Making school harder would increase success

Bring back excellence as a virtue, goal and requirement, Noah Stevens writes.

Just after the school year wound up in June, Gazette columnist Allison Hanes assigned some summer-vacation homework: to think about how to reinvigorate Quebec’s education system.

So, I’ve been thinking. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the solution to the province’s chronic high drop-out rates lies neither in offering students remuneration (as businessman Mitch Garber proposed earlier this year) nor in eliminating standardized, provincewide final exams, as James Watt suggested in a recent Gazette oped.

These would take us in the wrong direction. Instead, let’s raise the bar. Challenge students. Make it more difficult. Make them work. Think. For the student, education should be an accomplishment. Make it their fault if they fail. Bring excellence back as a virtue, a goal and a requirement. Give students a reason to be proud of themselves if they succeed.

In my view, students don’t drop out because school doesn’t respond to their needs. They drop out because it does not show them how they can respond to society’s needs. It fails to give them a higher purpose.

Teaching people to be selfish is not inspiring. Teaching them to think of ways to build a better world is. If you want young people to become truly autonomous, teach them to think of others.

It’s also important to recognize a simple truth: Not everyone wants to go to university. Stream Cycle 2 high school students. Route those uncommitted to academics to vocational programs. Route those uncommitted to any kind of school to the job market, if they are of age.

Those who remain on the academic track will then no longer have to suffer through watereddown courses. They will be free to excel. When

The notion of silence is a historical artifact, as are uninterrupted concentration and deep thought.

they get to university, they will be ready for bigger challenges. Our institutions of higher learning will be able to recover their role as idea incubators for society.

With uncommitted students re-routed or gone, discipline problems will diminish. There will be fewer distractions for teachers and students alike.

Those who take the vocational track will be able to focus on what they find interesting and motivating. Instead of being forced to sit through years of boring classroom work that is neither what they want nor who they are, they will start down the path to personal development in a much more timely manner. They, too, will be free to excel at what they have chosen.

Education should not be reserved for the most intelligent, but rather for those who are both committed and prepared to take responsibility. Committed means the student is going to do the work, no matter how hard. Responsibility means it is not the teacher’s fault if they fail.

Teachers must be allowed to do their job. Less and less are they actual teachers; more and more, they have become evaluators and justifiers. They spend less time thinking about pedagogy, and more on defending themselves against the almost inevitable parent and student criticisms and accusations of unfairness. In today’s culture, they are guilty until proven innocent.

Homework is rapidly being drained of seriousness. The notion of silence is a historical artifact, as are uninterrupted concentration and deep thought. Undistracted reading is another casualty of our times. The only way they will be recovered, and the only way homework can ever again have meaning, is to bring back a notion that was once common: At the end of the day, either followed or preceded by an hour of sport, students should have an hour of study, at school or at home. This hour would be electronics-free, silent and supervised. Students also have a job to do and they, too, must be allowed to do it.

When the education professional and the learner, both, are free to do their best to make learning happen, it almost certainly will.