November 18, 2023
HERE'S MY TAKE
The difference between climate and weather is well understood and its application to education is straightforward. Weather is what you experience when you walk into a classroom today. Climate refers to longer-term trends and policy changes that will shape what you will expect to find in a classroom a decade or two from now.
Last week, I participated in discussions around Cardus Senior Fellow Dr. Deani Van Pelt’s presentation, “Charting New Horizons for Independent Education.” Dr. Van Pelt used a “fortress” metaphor to describe education delivered by government-run schools. Within this fortress are provincial ministries of education, local public school boards, and the fully publicly-funded local school any student can attend based on their postal code. Other education stakeholders, including business groups interested in the workforce-readiness of graduates, community groups, parents and independent schools/homeschools are mostly outside of the fortress. (You can watch Dr. Van Pelt’s worthy speech on YouTube.)
Her point was that there were opposite trends occurring inside and outside of the fortress. Inside the challenges include “learning loss, achievement decline, increased absenteeism, escalation in violence, teacher retention realities, mental wellbeing and anxiety, dominant ideologies and book bans.” Outside the fortress, there is significant growth in homeschooling and independent schools (limited by capacity–most schools report wait lists) along with policy innovations that are sparking changes in how education is being delivered. Microschools, charter schools, and hybrid schools are just part of the new lingo.
Regular readers will be familiar with my biases on this file. I have long advocated for pluralism in education. All parents should have meaningful and viable choices as to how their children should be educated. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. And given that we are not educating “brains on sticks,” education must focus on the whole person, including the spiritual dimension. There is no such thing as (nor should there be) “values-neutral” education.
In practical terms, that means respecting parents who want educational options aligned with their religious beliefs. But, and this is an important caveat, that does not mean having two types of education: public and private. All education should be for the common good. While parents are the primary decision-makers and responsible are for the education of their children, I have an interest in how my neighbour’s kids are educated. Those kids are the citizens who will vote, the employees who will contribute to the economy, and the neighbours I will need to live alongside. The notion that “public” education requires the government delivering education is mistaken. What makes education public is a shared commitment to the common good, regardless of who delivers that education or how they do it.
Adjacent to the event at which Dr. Van Pelt spoke, I was privileged to participate in a three-hour conversation with a dozen or so philanthropists who invest in independent schools. One takeaway was the importance of not reducing education to a commodity in all our striving for educational pluralism. Education is not an ordinary consumer good. Yes, a lot of money is involved (which isn’t always wisely spent) and, yes, it’s useful to allow some market forces to drive innovation (since monopolies rarely produce the conditions for innovation and excellence). Still, in our process of rethinking education policy and frameworks, we must not lose sight of some of the fundamental characteristics of education. It is something different from other consumer services available in the market. Education requires a sense of belonging and caring for the student, which we don’t achieve when all the focus is on meeting the consumer demands of a paying customer, treating it as a commodity, fearing that a sale by the competitor down the street means the student will be switching schools every academic year. Stability and belonging must be part of the equation.
Musing on these things during a five-hour plane ride a few days later, my journal ended up with five possibly foundational questions in assessing the various ideas floated. I was at 35,000 feet with no access to the dozens of books I’ve read on the subject over the years. But sometimes a fresh attempt to articulate framework understandings without reference to textbooks, synthesising what you’ve thought over the years, is useful. For what it’s worth, here is what I came up with:
Education is a process of cultivating and stewarding the gifts that God has given to each of our children. It means building up their identity as created image-bearers of God, helping them realise their potential, preparing them for their vocation in life, and discipling their whole person (body, soul, mind, and will) so that their loves (by God’s grace) might be rightly ordered.
There is no one best way. Respect for the individual needs of students and the cultural and historical context in which you are living are a given. But so is a commitment to learning the lessons of those who have gone before, both building on their best practices as well as learning from their mistakes. This means that education delivery systems (and the policy frameworks that enable them) should always be evolving.
Education is a public good and ensuring the next generation is well-educated contributes to social flourishing for us all. Parents have the primary responsibility and should have “skin in the game” but public policy should enable affordability and options, creating a “thick community” that surrounds not just education in general but specific schools. The fundraisers for my local Christian school don’t just supply funds; they build community and that improves educational accountability and outcomes. Parents shouldn’t just vote for school board trustees—they need to be involved in the schools their kids attend. There is a particular responsibility on us all to ensure that those who are differently gifted (for whom education is inherently more expensive) are included and not marginalised.
Both. My experience of the teaching profession (both K-12 and post-secondary, in public and independent schools) is that they tend to think differently and more broadly about education than the parents of the children they are educating. Small numbers of folks occupy the extremes of the education outcome measuring stick: the binary between “achievement education” in which academic outcomes and job preparedness are primary, and “liberal arts appreciation” in which a discovery of all of life, including the stuff deemed not as “useful” for the resume or job search, take priority. Most agree with a both/and approach, yet education professionals are almost always closer to the “liberal arts” end of the spectrum. So, in that sense, education has long led social change. But as influential as education is, culture is much broader and, as the present moment confirms for us, developments outside of the classroom have a way of shaping education and creating possibilities, but also of limiting what education can accomplish.
North Americans generally and Canadians specifically talk a bigger game about the importance of education than they live. For most of my life, those of us critical of the education system and outcomes got an occasional listening ear, but rarely has meaningful education reform been a public square priority or a vote-driver. That has given status quo protectors a huge advantage. One of the benefits of COVID is that it gave parents (in all forms of schooling) a much closer first-hand look at what K-12 education actually looks like. Many were not thrilled with what they saw. The next few years will show whether the current momentum for change is a blip or a tipping point. Other social factors (the overreach of identity politics and gender ideology, and a lack of workforce preparedness reducing productivity and standards of living) will play a significant role. But the biggest challenge is that it’s the kids who’ve yet to start school who’ll fully reap the rewards for improved education today.
When I’m back in my office, I will pull out a few of the texts and compare–I’m sure I’ve missed a few things. But as important as good definitions are, education doesn’t happen in the policy boardroom or in think tank roundtables; it happens in the relationship between teachers and learners. The insight of one roundtable participant, a retired principal, was particularly poignant to me. He noted that when he evaluated schools, he focused not on the resources, pedagogy, or other obvious externals, but he looked for evidence that the teacher cared for the students. And isn’t that a core consideration? How do we create settings in which two image-bearers of God, respecting the gifts and responsibilities of each, can engage in teaching and learning?
I’m not sure I can confidently answer whether Harvard as we know it will be there in a decade or the extent to which various innovations in education delivery will take root. I’m pretty sure the climate is changing, though. So, whatever is there a decade from now, it will look quite different from what is there today. Whether it will be better will depend on how we apply basic foundational principles to the creative innovation required. The education climate crisis is real. The challenge is how we will respond.
WHAT I’M READING
Defining War Crimes
Not something that was top of mind just a few months ago, but as “war crime” terminology is included in the polemics around current conflicts, I found this NPR piece helpful in understanding the historical development of this concept.
Charity Begins at Home
A U.S. study of 1,500 parents and their children showed (not surprisingly) that the giving patterns of parents is a very significant predictor of the extent to which children give and volunteer. While funded by a charitable sector advocacy group and focused on formal charitable giving, implicit in the report is the virtue modelling and cultivation that giving and volunteering provide.
Ayaan Ali’s Conversion
There has been plenty of coverage this week of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay last week in which she “came out” as a Christian. Ali gained a profile in the 1990s as a Dutch Parliamentarian who had to travel with armed guards when she spoke out against the oppression of her Muslim upbringing. She joined the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as an outspoken atheist in the decades that followed. Her very public (and, by her own admission, surprising and unforeseeable) journey from Muslim to atheist to Christian arouses both curiosity and criticism.
Fighting Discrimination
Twenty-five Jewish members of CUPE filed a human rights complaint against their union, arguing that the pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic comments of union leadership created unsafe conditions and were a breach of the union’s duty to represent them.
Free Speech and Hate Speech
The World Evangelical Alliance submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Speech addressing “the paradox of the rise of hatred targeting religious minorities and the adverse impact that anti-hate legislation can have on legitimate religious expression.”
MEANINGFUL METRICS
Statistics Canada released an analysis of the Canadian economy this past Thursday which provided a pretty pessimistic picture of Canada’s economy. Both affordability and productivity are trending in the wrong direction and there is little sunshine peeking through the economic storm clouds. Chart 1 shows how (save for the blip of January 2023), the rise in interest rates has slowed GDP growth and is dragging down consumer spending. Chart 4 shows the decline in GDP per capita. This number is a consequence of how many people are working as a share of the population, how long they are working, and how much output there is for every hour worked. Digging into the numbers more deeply, it would seem that Canada has challenges on all three of those fronts.
TAKE IT TO-GO
To Joke Is Human
I had the pleasure Wednesday evening of having a dozen or so Insights readers join me in Vancouver for a conversation about this newsletter. We didn’t talk much about my attempt to give you a more light-hearted takeaway each week, perhaps out of politeness that my jokes are sometimes a bit lame. That said, the show of hands gave a thumbs-up to continuing with this “humanising” process. This wisdom gleaned from the crowds was confirmed by a Harvard Business Review article which contends that purposeful humour is strategic and wise. I won’t ruin this affirmation by pun-ishing you with my usual litany of words inserted solely for their double-entendre implications. In fact, the affirmation I received almost moved me to submit my last ten puns to a contest for best puns. But I fear if I did, I might learn that no pun in ten did win. And I’d be joking if I told you that I inserted the puns just for you, or for winning some contest. After all, a pun is truly its own re-word.