – AERO. Peter Gray’s son attended the non-coercive Sudbury Valley School. Its co-founder, Daniel Greenberg, says the school’s greatest gift to its students is to let them be, and Peter’s firsthand experience with Sudbury Valley has most clearly affected his thinking. There are many others who could be mentioned here and the words Patrick Farenga and Carlo Ricci used to describe John Holt, “A man who genuinely understood, trusted, and respected children,” apply to them all.

In an article titled Differences Between Self-Directed and Progressive Education, Peter Gray argues that Self-Directed Education is the wave of the future. It is a view held also by Daniel Pink, author of the best selling book Drive in which he says about the times we are in, “This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” He also says that you cannot take people who have been controlled all their lives and plop them into environments of undiluted autonomy. He says they need some kind of scaffolding to help them make the transition.

Progressive education can be looked at as scaffolding for the transition from traditional education to self-directed education. Experiential learning and deep learning, which are being explored by local school boards, are found in Self-Directed Education. When teachers retain some control over how these approaches to learning are implemented they fall within the category of progressive education. This control can serve as scaffolding to be slowly dismantled as students regain their innate sense of what it takes to be a self-directed learner. The use of the word “regain” in the foregoing sentence is to encourage people to do more than laugh at the saying, “I was such a great learner and then I went to school.”

The elimination of formal timetabling and age-segregation has the potential to expand the possibilities for immersing students in experiential and deep learning while creating a community of learners characterized by equity and inclusion.

Footnotes

[1] Vicki Abeles in her book (p, 56) and documentary film, both titled Beyond Measure, presents Larry Rosenstock’s view of the traditional school schedule.
[2] Ottawa Board of Education, Report no SU81-01 from the Superintendent of Schools Department to the Ottawa Board of Education: Report on Declining Enrolment in Ottawa Secondary Schools (Ottawa: OBE, 1981), 12-14. 
[3] OBE, Report SAA-85-04, 4.
[4] Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, Eastern Secondary Area Accommodation Review: Final Report (Ottawa: OCDSB, 2017), Appendix B.

Public Education: 
Over the past year and a half Uniting for Children and Youth (UCY) focused most of its efforts on raising awareness of a different vision for publicly funded education. Schools are places that determine the kinds of citizens our society creates. This is seen in the documentary film Schooling the World which states, “If you wanted to change a culture in a single generation, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children.” Abraham Lincoln made a similar statement saying, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” If we want a population of mentally healthy, competent and contributing adults, we need to provide children and youth with appropriate learning environments. The competitive, authoritarian systems common throughout public education over the past decades are not working. Evidence of this is apparent in the state of people’s mental health and in voter turn out. People are struggling and disengaged. This is not what we want to keep perpetuating.

Larry Rosenstock, a founder and spokesperson for the High Tech High network of charter schools says that the greatest impediment to educational innovation is the formally scheduled school day. Peter Gray, a founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) points out that despite the need for people to be independent, lifelong learners, it is almost impossible to find a school jurisdiction that has a course or program specifically designed to develop the skills required for self-directed learning.

UCY will therefore have as a top priority in the time leading up to the 2022 Ottawa school board elections the task of building awareness of real alternatives to current practices, how promising ideas can be responsibly tested, and how public schools can incrementally transition to a different model through non-coercive processes paced to our readiness to adopt change.

Youth Empowerment: 
A factor attributed to why there has not been more progress on the climate change problem is that environmental groups have remained too disconnected. To help address this problem and to express a symbolic “Thank-you” to all youth who are expressing their climate concerns, UCY sponsored 32 youth leaders from various environmental action groups to attend the 2019 Ecology Ottawa Gala. These are youth who are actively working to ensure that theirs and future generations have a safe planet on which to live out their lives.

Youth climate action is not the only important work being done by youth. Many are involved in other actions designed to improve the lives of young people, but as with climate change, progress has been slow because groups advocating for youth have been too disconnected. The founding purpose of UCY, as its name implies, is to help connect the groups and people who advocate for youth. It includes adults as well as children and youth who have a focus on youth empowerment, who see children and youth in terms of the definitions provided by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The trend is towards seeing young people as community assets and resources to be included as equal partners in making decisions that affect them.

Figure 1 presents a diagram of how the snowflake model described in Organizing, People, Power, Change can be adapted to manage the many connections among groups advocating for children and youth. It represents ground-breaking work designed to preserve the autonomy of individual groups while keeping the flow of information to a manageable level. It is in essence an experiment investigating how we might better operate as a democratic society.

The goals of UCY are noble, its participants are authentic, and the commitment is strong. Contact us at UCY to learn more or to become an active participant.

Note: Figure 1 is designed to spark imagination. The snowflakes of individuals have been applied to only a few of the included organizations, but they expand out from all of the organizations according to how each manages its followers.

Free Admission for Youth to the
2019 Ecology Ottawa Gala
November 20th, 2019 at Lansdowne Park

Uniting for Children and Youth (UCY) is providing a number of young people with free admission to the Ecology Ottawa Gala, November 20th at Lansdowne Park. It is a symbolic “thank-you” to youth generally for the strong leadership they are showing in the fight to address climate change. If you are a teen who is passionate about the future of our planet and would like to attend the Gala, please contact Richard at UCY, and plan to bring a friend so that you have with you the comfort of someone you know. The Gala is a wonderful opportunity to network with like-minded people. It is hoped that youth from across the city will take advantage of this offer and will be stimulated by the energy of other youth and adults they meet. The number of free admissions to the Gala through UCY is limited. If you wish to take advantage of this offer, please get your request to attend to Richard as soon as possible. Email richard@ucyottawa.com.

To Adults Reading This:
Would you kindly share it with youth you know who might be interested in attending?

We are encouraging other groups to also sponsor youth to attend the Gala. Please contact UCY if your involved with sponsoring youth so that we can arrange for them to meet with other young people.

Email richard@ucyottawa.com.

Four years is how long students spend in high school, and the current draft of the OCDSB 2019-2023 Strategic Plan suggests that they, and younger students, are going to have four more years of the same old. The draft lacks signs of fresh thinking and gives little hope that significant progress will be made on pressing issues over the next four years. The OCDSB needs to return to the drawing board with a renewed determination to produce a plan that gives hope our students will see better days.

There are people in the board with the vision and desire to make a difference, but they need public support to amplify their voices. They need parents and other stakeholders to invest time to learn about the current draft plan, to formulate their opinions about it, and to provide the board with their feedback. My response, linked here, that I recently shared with board leaders could help others to clarify their thoughts on the draft.

School boards have a major impact on society. Abraham Lincoln said the philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next. It is not only the philosophy that schools affect. They impact the health of a nation, its people’s sense of well-being and their readiness to participate in the decisions that affect them. For this, people need to make their voices heard, and because children learn from what they see, they  need to see adults exercising good citizenship.

The board wants to drive cultural shifts in the areas of innovation, caring and social responsibility. Its draft strategic plan suggests that it also needs to drive a cultural shift at head office. By telling our school board trustees, board executive,  principals, teachers, school council members and their OCASC representatives what we think about the board’s draft plan, we are acting in the interests of children and youth and a secure future.

For those who know our schools need to be different for today’s students, it is a time to rally, a time to stand up for children and youth.

These links are to OCDSB information on its draft strategic plan:

Something Significant Is Taking Hold.

Since March 4^th, when community leaders met with Ottawa-Carleton District School Board officials, much has transpired. Here is a list of some tangibles. (PDF format available here.)

Actions Pursuing Equity, Inclusion and Youth Empowerment in
Their Communities and Schools

If you would like to be involved in any of the actions listed below, please email contact@ucyottawa.com and someone will follow-up with you.

1. A follow-up statement on the March 4^th meeting was created and made available through the Uniting for Children and Youth – UCY website. It is essentially a working document.
2. A UCY blog post, “Something Significant Is Happening,” was created to convey that we have a moment to make a difference and we need to seize it.
3. A second meeting of only local leaders was held March 20^th. A statement arising from it, titled Youth Agency, is also available through the UCY website.
4. This document, “So Much Is Happening,” has been created and shared as a UCY blog item.
5. The Equity Ambassadors. An initiative is underway to create a group of around 8 representatives of diverse identities (communities) to represent their constituency. Each representative/ambassador would understand what their group wants and would bring their community’s wishes forward to guide the actions of us all. This initiative is pictured as putting our choir together, “singing one song with many harmonies”.
6. Pursuing the possibilities: A group will be meeting March 25^th to define the benefits of alternate schools and self-directed learning, and to clarify the kinds of pilot programs needed to shed light on how to provide these benefits for all students. See Youth Agency for more on this initiative.
7. Pursuing equity:
   • 2019 Black Students Forum: On March 25^th the OCDSB will be hosting its forum designed to hear from its black students. It presents a wonderful opportunity to start a sharing of their stories for the benefit of students everywhere. We have people attending who will be looking for ways to help spread the students’ stories to give them lasting value. This is the start of an effort to have the stories of all sorts of students shared with others. We have students suffering in silence who don’t know how to articulate their pain. It is immensely reassuring for them to learn of others with whom they can identify and to see how they articulate their feelings.
   • Expanding the Role Models: Even today the very vast majority of people pursuing teaching careers are white, successful products of traditional schooling. It makes public education a white institution in our multicultural society, and it is self-perpetuating – non-white students are less likely to see teaching as a career for themselves when they don’t have role models with which they can identify. A group is forming to consider how to address this problem.
8. Promoting youth agency and community
   • Youth Ottawa has done amazing work for young people in Ottawa, and meetings are being held to determine how to support it and expand its programs. The programs exist so it is a matter of securing the funds to sustain them and to provide for more students to benefit from them. May 23rd is the date for its Youth Action Showcase that will be taking place at the Ottawa City Hall (Jean Piggot Place) from 9 am to 11 am. Its purpose is to promote youth voice to key stakeholders and celebrate youth civic engagement projects undertaken through partnerships with all four Ottawa school boards. It will be like a science fair crossed with a speed dating event, but for civic engagement projects and for matching youth with community leaders and decision makers. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=TvwMueV6dPM for a glimpse of what to expect. We are asking people to encourage their school board staffs and trustees to attend the event to help generate visions of how to take learning beyond the classroom walls and into the community where it can do some good.
   • Ecology Ottawa and partners: We are beginning to see other community groups that are not generally associated with children and youth inviting them to be equal partners in this life, to participate as people with much to contribute right now. Evidence of the contributions they have to make is found with Greta Thunberg and the youth climate action movement she has created. (See the “It’s Literally Our Future” link below.) Ecology Ottawa, in partnership with CAN-Rac, Just Food, OREC, Ottawa Greenspace Alliance, Ottawa Healthy Transportation Coalition, Sustainable Eastern Ontario, and the Ottawa Peace and Environment Resource Centre, is launching a program March 27^th titled Youth Climate Ambassadors. To attend the launch, register here. It is a year long project dedicated to equipping 40 young people from across the city of Ottawa with the skills and knowledge necessary to take on climate change at a local level. The program is designed to cultivate the next generation of environmental leaders, foster deep connections with the diverse range of local actors on climate change, and engage a large number of youth and the general public in youth-driven, peer-to-peer engagement.
9. Citizenship
   Efforts are underway to cultivate with young people and adults a stronger sense of what it is to be a good democratic citizen. We have two top experts on citizenship living in our community. One is David Newing, co founder and chair of the United Citizens Initiative- UCI. He recently published the book titled: Global Citizenship in the 21st Century – A Leap of Faith to a Better World. The other is Joel Westheimer, professor and university research chair in democracy and education at the University of Ottawa and education columnist for CBC Radio. His most recent book is titled: “What Kind of Citizen?: Educating Our Children for the Common Good.” Ottawa, the heart of one of the world’s strongest democracies with experts like David and Joel in our midst, is the ideal place create an example of how to create solid democracies that can easily withstand the despotic desires of deranged power mongers.
10. Awareness building: The Ottawa Public Education Remake Initiative – OPERI and World Youth Matters Media – WYMmedia are in discussions about how to bring to public attention what people are saying and doing about improving the lives of young people. As part of this effort a screening of the soon to be released film “Self Taught” will be provided for the Ottawa public in the fall. This may be turned into an all day conference for youth and include keynote experts and panels with youth who have experienced self-directed learning environments. Plans are being formulated by WYMmedia to hold a national conference, followed later by an international conference to bring world attention to what we can do better for children and youth, and to put Ottawa on the world stage as a true leader in the quest to have the rights of children and youth respected by all.

“It’s Literally Our Future”
http://time.com/5554775/youth-school-climate-change-strike-action/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2019032110am&xid=newsletter-brief&eminfo=%7b%22EMAIL%22%3a%22Peza0Al48t4vxcpwN%2biPS96HGpWbRE2a%22%2c%22BRAND%22%3a%22TD%22%2c%22CONTENT%22%3a%22Newsletter%22%2c%22UID%22%3a%22TD_TBR_3B68F118-5A1D-4AD4-897E-E04DE6CC64B5%22%2c%22SUBID%22%3a%22125388608%22%2c%22JOBID%22%3a%22944194%22%2c%22NEWSLETTER%22%3a%22THE_BRIEF%22%2c%22ZIP%22%3a%22%22%2c%22COUNTRY%22%3a%22CAN%22%7d

Ottawa has much to be proud of.
Let’s help all of our children and youth to be proud of their Ottawa.

On March 4^th, 2019, something significant was started. Thirty community leaders met with officials of the Ottawa Carleton District School Board – OCDSB. Their purpose was to address issues of equity, inclusion and youth empowerment. The OCDSB officials were top decision makers, Lynn Scott, chair of the board of trustees; Camille Williams-Taylor, the director of the board; Dorothy Baker, the superintendent of curriculum services, and Michele Giroux, executive officer of corporate services.

The diversity of the leaders who came together to advocate for children and youth makes the meeting significant. Indigenous, Muslim, black, brown and white people were all represented, as were homeless youth, struggling youth, and youth who are doing fine, but who could be doing so much better. There were also people from Ottawa’s three major universities. Together they represent the voices of a very large number of concerned citizens.

Conditions within the school board at this moment add to the significance of the meeting. The board of trustees is newly elected and it is in the process of drafting its strategic plan for the next four years. The board has been accused in the past of being disingenuous in its consultations with the public, but this is not a big concern at this time. Building Brighter Futures Together 2019-2023 outlines the board’s commendable efforts to be transparent and to hear what people want to see in the new strategic plan, and there are other signs contributing to positive feelings. The March 4^th meeting was originally scheduled for February 13^th, but a snowstorm forced its postponement. The board was most accommodating with the rescheduling, and when concern was expressed that input from the meeting might now be received too late for due consideration in creating the strategic plan, Lynn Scott, whose integrity has never been questioned, was quick to reply. “Regarding the strategic plan,” she wrote, “the work is not proceeding so fast that we won’t be able to take the group’s views into consideration, in my opinion.  The strategic plan is very important, and very important that we get it right.” Another sign that equity and inclusion will be a priority over the next four years is the new director, Camille Williams-Taylor. Camille joined the board in January and in her previous role as a superintendent with the Durham District School Board, she gained considerable experience working on the issue of equity. She is also a person of colour stepping into the top job in a board where any colour at all has been hard to find. It is a sign that change is in the air.

The change in the air is more than local. A book being studied by students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa gives scope to what is happening. Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World sounds like it is about technology, but it is really about equity, inclusion and what voices are going to be heard. An understanding of the significance of the OCDSB March 4^th meeting can be gained by putting it into some context with what the author Ramesh Srinivasan shares through the book.

Two terms he uses first need defining. One is “contact zone,” described as a space where disparate cultures or communities encounter one another. The second is “postcolonial moment”, a time that interrupts power relations that favour people of privilege and redistribute authority. “Both,” in the words of Ramesh, “describe a moment where inequality can be recognized and confronted in the hope of changing the future.” This defines the significance of the March 4^th meeting. The contact zone is the OCDSB. The postcolonial moment is being created by the disparate communities represented at the meeting. It is a coming together of people with the potential to change the future in a significantly positive way. We need for all to embrace this moment.

A report on the March 4^th meeting is available here: Equity, Inclusion and Youth Empowerment.

Following is a message I sent to my MP Mona Fortier this morning urging her to support efforts to take advantage of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent to provide equity, inclusion and empowerment for all young people. The more that our elected officials know about what we, their constituents, want, the more likely they are to act on our behalf. Kindly consider sending a similar note to your MP.
 

I know that you as my MP can help!

With the federal fiscal year end just over a month away, and 2019 budget deliberations in full swing, Black Canadians and our allies are asking how the promised actions contained in Budget 2018 are actually making a difference in the lives of Blacks in Canada.

With the election around the corner, many rightly concerned about empty promises are asking: Where’s the beef?

Blacks know that our 3-11% of eligible voters – in certain communities are making a huge difference!!

And the numbers are growing!!

Last January 30, 2018, Prime Minister Trudeau, on behalf of the Government of Canada, endorsed the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (UN-DPAD), thereby committing to address the UN’s’ 2017 recommendations to improve the condition of people who identify as Black and/or of African descent in Canada.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwdQ_7dQOhU

Since then, many Black community organizations, community leaders, and individuals, have engaged each other, the Federal MP Black Caucus, Ministers, opposition parties and federal unions to better understand what this endorsement could mean to many Black Canadians disadvantaged daily by the systemic oversight and unconscious bias the PM referenced in his January statement.

What is the status of the $10m projected for Black mental health initiatives?

What has been the level of community awareness, outreach and bureaucratic line of sight placed on the $42 million allotted for anti-racism (Black) initiatives?

How far has the bureaucracy progressed regarding disaggregation of data in relation to justice and sentencing, housing, employment, mental health, and federal procurement/disbursements?

Blacks haven’t heard a word on any of this!!

Black Canadians know and applauded the Government’s measurable actions following its acknowledgment of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Persons and the apology and funding given for the internment of Japanese Canadians. We would like to see similar actions to support Black communities.

Each of you as MPs can help!

Say no to a feeling of a double standard being used against Black Canadians.

What we are requesting as a first and fair step given what we’re experiencing thus far is to appoint a special adviser (UN-DPAD Champion) on African-Canadian issues during UN-DPAD.

The champion’s role and position would be similar to MP Randy Boissonnault’s on LGBTQ+ issues.

The appointment of a UN decade champion will help the Government of Canada act on its commitment to the International Decade and address the very real bureaucratic stagnation that many of these laudable commitments are experiencing.

Each year, the champion could submit an annual report to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Black Parliamentary Caucus that addresses current issues, findings, progress and recommendations.

To support both the Champion request – and address the stagnation – expressed above, Black communities have been mobilizing in various ways – big and small, at kitchen tables and in neighborhoods across the country.

Many recently came together at the 2nd Annual National Black Canadian Summit, February 1-4 in Ottawa.

On February 24th, there will be another online conversation across Canada on the extent to which promises to Black Canadians have been kept .

We’d be delighted if you can come on board in working with us as so many of us have worked with you.

Ask the Govt, caucus members and or cabinet to take this straightforward action.

Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democrats, Greens…our priority – starting now, is to not be taken for granted.

We are ready to work and support those whose actions best align with the interests of our one-million Black Canadian citizens.

I and others would welcome a response and an opportunity to discuss these matters further at your earliest possible convenience.

Sincerely,

Unleashing Potential, Harnessing Possibilities

“This report is written in plain English, in a style that is designed to be inviting and inclusive of all stakeholders. Imagination, creativity and innovation, on which this report focuses, can best be achieved when all stakeholders are encouraged to provide their unique insights and contributions. As today’s school communities extend well beyond a classroom’s walls (and, thanks to technology, well beyond our geographical borders), this report has been written and designed so that anyone—regardless of whether they work in the field of education or not—can easily read it, understand what it means for them, and join in the conversation.”

These are the opening words of the OCDSB document Unleashing Potential, Harnessing Possibilities referred to in the Ottawa Citizen article titled Ottawa’s public school board needs a plan that inspires published Friday, January 25th, 2019. This document can be seen as a plan that inspires, but the article is saying that the OCDSB has not delivered on it. Producing a document like this is the easy part of a change effort. Effectively implementing it is the hard part, and as the above excerpt indicates it requires the involvement of all stakeholders.

The OCDSB has at times been accused of being less than genuine about listening to stakeholders. True or not, if this is the perception, then people will tend not to participate in public consultations. Given the low voter turnout rate with the recent school board elections, and the lack of parental involvement in school councils, it appears that the OCDSB has a huge problem with people thinking that their voices don’t matter. 

In June 2018, two professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education released the results of a survey they did of public opinion about education in Ontario. They found only fifty percent of people were somewhat or very satisfied with their schools. This means that fifty percent are not satisfied, and we need to hear from them to create a public education system that is equitable and inclusive for everyone. For this to happen, marginalized and disenfranchised people need to believe that they will be heard and respected if they speak out. We not only work to improve our schools by genuinely listening to everyone and fully considering all views, we work to cultivate a healthier democracy, one that is far more participatory.

In her book Education, Student Rights and the Charter, Ailsa Watkinson  looks at how to properly apply the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to education in Canada. She says it requires a change in attitude and that, “A change in attitude requires those who have the power to effect change to engage in reflective thinking. . . . According to John Dewey,” she writes, “reflective thinking requires open-mindedness, responsibility, and whole-heartedness.” Dewey describes open-mindedness as the “active desire to listen to more sides than one; to give heed to the facts from whatever source they come; to give full attention to alternative possibilities; and to recognize the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us.” If those in the OCDSB with decision making power exercise reflective thinking in this way, then the public will become more engaged, more potential will be unleashed, and more possibilities will be harnessed. The right attitude will lead to finally addressing the problems of equity and inclusion, and establishing learning environments that everyone finds very satisfying.

If you want to control, you design organizations for accountability.
If you want to accomplish, you design for commitment.
– Tapscott and Caston, Paradigm Shift

Change is happening like never before, and according to John Petersen, futurist of the Arlington Institute, we can only make the best of it by thinking outside the box. Ken Robinson expresses a similar view in his video Changing Education Paradigms.

From the study of paradigm shifts, much has been learned that we need to apply to education. When a dominant paradigm is proving to be inadequate despite the protracted efforts of its most able disciples to solve its problems, other paradigms emerge in a battle to replace it, and proponents of the dominant paradigm will do what they can to keep contenders at bay.

It has been found that it is generally the young and the new who usher in a new paradigm, and it is easy to understand why. The people in charge of the old education paradigm are its successful products. It has worked for them and they consequently believe it can work for everyone. For them to adopt a new paradigm, they need to go through a painful process of acknowledging that much of what they have conscientiously spent their careers doing has not served students as well as once thought. We can certainly feel compassion for those caught in this dilemma, but we must not let it diminish our commitment to students and a just society.

Some disciples of dominant paradigms that are proving to be inadequate are relatively quick to recognize the benefits of a new paradigm, others take longer, and some never get outside their box. It stands to reason that those slowest to change are those who have been longest in the old paradigm and who have reached its highest ranks. In other words, the people most in control of our old school systems are possibly the ones most unlikely to lead the transition to a better paradigm. Various sayings exist that make this point. We’ve all heard it said that science progresses when old scientists die. Marshall McLuhan said we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish, meaning that if all we really know is what we swim in everyday, we likely have no idea that there are fresher waters elsewhere. It has also been said that the worst people to clean up a mess are the ones who created it. The message is that the people in charge of education today are not the ones we should expect to lead a transition to a better model.

John Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down wrote, “It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.” It alludes to the competition between paradigms, but it doesn’t mean that proponents of an old paradigm are necessarily oblivious to a different way of doing things. In the 16^th century for example, people knew of Copernicus’s theories, but rejected them believing that if the earth moved at the speed he said it did, then when people jumped into the air the earth would move out from under them before they came down. There is plenty of evidence that today’s education leaders know that the democratic learning model is a contender to replace the dominant Prussian model, but they simply don’t get how students can be responsible for their own learning and equal partners in decisions that affect them. The misconception is similar to the one women have had to battle. People once said in all earnestness that women could never operate effectively in the boardrooms of big business. It’s all about opportunity. Given the chance to prove themselves, they proved that they were perfectly capable. When students are given a proper chance to direct their learning, they demonstrate not only that adults can trust them with the task, but also that we err if they are not given that responsibility.

Before leaving the arguments that question the ability of today’s education leaders to fix what many call a broken system, consider the following quote.

“Today, on every side, however, there is heard a growing demand for a fresh look at education in Ontario. The Committee was told of inflexible programs, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization, and mistaken aims of education. We heard from alienated students, frustrated teachers, irate parents, and concerned educators. Many public organizations and private individuals have told us of their growing discontent and lack of confidence in a school system which, in their opinion, has become outmoded and is failing those it exists to serve.”

This is a statement found in Living and Learning, the ground shaking report published by the Ontario Government in 1968 when Bill Davis was the education minister. For many observers, it rings as true today as it did fifty years ago, and their view is supported by the 2018 survey of public opinion on schools, conducted by professors Doug Hart and Arlo Kempf of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. They found that only “Half of the public are somewhat or very satisfied with the school system in general.” We all know how easy it is to find people who are discontented with pubic education, but the survey puts a number on it. Fifty percent of those surveyed are less than satisfied, and a closer look might reveal that a large number of those who say they are satisfied are saying it for the wrong reasons. Students who appear to be well served by the system are often overstressed pleasers obsessed with achieving personal success. They appear to be well off because they are on track to get into colleges and universities, but real success is about much more. It requires knowing yourself and it is only genuine when everyone is succeeding in a climate of well-being. The current system gives lip service to this, but it doesn’t deliver.

For half a century, and actually much more, talented educators have applied themselves to solving the problems of public education, yet the problems persist because they are working from the perspective of the old paradigm. For evidence of this consider that the only tangible result of the OCDSB’s five year study of its secondary school program was to create a second International Baccalaureate program for students on the west side of town. A forward looking document created by the board, Unleashing Potential, Harnessing Possibilities, was prominent at the time, yet the best the board was able to do was to provide more of the same. The leaders consulted the public, but they interpreted what was workable or not workable through their own lenses.

­The Copernican Revolution was not like the paradigm shift being called for in education. It was all or none. Either you believed the earth was the center of the universe, or you didn’t, but this kind of flip-flop is not required with the democratic revolution in education. Schools can become democratic incrementally. Each small step towards non-coercive learning environments can be studied to determine the next best step. Through this process it might be discovered that our best option is something a little more controlled than the best known totally non-coercive Sudbury Valley School. The challenge confronting educators and their communities today is to embark on the discovery process of determining if and where the ideal may fall between coercive and non-coercive learning environments, and not to settle for better until it becomes clearly the best.

The current school authorities, described above as perhaps not the best to implement fundamental change, remain essential for what they know about their systems. An incremental transition to a new paradigm requires people who have a deep knowledge of how school boards operate. A transition left to the futurists risks a backlash that sends everyone scurrying back to the old way of doing things, as the above Alan King cartoon portrays. A paradigm shift in education will occur most effectively if we apply the lessons learned from previous paradigm shifts and we don’t let it become a destructive competition. We need it to occur as a constructive collaboration between opposing views in order to find with the least possible disruption the best solution for students and the world they are inheriting. The grounded theory approach to change mentioned on the UCY homepage is a way to approach change when the end result is not fully known.

The short video with Peter Senge and Justin Reich that was also mentioned on the UCY homepage helps to create the vision of how to invite real change.

Not long ago we looked south of the border to what we thought was a stable democracy, but what we see now is cause for alarm. It has led many of us to question the health of our own Canadian democracy, and here in Ottawa the signs are not good. It might be said that we are doing little more than pretending to be democratic, and this is no more evident than in the results of the recent Ottawa-Carleton District School Board trustee elections.

Despite concern over the growth of the far right populist movement occurring around the world, people in Ottawa did not demonstrate at the polls that they are any more concerned than usual. Consistent with four years earlier, only 40% of eligible voters turned out to exercise their democratic duty, and of those who did, there is, as there was four years ago, ample evidence that many of them were far from informed when they cast their votes. In one riding for example, two new candidates, Elaine Hayles and Travis Croken were running to unseat incumbent Mark Fisher. Fearing that she and Travis, who were similar in their views, would hand Mark a win by splitting the vote, Elaine suspended her campaign early and asked her supporters to vote for Travis. As it turned out, Elaine received 33.7% of the vote, more than twice that of Travis who got only 15.9%, and Mark cruised to victory with 50.4%. Under these circumstances, people may find the results surprising, but close observers don’t see it that way. For them, the results simply confirm their view that even among the small number of people who get out to vote, many of them know little about the candidates.

It might be said that Mark had a majority and would have won anyway, but that is not necessarily the case. Name recognition, which tends to favour incumbents, could have explained the difference, but this diminishes when people are more informed. In Zone 7, there were only two candidates running, Jennifer Jennekens and Kim Woods. Neither was an incumbent. Jennifer won the riding with 52.7% of the vote compared to Kim’s 47.3%. Jennifer had run in the previous election and therefore may have had more name recognition than Kim. She was also first alphabetically on the ballot, which is another advantage when voters are uninformed, and so it is fair to wonder if Jennifer won because of her platform, or because people were not paying attention. If you add to this the fact that candidates in addition to Elaine Hayles who had suspended their campaigns, or who were essentially “no shows” during the elections, received in the range of a 1000 votes or more, a valid conclusion to be drawn is that our democracy is not alive and well.

Putting this concern for our community having a democratic deficiency into context with public education, we might say, “Well little wonder.” We school children in an autocratic environment where they have little control over what happens to them. It conditions them to think that their views don’t matter and that other people who presumably know more will look after them. By keeping children infantile in this way they are thought to be more manageable, but they may never grow up. This is what a 40% turnout of uninformed voters suggests is happening. The health of our democracy requires that our schools treat students as democratic citizens. There is no mystery in how to do it. There is plenty of information on the democratic learning model. What people find mystifying is how to transition from our autocratic system to a more democratic one. The key is to establish the kinds of conditions in public education that allow for a fundamental shift like that from landlines to cellphones. Provide choices; make them equally known and accessible, and let students decide with their parents their best option. The speed of change has to be paced with the ability of schools to provide alternatives in much the same way that organizations must manage growth, but by taking full advantage of the educational benefits of technology, a major transformation could occur relatively quickly.

The Continuing Effort of Uniting for Children and Youth

The role of the voter does not end on election day. Trustees who intend to address specific concerns of the voters need to be supported if they are to overcome inevitable obstacles. We also need to hold them accountable for what they have promised. UCY will be working to provide this support and oversight. Please subscribe to Uniting for Children and Youth to help us perform this task.

UCY is building awareness of the shift taking place from the industrial age education model to one more appropriate for today. The more that we understand what is happening in education, the more we will be able to provide students with the educational opportunities they need to succeed in the new age, while maintaining their health and sense of well-being. We use the UCY blog, Facebook page and website, along with various events to inform people of innovative ideas and the potential for new solutions to old problems. By looking beyond how things have always been done, we can begin to imagine the exciting possibilities for learning in this age of technology. Subscribe to UCY to join us on this journey.

Repost from September 9, 2018

Following are eight fundamental problems with the industrial model upon which traditional education is based. As we become more aware of these problems, the support for creative and innovative teachers and principals will grow. Ottawa residents, help us to inform voters of the need to get beyond industrial model schools. Make this election year the turning point, the point when we systematically undertake real change. Follow developments in the lead-up to the October 22nd school board trustee elections. Help us to have more people than ever going to the polls informed of educational issues and the candidates most likely to address them effectively.

Eight Fundamental Problems
This list is a sampling. Readers are invited to add other problems or make comments below.

1. Children as young as 5 are being made to feel inferior.

Children entering grade 1 can be almost a whole year younger than their peers, yet they are all measured according to standardized curriculum outcomes. The age difference is huge and can leave the younger children disadvantaged and feeling inferior for no reason other than their birthdate. There are many examples of schools that do not discriminate by age. There is a solution to the problem.

2. Schools are killing creativity.

Using a creativity test developed by NASA, scientists found that 98% of 1600 – 4 and 5 year old children in the study fell within the genius category of imagination. When these children were 10 years old they were retested and the number in the genius category dropped to 30%. The number dropped to 12% when this group was tested again at 15 years of age. The article containing this information asked, “What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling?” The answer given was 2%.

This concern that schools are killing creativity is the topic of Sir Ken Robinson’s most watched Ted Talk of all time. The World Economic Forum expressed a similar view in a recently published article titled Education systems can stifle creative thought: Here’s how to do things differently.

An IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEO’s from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide puts the value of creativity into some perspective. They believe that “more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision – successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.”

Creativity is listed along with critical thinking, communication and collaboration as comprising the 4C’s. These qualities, believed to be essential for successful living in today’s world, are poorly cultivated in traditional schools. EdLeader21 is pioneering how to develop the 4C’s in schools.

3. The lack of movement is resulting in kids being labelled ADHD.

Maria Montessori stressed the importance of movement, believing that curtailing it threatened the child’s personality and sense of wellbeing. Finnish schools give students more recess time than most North American schools. Witnessing the good results in Finland, a Texas school gave its students three times more recess with the result that ADHD became far less of a problem.

La Fondation Momentum Jeunesse/Youth Momentum Foundation is an Ottawa/Outaouais organization promoting the mental health of young people. It recognizes the negative health affects of children being too sedentary and is helping to alleviate the problems by placing spin bikes in classrooms. It gives kids who feel they need to get up a move a way to get some exercise.

Other groups working locally to ease this problem are the Healthy and Active Living and Obesity (HALO) branch of the CHEO Research Institute, Forest Schools and Active and Safe Routes to School.

4. Physical and mental illness are caused by a lack of control over one’s life.

A recently published book The Self-Driven Child helps to expand thinking around this problem. Elsewhere, a lack of control over one’s life is being identified as a major contributor to stress, and high levels of stress lead to physical and mental ill health. Traditional schools are controlling. Students have little say in making decisions that affect them. Many adults think that young people lack the experience to make good decisions, but students attending democratic schools have proven otherwise. They show that they are capable of making good decisions and they learn how to be good democratic citizens when they participate in meaningful decision making.

5. Age-segregation is a huge waste of our best learning resource.

We’ve all seen it. Children learn a great deal from older children. Daniel Greenberg, a founder of the Sudbury Valley School, said when asked to explain the success of the school, “Age-mixing is our secret weapon.”

Not as obvious is what older children learn from younger ones, but it’s equally important. They learn about empathy and caring. They practice their communication skills when explaining things to younger people. They solidify their knowledge by sharing it with others, re the adage: “If you want to really learn something – teach it.” They improve their oral reading skills when they read to younger children, and all of these interactions help to boost their self-image.

We need to rethink schools so that we take advantage of this great learning resource.

6. The lengths of the school day and school year are out of sync with the needs of today’s families.

The lengths of the school day and school year simply don’t fit the needs of modern families. Working parents are often burdened with the need to find before and after school care, and their kids get shuffled from one place to another. Increasingly, community schools are offering before and after school programs, but children still get shunted from one program to another. It’s a problem with no easy solution in traditional schools, but by changing the school model new solutions become available.

The same is true with the length of the school year. It doesn’t fit the needs of modern families. Working parents have the headache of trying to figure out what to do with their kids for two summer months when schools are closed. Under a different model, year-round schools become much more of a possibility. Year-round schooling is not more of the same kind of schooling we have now. How it would look is for people to imagine at this stage. The Sudbury Valley School, summer camps, world schoolers, unschoolers, family holidays anytime, student exchanges, coop experiences of any length, and all sorts of other things amount to what some imaginative people call “the infinite possibilities”.

7. Top students are not tops in the workplace.

Alfie Kohn and Robert Sternberg are two highly respected people who warn against thinking students with good grades are doing fine. In a short, but impactful video, Kohn talks about how students can become fixated on getting good grades and how they can lose something as individuals and as learners.

In a Scientific American article, Sternberg says, “Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons.” He argues “that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people; we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.”

8. The exclusion of parents.

Many parents would like to be more involved in their children’s education, but schools offer little in between. Either the children go to school full time or they get homeschooled.  Liberated Learners demostrates how to combine the two in ways that suit students and families. The possibilities for schools to be working in better partnership with families are greatly expanded once we get beyond the constraints of the industrial model of schooling.

Getting rid of formal scheduling is a key to solving these problems. Small pilot programs in community schools involving students, teachers and parents who want to be pioneers of a new age of learning is a sensible way to proceed. This is how real innovation can begin.

Of note is the Canadian Coalition of Self-Directed Learning. It’s a group of eight public schools located in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. These are good examples of people pushing the boundaries.

Lessons from the Walter Baker Pool

and

What Are Schools For?

by Adele Blair

As a retired, senior lady awaiting an Aquafit class recently, I watched with nostalgic memories of my own babies, a group of twenty something, swimsuit clad moms, carry their cherished infants on their hips, confidently into the warmth of a shallow pool, at the Walter Baker Sports Centre, in Nepean, Ontario. With a one on one ratio, a small class of moms and babies, and a sweet, young swim instructor, the class commenced. The babies felt secure in the arms of the most significant human in their world. The moms felt safe, along with their children, with the small class, the spacious shallow warm pool, and an outgoing, well trained instructor, whose smile could light up the entire place , even if the power failed!

And the focus was on teaching the babies that being in the water was fun, enjoyable, safe and that mom loved every minute of it too! They were towed around as if pulled by a tugboat, swooshed back and forth while laughing like crazy, and engaged in a splashing game which drenched everyone in the end, as if they had run through a car wash, or danced in the rain!

Every one of these babies had an amazing physical, emotional, and intellectual experience as they began the Learn To Swim program, which could extend through the duration of their childhood, through the sequentially prescribed steps, which teach the skills needed to become a competent swimmer, well into the teen years, when a National Lifeguard Certification can be obtained.

I saw my own children climb those steps for a while, and then leap over the standard progression, into the Nepean Swim Club, where they became world class, national or provincial finalists and champions.

I was given to comparing the success of this programming, now so established and proven to teach children to become competent and safe swimmers, and for those with interest, talent and supportive families to become world level athletes, to the elementary school system in which I served, as a teacher, for a 31 year career, and in which my children were educated.

It helped me answer the question “What are Schools For?”, with clarity and ease, at least for children under 9 or 10 years of age, in this expression of ideas.

Consider this. At the pool, the stage is set for babies to love and enjoy the water experience. They have the security of warm and supportive humans nearby, who will protect and keep them from any harm. PLAY, in this environment builds a love for the activity, and learning how to swim, right from the get go!

The environment is perfect, with loads of space, a child centred determined amount of time at the activity, the ideal adult/ child ratio and the aim to establish emotional, physical and intellectual readiness for swimming instruction. And it is accomplished with all these ducks in a row, with PLAY.

Educators have been taught for years the philosophies of great thinkers like Piaget, Jamison and Montessori, that “ Play is the work of childhood.” In my experience, approaching teaching almost anything to children is best done through play, both free play, and structured play, designed for a purpose. Sometimes the play can be alone, sometimes with an adult, sometimes with one other child, and sometimes in groups.

In the swimming instruction program, I note that each level has a clearly defined, absolutely comprehended by everyone, list of tasks that the child MUST complete, by himself, without any help from anyone, in order to pass, and be assigned to the next level above. No child moves ahead to harder tasks, without 100% mastery of the skills in the class before. If, for example, the child must swim alone 25 metres, with no help from any device, instructor or parent, he/she MUST be able to do it, or he/she MUST take the class again.

In the swim classes, no one moves on who has not mastered the required skill. No one gets passed because he/she attends all the sessions. No one gets passed because his/her parent complains about the teacher. No one gets passed because the parent complains so much, the instructor caves and checks the pass box on the evaluation. No one is passed because his/her group all tried very hard. No one gets passed because he/she is of a particular race or culture, or comes from a disadvantaged background. No one gets passed because he/she might feel badly about needing more time than others to learn the skill.

Indeed when a child gets passed from one level to the next in the swim program, EVERYONE knows that the child can do exactly what he/she needed to do to meet the standard, and that he/she did it on his/her own. EVERYONE can be completely assured he/she is ready and capable to tackle the challenges of the next level. EVERYONE can rely on the truth here, that the child’s skills are strong at every stage and the foundation provided will allow him/her to progress confidently, from one level to the next, and then on to the ones which follow those.

At some point, some children seem to just get it, fast and well, and surge ahead of their group. Their skills develop at a breakneck pace and they fly through the water with ease. They love the activity and are really exceptionally good at it. Many of these kids drop out of the step by step programs, join a swim club and rise rapidly through the ranks of competitive swimmers, who develop this sport to the limits of their time, interest, ability and parental ability to support it. For some, it sets them on a path for a career choice or lifetime recreational activity.

For others, the slow, steady progression through the levels is best for them to eventually, over time, become decent, average swimmers, who enjoy time in the water, safely and comfortably, taking them through life with a skill valuable to all. Attaining competence in basic swimming has taught them how to keep safe around water, how to save their own life if needed, how to have fun, how to learn in a group, how to do what an instructor tells one to do to reach a goal, how to practice something over and over until the desired task is learned, and how to be confident that one can achieve a goal, even if at first, he/she finds it difficult. It has also imparted the message, that it is OK not to learn something at the same rate as someone else, and that accomplishing the goal totally by oneself, no matter how difficult or how many sessions it may take, is most rewarding and a major confidence builder! It teaches children, that anything worth doing and learning requires one’s own, personal, full effort and no one else can, or should, do it for you!

In addition, in the swim programs, no instructor is expected to deal with more than the set number of children, usually about 5. No instructor is expected to get all the kids ready, dressed properly, checked for physical health, assessed for mental health, include children with behaviour problems or other special needs without a helper, guarantee that everyone passes, ensure choices of activities are provided, cover all the content in the course no matter if sessions are cancelled because of weather, a fire drill or pool closure issue or do it, in half the time, because parents also want their child to learn diving or some other worthy, desired skill set!

I see the purpose of the elementary school as the foundation to lifelong learning. Schools should be funded and staffed to allow for the development of the very young child, in a safe, supportive environment to experience the enjoyment and thrill of learning. A PLAY based approach would be best and supported by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada in August, 2016.

Keeping the focus on the keys to opening up the world of knowledge to every child, has got to be READING, WRITING, and ARITHMETIC. Round that emphasis out, with exposure to the world of MUSIC, self expression opportunities through ART, and the development of a strong, healthy body through a great PHYSICAL EDUCATION program and that would meet the needs and time constraints, of most children for the elementary years, in school, in my opinion.

With a focus on the development of high level skills in Reading, Writing and Mathematics, a child would be enabled to go on to learn anything he/ she wants by him/herself. This approach would then allow all children, no matter their ability, interests or future choices the core base, the salient foundation, the house built of bricks rather than straw, which is an absolute necessity to go on in any field of study. Without being a highly skilled reader, a competent writer and a person with a solid mastery of basic mathematics, most further learning and career choices are badly compromised.

Educational programming seems to have lost sight of this, during my lifetime.This is not because we have not tried to improve schools or because our leaders in politics , Ministry of Education staff, researchers, school boards, administrators or teachers are/were not high quality people, trying their best to improve our schools. The problem is, we are trying to do too much.

Wonderful ideas have circulated through the years, in waves of changes to the way school has been served up to our children. Every single one probably could be supported in theory, as a way to make education better. Every single one has been seen as something we should be doing , something we need to add, or something every child must know, because our society and knowledge base has expanded so quickly, with experience, echnology and scientific discoveries. Who could say learning a second language, studying computers, or having sex education in schools is not important? The problem, once again, is, we are trying to do too much.

When you add something in, you must take something out. That is the true reality of programming for classes of children in a typical school day of about 5 and 1/2 hours. When you add in a computer class you must steal the instruction time from another subject. When you add in a a second language block or blocks, you must steal the instruction time from another subject. When you add in a religion class, a sex education class or a preparation for EQAO test class, you must steal the instruction time from another subject. I repeat, when you add something in, you must take something out. Basic principal. Something in, something else out!

The result, in the school system, has been a severe and drastic reduction to the time allotted to the core basics of learning. In 1965, when I was trained as an elementary teacher, the primary class day had two full blocks, one half of the instructional time in the school day, of focussed instruction time on language, at least! It included free reading, phonics, spelling, reading in groups according to level with the teacher, seat work such as comprehension questions or the like, done individually, related to the reading lesson, written composition, printing/ cursive writing, and listening to a story being read by the teacher. The second half of the day saw Mathematics taught, building skills step by step with tons of practice and those horrible words, rarely used today, called practice and drill, for a quarter day. The remaining quarter day, tried to achieve the objectives for learning in curriculum guidelines, for everything else- music, science, social studies, health, religion, current events, public speaking, drama, physical education, art and whatever else popped up that day, or term, or year!

That recipe for education, while rift with problems that everyone interested in improving the school were aware of, did produce a large cohort of children who were competent readers , able writers and had a core base in Mathematics by age 9 or 10.

Now, remember the basic principal. Something in, something else out!

With the changes we are trying to make in schools, in 2018, implemented the way they are, with the funding available to do it, the skill levels of children learning there currently,  in the three basic areas of reading, writing and mathematics, have declined. I saw it as a teacher. I saw it as a social worker. I saw it as a parent and grandparent.

I do not need to list for you here the literature, articles or studies to prove it. I am sure both you and I, and lifers in education, in this province, can give innumerable examples from our own experience to prove it, which in the end is the true reality of the situation. Indeed, studies can be quoted or designed to prove whatever you want, as anyone with university training can attest. The proof is in the pudding, called real life performance!

My own daughter, now 42, went off to college after a grade thirteen graduation, from the English program, in a Public System in Ontario. Initially, she sent me her research papers to look at , and I could not believe the level of the writing and the corrections I needed to make, to assist her. She is a bright girl, who completed a Business degree and has a professional level job, today.

My close friend’s daughter, now about 38, completed the same grade thirteen level, in a Catholic System in Ontario, and wanted to be a high school English teacher. My friend told me, that she had the same experience, with her daughter, who went on to get her teacher credentials and enjoy a career in government. Her mother’s comment at the time was, “She will have to learn how to write herself, before she will be able to teach anyone else.”

Another good friend, whose son went through a French Immersion program, says of her 30 year old, who is bright, has a degree now and good career going, that he cannot write in English or French and that she would never choose that programming option again, for any of her children.

I recently babysat an 8 year old child in my network, who will enter grade four this year. I played a few games with her and asked her to read a few things, which I would have expected the over 1000 grade three/ four kids whom I had taught, to handle with ease. I was quite disturbed by her skill level, despite her being a bright little girl, with a wonderful involved family.

I am limited here in space and time to go on with examples. Suffice it to say I would have no problem in providing many more. The problem is not less able learners. The problem is not less able teachers. The problem is we are trying to do too much.

The steps to mastery of the basics of Reading, Writing and Mathematics, require step by step progression in the development of skills, over many years, which absolutely demand large amounts of time, practice, repetition, effort, guidance, and support, when a few bumps occur along the road to competence. Without these basics, cemented in stone, in the elementary years, the choices ahead become limited, and others completely beyond reach.

What, then, are schools for?

In my opinion, the Elementary schools should concentrate on the basics, so the child becomes equipped to learn anything he/she wants, as he/she matures. They should give the child a hook and some worms, teach him/her how to fish, so he/she need never go hungry again. They should ensure the achievement, by every child, of solid, high level competence in Reading, Writing and Mathematics, in a warm supportive environment.

And like the approach in the swimming programs, the teacher should be competent and supportive. The requirements to meet each standard should be clearly stated. The stepping stones should be presented in a logical sequence with the outcomes expected, measurably realistic. And finally, the child must be able to prove his ability to meet the standard, confidently by himself, before he is allowed, expected or asked to move on, to the next level.

Let us learn, digest and apply the Lessons from the Walter Baker Pool to our schools. With the ability to read well, write well, and understand basic mathematics, a child can be then be set free on any path , to learn whatever he/she chooses, whenever he/she chooses, in whatever way he/she chooses, as a lifelong self directed learner!

So says the wisdom of experience.

by Adele Blair

Adele was an Ontario elementary school teacher for 31 years before taking on a second career working with children, families and disabled persons. She now enjoys advocacy work and writing for a hobby. She has three adopted children and six grandchildren. She resides in Nepean.

The following is the text of an email sent to candidates running to be Ottawa Carleton District School Board trustees. The goal is to provide the candidates with an opportunity to provide voters with as good a window as possible into what to expect should they get elected.

“There will be efforts to share with the public in the time leading up to the elections the idea that it is not a bad thing for candidates to change their views on a topic. With more information and/or reflection on an issue a candidate may have a change of mind. We are always growing and we need leaders who are not going to double-down on stated positions just to look strong. We need flexible ones who base their positions on the latest information and with as much reflection as time permits.

“The issue of appointing the new OCDSB director will remain on the table for the duration of the elections. UCY offers the “Follow-up” opportunity for candidates to further express their views on the matter. With transparency, our democratic values, and respect for the voters being elements at play, voters will be able to learn a lot about each candidate from how they respond to this issue.

“You are urged to read the comments that readers have added to the September 4th Ottawa Citizen article about the appointing of the new director, and to consider if after reading them you are comfortable with the response you provided to the UCY Question 1.”

The topic is the appropriateness of actions the OCDSB has undertaken to select a new director.

Today the Ottawa Citizen ran a story about the attempts of Uniting for Children and Youth (UCY) to delay the selection of the new OCDSB director. There is the common sense reason for doing so, that the new board to be elected October 22^nd is the one that has to work with the new director so they should be the ones to select the person, but there are other reasons.

Before getting to them, consider the issue of an interim director. The board seems to have an aversion to having one despite the associate director, Brett Reynolds, being positioned to step into that role, and the fact that many organizations have operated well with interim directors while the most suitable person is being sought for the role. The PC Party with interim leader Rona Ambrose is a good example. The question is, “Would the best course of action be to operate with an interim director or proceed as the board is doing?”

Most important to me are our democratic values. Our democratic values are under assault these days and we need to have a good discussion about what makes a good democratic citizen. We are in the midst of school board elections. The public is going to decide within weeks whom it wants making big school board decisions that will affect the lives of students and the shape of our communities for years to come. During this time the current school boards record will be put under the microscope to determine if it has done a good job, and if things unfold as one would hope they will, people will grow and perhaps change some views during this time. The elections offer the public the opportunity to collectively voice their current view of whom they want making the big decisions. To not wait for their input is to bring into question the level of respect the board has for its electorate, and its sense of what it is to be a leader in a democracy. It brings to mind Trump’s short list for Supreme Court justice, which looks to many observers like an attempt to impose his will on the voters instead of to do what is best for the country.

The current school board has not demonstrated much vision or imagination for how to bring public education inline with the times. It has been informed that this is going to be highlighted during the election process. For it to move to appoint the new director before this challenge has been well addressed can be seen as arrogant and not in the best interests of our students, our communities, nor our future. It is a display of the same kind of disregard for the opinion of others as when they voted to close Rideau High School, despite receiving that day a government memo advising the board of updates to the accommodation review process, and the strongly stated belief by a person representing community members that the OCDSB had absolutely not acted in the way those updates directed. The board has demonstrated the attitude that it knows best with disregard for what others are saying, and for them to push ahead with the selection of a new director, instead of waiting to see if people think the same after the elections is questionable. They may have the right to make the appointment, but is it the right thing to do, and whether or not they actually have the right is a question that needs to be answered.

There is some uncertainty as to whether or not the board has the right to make the selection at this time. Gurprit Kindra, professor with the University of Ottawa Telfer School of Management, and Nathalie DesRosiers, former Dean of Law with the University of Ottawa and cabinet minister with the Wynn government wondered at the legality of the board making the selection before the election. They thought there might be a law prohibiting organizations from appointing new CEOs within four months of the election of a new board. The director of the school board is in effect the CEO of the school board. If such a law exists, then we need to know if it applies to school boards. If it does, and the current board proceeds to appoint a new director, it is potentially creating the situation that the board will be tied up with legal proceedings to nullify the appointment, a costly waste of resources that is better spent on the students. It would make for a bad start for the new board that would want to be dealing with other things.

So why the great rush? What are the irrefutable arguments for making the selection now? To date it seems that the perceived, but questionable, downsides to operating with an interim director are outweighing the possibilities of not having the most suitable director for the job.

A final comment with respect to the Citizen article reporting that one trustee has accused me of harassment for sending out numerous emails on this issue. Things were evolving and to be fair I wanted to keep the trustees informed of developments so that they could respond accordingly if questioned by people. I was concerned about the possibility of being criticized for the number of emails and I weighed the value of each one before sending it. I feel the accusation of harassment reflects the unwillingness of a trustee to appreciate the importance of selecting a new director, and the right that people have to speak out strongly on issues that affect them. I see this charge of harassment as one of the tactics used to silence one’s critics. I’m encouraging people to make their voices heard, and to know when someone is just trying to silence them. In fairness to the other trustees, the person who made the accusation should identify themselves.

Twelve ways to help elect the educational leadership we need.

1. Contact us stating your biggest concerns with public education. We will bring them to the attention of the candidates running for school board trustee. A recent survey by OISE found that only 50% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with the public schools of Ontario. This means a lot of other people have something to say. Even those who are very satisfied probably have ideas about how things could be even better, and UCY wants everyone to have their views considered. Write to us if you want to keep your opinions confidential, or leave a comment with a post on our Facebook page or with a UCY blog item, but don’t be silent. Apathy is killing us.
2. Talk to your neighbours, friends and other parents of children at your children’s schools to help generate the much needed discussion on education. If we aren’t talking, then we are part of the silent majority, and as Noam Chomsky says, the passive “who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”
3. Attend events to learn more about the issues and the candidates who are running to be your representative on the school board. Don’t be one of those people who has no clue who is running to be a boss of their children’s school, and who checks off the best looking name.
4. Get on our mailing list to stay informed of events and activities. If the link does not work, please send your name, email address and postal code to info@ucyottawa.com. We would like to have your phone number, but it is optional.
5. “Like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @ucyottawa. Share and retweet our messages, and ask others to do the same. The more the authorities see public concern, the more they will listen to the public.
6. Print out and take our sign-up sheet to events you attend and get people to sign it. Scan and email the signed sheets to info@ucyottawa.com.
7. Share our brochure.
8. Consider helping your choice for trustee to get elected.
9. Call or write people running for office to tell them your concerns.
10. Arrange to meet with people running for office in your area and take supporters with you.
11. Organize an all candidates meeting or a town hall for your community to better get to know the candidates.
12. VOTE for Innovative Thinking and help to get out the vote.

Uniting for Children and Youth is asking people to consider the question, “What is school for?” It’s a question that candidates for school board trustee will have considered and to best fulfil their duties they need to know what the public thinks of the issues it raises.

The question is relevant. Modern times require that we reconsider the purpose of public education. Ken Robinson’s video “Changing Education Paradigms” is one of the strongest voices making this point.

Signs of public education failing to do its job were highlighted in 1968 with the publication of the Ontario study on education titled “Living and Learning”. It states:

“Today, on every side, however, there is heard a growing demand for a fresh look at education in Ontario. The Committee was told of inflexible programs, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization, and mistaken aims of education. We heard from alienated students, frustrated teachers, irate parents, and concerned educators. Many public organizations and private individuals have told us of their growing discontent and lack of confidence in a school system which, in their opinion, has become outmoded and is failing those it exists to serve.”

This year, fifty years later, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education – OISE published a survey that found only fifty percent of people are satisfied or very satisfied with public education. Also this year, the World Economic Forum published an article that states, “Traditional education does not sufficiently value innovative and entrepreneurial thinking – our system even dumbs down the creative genius that we were born with, according to a test developed by NASA.”

Despite the concerted efforts of competent people striving for decades to improve public education, the level of discontent remains high. Increasingly, people are realizing that the industrial education model, based on age-segregation and subject promotion, is not suitable for achieving the equity and inclusion, and fostering the creativity and innovation essential for widespread satisfaction with our schools. The democratic learning model is emerging as a good alternative, but can it fulfil what we see as the purpose of education? By pursuing the answer to the question, “What is school for?” we position ourselves to determine if we need to seriously explore the potential of the democratic education model to meet the needs of all people in our changing times.

The following references can serve to stimulate thinking about the question.

“Living and Learning”, also known as “The Hall-Dennis Report”, has a section titled “On Aims of Education”, p. 67. The Report is available online at: Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario.

In his blog for Psychology Today, Peter Gray has a post titled What Are the Proper Purposes of a System of Schooling? Another post of his that expands thinking on the topic is Differences Between Self-Directed and Progressive Education.

The Sudbury Valley School is perhaps the best-known example of a completely democratic school. The homeschooling subgroup known as “unschoolers” applies the same student-led approach to learning. Daniel Greenberg, a co-founder of Sudbury Valley, says that it is the job of school to bring the real world to the attention of the students. Something to keep in mind when considering this approach is that it does not require a flip-flop. In Ottawa, John McCrae Secondary School and Lester B. Pearson High School have provided examples of how schools might become a little more democratic. They raise the prospect of an incremental transition to a more appropriate model for public education. That new model may end up being more, but not fully, democratic. A grounded theory approach to change, systematic research to systematically generate the vision of a new school model, would be the way to investigate its full potential.

UCY will be providing updates on this topic as we approach Election Day October 22^nd. To stay informed, please subscribe to Uniting for Children and Youth.

Collaborator. This is the word that best describes the ideal school board trustee. He or she is an open-minded person who can objectively weigh another opinion, no matter from where it comes, and work respectfully to resolve differences to achieve the best possible outcomes.

A trustee’s job is difficult. Views on what make a good education and the needs of different communities vary widely. The potential to digress into personal attacks is ever present, but if it happens, the effectiveness of a board will likely diminish. People want a trustee who can articulate their views, and it needs to be someone who also has the negotiating skills of a good diplomat. We cherish our democratic values, which are based on equality and respect for others. From an education perspective, we need school boards to serve as examples of constructive working relationships and democracy in action.

Jacquie Miller’s August 2^nd article in the Ottawa Citizen recounts unpleasantness that occurred in the OCDSB during the past term. We need to start the next term on a positive footing. The public has the task of electing a team of trustees who look forward to problem solving together.

UCY will be working to provide voters with the information they need to elect the team of trustees that can accomplish the most for the students of Ottawa.

Follow us on Twitter: @ucyottawa, and “Like” us on Facebook: @UCYottawa. Become a UCY subscriber to keep up-to-date.

by Richard Fransham

Public schools most serve their purpose when they are the hubs of their communities. They can establish a sense of belonging for families and the kinds of relationships that contribute to the well-being of a community. It follows that school closures can be wrenching experiences that set people adrift, and this is particularly true for the most vulnerable. The social cost, that of destabilizing people’s sense of belonging and well-being, needs to be treated as the primary concern when schools are being reviewed for closure, and something to avoid in most cases.

This article is not an argument against school closures per se, but rather it is an effort to open people’s imaginations to alternatives to closures, alternatives that preserve community, increase benefits to students and reduce costs. It sounds too good to be true, but it is what changing the education paradigm offers to do.

Larry Rosenstock, a founder of the successful High Tech High network of charter schools in California, says that the greatest impediment to educational innovation is the formal school schedule, the dividing of the school day into fixed chunks of time. It produces what is called assembly line learning, and eliminating it is essential to properly addressing the problems that lead to school closures. This is perhaps most evident in how secondary schools operate.

It is a commonly held view that for secondary schools to be viable they need a minimum enrolment of about 800 students. This is the number that permits a traditional school to provide the range of course options considered necessary for a good education. When the numbers drop below this threshold, schools can be at risk of closure. With higher enrolments more course options can be offered allowing more students to pursue topics of interest. This has fostered the thinking that bigger is better, which results in consolidating schools with low enrolments into larger ones, and this creates another social cost. Anonymity creeps in as schools increase in size, making it increasingly difficult for students to feel that their schools are communities rather than factories, and increasingly difficult for teachers to cultivate the kinds of relationships well known to be at the heart of student engagement in learning. Some estimates are that anonymity begins to manifest itself when numbers exceed 250. Another estimate is that when students enrol at a young age and there is little attrition, a school could have as many as 450 students without creating anonymity.

If anonymity were not a problem, there are sufficient other reasons to move away from formal scheduling. Even in larger schools, it limits the number of ministry courses available to students. It is common for students to be lined up outside the guidance office in September waiting to have their timetables revised, because courses they chose were cancelled due to lack of interest. There is a stereotyping affect at play in that students can only take courses of interest to a sufficient number of other students. It is an affect that diminishes diversity and works against the interests of minorities and children who don’t fit the norm. It also happens on a regular basis that students who enrol in options that are cancelled end up being required to take courses in which they have no interest. It is a flexibility problem that also affects teachers who are assigned to teach courses outside their areas of interest and expertise, because they need to be given a full schedule and it can’t be done otherwise. This aggravates the problem of equity. The subject expert can be teaching one group of students, while another group taking the same course is taught by someone with no expertise, and who may not want to even be there. It is a situation where one group can be turned on to a subject, while another is being turned off. Formal scheduling also plays havoc with the integration of subjects. It results in subjects being studied in isolation, which limits how creatively students can apply the knowledge.

A further consequence of formal scheduling, one that is counter-productive to cultivating a healthy democracy, is its propensity to create a class system of winners and losers. Winners take advanced math and the sciences; losers take general math and the trades. This is a disservice to both groups. It causes discrimination that reduces the joy of living, and it influences what students consider appropriate to study, thereby limiting students’ worldview and their potential enjoyment of learning.

To get beyond formal scheduling, we need to accept that students want what is best for themselves. When we see them behaving inappropriately, it is usually because they are feeling too controlled or they have a lesson to learn about what is acceptable. If it is a lesson to be learned, then there is a teachable moment, but if it is a matter of control, then theories on the locus of control need to be considered. Evidence is mounting that the locus of control has to be intrinsic for student engagement, that students need to have more control over their learning. Formal scheduling by design is controlling. It results in students being told where to be, where to sit, what to learn, how to learn it, whom to work with, when to talk, when to go to the washroom, and so on. It can be highly frustrating and those not inclined to succumb often lash out. Research is also showing that a lack of control over one’s life is a major contributor to anxiety and depression, and so while educators are dedicated to providing for the well-being of students, the structure is working against them. There are even discussions about a lack of control being a major contributor to bullying. The Ontario Education Act states that bullying “occurs in a context where there is a real or perceived power imbalance.” It is referring to an imbalance of power among students, but in a system where adults power over students, relationships built on respect and equality are not being adequately modelled. The frustration of being too controlled coupled with power-over relationships between teachers and students is likely a contributor to students trying to power-over each other in ways that manifest themselves as bullying.

Learning environments free of the bells make it possible to create community learning hubs where students can have substantially greater control over what and how they learn. More control means more responsibility, which translates into having to be more responsible. Being more responsible for one’s learning also creates better conditions for students to acquire the skills essential for independent lifelong learning. And when students become more responsible for their learning, teachers become facilitators of learning, as opposed to the dispensers of it, which leads to genuine relationships needed for a healthy society.

The process of eliminating formal scheduling needs to begin immediately, and the thing that makes it most pressing to act now is school closures. Community learning hubs can be any size, and like the one-room school house the learning can be diverse and rich. By learning how to operate these hubs effectively, we can overcome the problem of low enrolments and secure the future for schools at risk of closure.

The pilot program promoted by the Ottawa Public Education Remake Initiative (OPERI) is recommended as a starting point for a grounded theory approach to change, where ongoing systematic research leads to systematically transitioning to learning environments free of formal scheduling. This pilot program has been successfully conducted in an Ottawa secondary school. It runs for one semester with 25 students in their community school. Students and teachers choose to participate, and no additional funding is required. Students still acquire four ministry credits needed to graduate, but the emphasis is upon developing the skills required for independent, lifelong learning. This is done in an environment that fosters a caring community where everyone is a learner and a teacher. By witnessing this program, people will find that their imaginations open to extensive learning possibilities and how change can be conducted as an incremental process where people choose to participate, as they feel ready. They will also begin to appreciate the enormous cost savings to be gained by moving to a system that does not require the substantial resources put into timetabling – including the lost learning time involved, and where better relationships greatly diminish the costs of disciplining students and of dealing with the mental health issues of both staff and students. This program is designed for secondary schools, but the concept can be adapted for elementary schools. For more details, visit the OPERI website, and feel welcome to contact us for more information.

by Richard Fransham

The setting is Lester B. Pearson High School in east Ottawa. It’s the 1990s, I’m a teacher, and Scott is a student in my grade 11 computer class.

Inclusion was important back then, and it’s important now. The remarkable thing is that in the 25 years or so since Scott was in my class, schools have shown little sign of getting better at how to deal with diversity and deliver equity. The problem is the school structure. It makes inclusion, which is all about equity, at best a forced fit.

You see, Scott couldn’t do what the so-called “normal” students in the class could do. He had Down Syndrome, but inclusion meant having him do what the other students did even though he couldn’t do it. From a teacher perspective, it greatly increased my workload because I had to plan something for him and something different for the other students, and it made him stand out as unable to do what other students were doing. Compassion is not the problem here. The problem is unreasonable expectations. It comes down to too little time and too rigid a system for teachers to give all students what they need.

Some people will argue that I simply didn’t know how to make a success of the situation, and I would agree that with what I know now I could have done better, but around the same time I had another experience that cast things in a different light. I had the opportunity to work with twenty-five students who were freed from formal scheduling for a semester. The students were mixed-age from grades 10 to 12 and represented a cross-section of the larger school population. They stayed together all day working under self-direction to obtain credits in four mandated courses. I acted as a facilitator emphasizing the skills required for independent, lifelong learning, and I actively cultivated a caring learning community where everyone was a teacher and a learner. In that environment, Scott would have thrived. The story of Danh helps to explain how this could be so.

Danh had recently immigrated from Vietnam. He was a student in my grade 9 science class, and he was miserable. It was a large class of over 30 students and integration policies at the time meant it included the full range of low performing to high performing students. It was a rowdy mix that left me feeling happy to survive it each day, and Danh appeared to enjoy it even less. He never smiled, never wanted to talk to anyone, in lab groups he stood at a distance behind the others wanting to disassociate himself as much as possible. He was one unhappy kid who wanted to be anywhere other than in that class.

To my surprise, given the experience he had under my watch, Danh enrolled in the program where students were free of the bells, and he accentuated as much as anyone could that the greatest benefit to eliminating formal scheduling is in what it does for relationships. The friendlier, less tense and less competitive learning environment resulted in Danh quickly making friends. Within a couple of weeks his scowl had given way to a charming, bright smile, and his English improve dramatically as he happily jabbered with his friends. It was compelling evidence that changing the learning environment can change a kid.

In November, less than three months into the program, Danh came to me asking if he could plan the class Christmas party. I asked him to check with the other students to see what they thought and in no time he was back telling me they liked the idea. Thus it was that he went from being self-exiled among his peers to being their social planner.

It turned out that we went to his uncle’s Vietnamese restaurant to celebrate the season. I rode with the class on public transit to the restaurant where Danh met us as the maître d’. Beaming, he graciously showed us to our tables asking us how the bus ride was and describing non-alcoholic drinks that had been specially planned for us as we settled.

The contrast between the Danh of a few months earlier and the Danh of that moment remains vivid for me as an example of what school does and can do for students. In addition, Danh’s story serves as an example of how to integrate, as opposed to assimilate immigrant students. In the program, Danh was the perfect ambassador for his people, loving and gracious he shared his culture with the rest of us. He had these gifts to share, and even more, the connection to the family restaurant gave us a lesson in what it is to be entrepreneurial.

Before returning to Scott, there is another story that will help to establish the natural place for him in that program that eliminated formal scheduling. It involves two grade twelve boys who came to me about six weeks into the program to make a confession. It was motivated by their sense that they had been transformed into better human beings. They told me they had signed up for the program because they just wanted to work together all day on computers, and that they intended to have nothing to do with the “little grade ten kids.” After confessing this, they added, “We don’t even notice the age difference now.” It speaks to the value of providing learning environments where students can actually get to know each other. The thing that brought the boys around to a kinder view of others was the gifts they brought to the learning environment. Their enthusiasm and knowledge of computers meant that they often had a gathering of admiring students peering over their shoulders at the magic they were producing on the screen. It worked to make friendships and friends don’t care about age.

It is also the gifts Scott has to offer that help to define how the program would work for him, and his special gifts were never more evident than the night of a high school dance. At the time, the boys and the girls lined up on opposite sides of the gym with the “normal” boys afraid to walk across the floor to ask a girl to dance, but not Scott. As soon as the first tune began he went to the head of the girls line and asked for a dance – and he got one. The tune ended and the dancers went back to line up in their same positions. The next tune began and Scott went again to the head of the girls’ line and asked the same girl to dance. She declined and without flinching he went to the next girl in line and asked her to dance, and she accepted. This went on for about ten songs with Scott returning to the head of the girls line and quickly working his way down it until a girl accepted his offer. It was a beautiful scene that said volumes about qualities we want to see in kids. His ability to act without discrimination, and without being hamstrung by feeling of rejection, resulted in him dancing the night away without anxiety while his nervous counterparts, afraid to take a risk, failed to take advantage of opportunity.

To have the likes of Scott in a learning program like the one that eliminated the bells would be fabulous for all of the other students. His positive, confident and loving disposition are gifts that cannot be surpassed.

Imagine the following. A group of grade 11 students in the program were studying Shakespeare. They decided to integrate their English, art and computer courses with the production of a Shakespearean play. They would create a set, learn their lines and act it out, and create a video edited on the computer. Scott would be in heaven helping with the art, acting out a role, and participating in the video production, and while he was doing that, he would be bringing out the best in his classmates by showing them the fun in being uninhibited.

If you think like me, then the stories above will have you asking, “Why are we not breaking out of the confining old practice of formally scheduling the school day.” We can provide learning environments that allow people to be real, to stay in touch with their humanity, to form caring relationships, and to learn what most matters. There appears to be no obvious answer as to why we are not doing so. It leaves one wondering if it is the result of “normal” people lined up on their walls afraid to take a risk. We have a choice. We can read this article 25 years from now and think how far we have come or how little has changed. Taking a lesson from Scott, it’s time to take a risk.

Over forty people attended the event , at least ten of whom are running to be trustees for either the Ottawa Carleton District School Board or the Ottawa Catholic School Board. Five current trustees,  were among those present.

Most of the time was spent in  groups working to determine common views about how our schools can best serve students and their families. Lindsey Barr, founder of World Changing Kids, provided the following three “takeaways” that she got from the event.

(1) I was so happy with the diversity of the participants – we had parents, educators, school board trustees and candidates, and concerned adults who don’t have children but who pay taxes to the public education system and want to have a voice.  We had participants from the OCDSB, the OCSB, the homeschooling community and private/alternative schools.  And I was impressed with the diversity in participants as the term is more commonly used – we had people from different races, cultures, religions, first languages, ages, and countries of birth.  We need to hear from a diverse group of people, who have had diverse experiences with the school system, in order to ensure that we are making changes to the education system that will benefit all children.

(2) People feel that the OCDSB has not really listened or been transparent in the past, especially in relation to the consultations for the changes made to the French Immersion program, full day Kindergarten and the closing of Rideau High School.  Parents want more of a voice when it comes to the decisions made by the board.  Communities want to be truly consulted.  And information needs to go out in more languages than just English in order to reach all the parents.  There was a strong sense of being responsible for all the kids in Ottawa and needing to make decisions that benefit everyone, especially the more vulnerable populations.  This made me very happy!

Welcome to the Uniting for Children and Youth blog. Posts to the right are listed in order from most recent.

Real Options for Student Well-being

Teachers who believe in public education have recently opened three private learning centres in Ottawa because they have been unable to pursue through community schools the kind of innovations being called for by people such as Sir Ken Robinson.

The Compass Centre for Self-Directed Learning, which is a member of Liberated Learners, offers one of these learning spaces. Revel Academy, based on the Acton learning model with a measure of Montessori, is another, and Blue Sky School, which is pioneering a prototype school of the future, is the third. All are particularly attentive to the individual needs of their students. By moving away from formal scheduling and age-segregation, they are showing us how to once and for all get beyond one-size-fits-all education.

Public education is our most powerful tool for building strong communities and the kind of world we want children and youth to inherit. UCY is working to make public education every parent’s first choice for their children. Consequently, it is raising awareness of how these kinds of private school learning environments  can be provided in community public schools. The goal is to make these kinds of programs accessible to all who want them. It would help to address the problem of equity, and innovative teachers would not be leaving public education. Free of the business distractions of having to make private schools viable, they could give their full attention to their students.

Outdoor Play Canada is stressing the importance of play to the health and development of young people. Its Position Statement On Active Outdoor Play summarizes its views. The Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group (HALO) of the CHEO Research Instituteis one of the driving forces behind the establishment of Outdoor Play Canada.