Rae review reviewCouple things about the Rae Review last night... Bob Rae wasn't there, but his predecessor, Bill Davis, was. He claims he was only there for "historical and hysterical" purposes. The man does have a sense of humour. I don't remember him as premier, even though I was ten when he resigned. (The first premier I remember was David Peterson). I didn't know that Bill Davis was responsible, as education minister in the late 60s, for the provincial college system. I directly benefitted from the investments his government made in education. This is the sort of conservative I would voted for. Shame they don't exist anymore. One of the people from UW got up and beseeched the government to get more involved in supporting UW's co-op education program, and how this program was good and wonderful and did great things. Bill Davis agreed that co-op was indeed good and wonderful, but responded by saying that he remembered back in the day when Mr Hagey and Mr Wright came to him from UW and told him that they didn't really want the government involved in their new and innovative co-op program. A member of the audience piped up with "Just send money!" I giggled. There was one girl who got up and gave a great story. "Imagine you're fourteen years old," she said. You won't be able to drive for another two years. They won't let you vote for another four. You're not supposed to go near alcohol for another five. But at fourteen, you're expected to choose your ulitmate career path. I hadn't realized, but streaming is back. And in a big way. When I was in school, we were "streamed." That's what they called it anyway. I don't know if you could call it that. You didn't explicitly pick a stream. You picked courses. There were Basic, General and Advanced courses. Basic were reserved, practically speaking, for those with learning disabilities. General courses were more practical and less theoretical. Shop classes, for example, were all general. So was gym, until you got to the health courses in the higher grades. Advanced courses generally had prerequisites that were other advanced courses, and OAC courses were all advanced. You needed OAC courses to get into university. In that sense it was a stream. It was possible, though difficult, to move from General to Advanced. You might have to re-take courses you'd already taken at an advanced level. This system made sense to me. I didn't see what the big deal was. My friend Bill hated French. In grade 9, he dropped out of the advanced French course and took the general one instead. Not really a big deal. You only needed one French course in high school, and it didn't matter if it was Advanced or General if you weren't going to take another one. His parents freaked out, though. "How are you going to get a job in the government if you don't know French?!" Something like that. Like a job in the government was a good thing. Bob Rae's NDP government, in an orgasm of well-intentioned egalitarianism, did away with this system, in a process called "destreaming." My sister had to deal with this. By all accounts, it was stupid. So I suppose it's no surprise that John Snobelen (the horse ranching, high school drop-out education minster under Mike Harris) would have brought back streaming. But apparently there are something like five streams now. And they really are streams. You have to pick one, based on where you expect to be at the end of highschool. Worse, these streams are intended as "preparation." Now when I was in grade 7 and 8, I was told that the whole point of those years was to "prepare" you for highschool. Highschool was difficult and demanding, and you must strive and sacrifice to get yourself ready for those demands. The problem was that grades 7 and 8 had absolutely nothing to do with anything we were to do in highschool. I hated grades 7 and 8. I nearly failed grade 8 science. Highschool, on the other hand, was a breeze. I suppose it's possible that the grade 7 and 8 curriculum might have prepared you for highschool in the sixties or seventies. It had nothing to do with preparing us for anything that we'd actually do. This girl (the one I first mentioned six paragraphs ago) told us that, of course her parents wanted her to go into the university preparation program. She ended up in the police sciences program at Guelph, I believe. In highschool, they told her that univesity was difficult and demanding, and you must strive and sacrifice to get yourself ready for those demands. All your tests will have essay questions. None of this multiple choice stuff—that was for lowly college students. All your assignments will be group work. Pick a partner. Of course, when she got to university, she found that all the test were multiple choice, because they're easy to mark. She was getting Cs in her course, not because she didn't know how the material, but because nobody ever told her how to do multiple choice tests. And, of course, nearly all her assignments were independant, and the few that were group assignments were groups of six or seven, because class sizes are so huge. There's a cautionary tale here. Education should be about teaching people stuff, not about preparing them for anything. Because chances are, the people doing the preparing are so out of touch, they don't have a hope of preparing anyone for anything. The nice thing about university, at least, is they're up front about this. If they're preparing you for anything, it's more school. And they know all about school. Sure, it would have been nice to have come out with a shiny honours CS degree with a few skills I'd actually be able to use on the job, but that was what co-op was for. My CS courses didn't come close. And you know what? I don't mind. Employers should know that in hiring a university grad, they're hiring somebody who knows how to learn stuff. comments:
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