By Raymond Viger
Neighborhood Schools
Why are schools no longer located in neighborhoods? Why have they been replaced by schools with 2,500 students?
With schools near their home, kids walked to school. There was less transport by school buses, and less obesity among young people. Kids arrived in school in a better state of mind, more able to tackle their course work. After an hour aboard a bus, little wonder that kids have to jump around to expend their excess energy. Are we going to prescribe Ritalin to calm them down?
School administrators create megaschools because they don’t want to offer specialized services to accompany students in small schools. Doing things this way forces them to group kids from a wider geographic area into a larger school, requiring the use of school buses.
A community should have the capacity to accommodate its kids, its senior citizens, its mentally and physically disabled… all those people who are different and who have different needs. Harmony is a balance between extremes. Society can’t live in peace if it leaves behind some of its citizens. This feeling of belonging to the vital pulse of a neighborhood allows for the better integration of its inhabitants, so that they aren’t just anonymous faceless folk limited to cycles of subway-work-subway-sleep.
Combating Poverty
A city can’t turn itself away from poverty. Poverty can become a cancer that eats away at the community. A conflict develops between two different worlds. The rich want services and a good quality of life. The poor only want to stay alive.
We can limit ourselves to beautifying a neighborhood, renovating buildings, increasing the number of lodgings, and pushing poverty a bit further out of sight. But how do we defeat poverty?
I knew an entrepreneur who was making a lot of money and living well. He had a grade 2 education. Good with his hands, he built houses his whole life. He admitted to me one day that had he been born 20 years later he never could have had the career he had because nowadays you need all sorts of diplomas to get the certifications and permits required to hammer a nail into a wooden plank. With his grade 2 education, he would possibly have become poor and homeless. We require at least a grade 9 – secondary 3 – to gain access to construction courses. Some even require a high school diploma.
Many say that school isn’t suited to people who learn differently. They learn by showing up, hammer in hand, observing, and following more experienced people. For them, it’s by breaking their fingers with a swing of the hammer that they learn to become a carpenter! What is more important? A diploma, or professional autonomy?
Is one of the causes of poverty stopping people who learn differently from gaining access to a trade? How can we practice full employment if some kids don’t have access to trades? Isn’t it the job of our educational institutions to adapt to the youths they have the responsibility to instruct?
Do educational institutions have to change the way they do things, their vision of education? Shouldn’t schools take their cues from alternative schools? A neighborhood institution with fewer students; greater autonomy to create and apply programs as a function of their students’ needs. The community can get more involved in fulfilling the needs of students, because it takes a village to educate a child.
In elementary schools, teachers are significant adults who stay with the same students over the course of several years. It’s a way of establishing a solid relationship between teachers and students.
The Limits of Teaching
Teaching is a calling. For those who practice the profession it must be a passion. It’s vital that we must support these adults in their mission. They play an essential role.
When a teacher has reached their saturation point, shouldn’t we help them find another job? We shouldn’t leave them in teaching just so that they have job stability and can one day collect their pension. A depressed teacher can no longer be a significant adult for a child. They become just a grain of sand in the enormous gears of the educational system. If possible, let’s transfer them to another job in which they can flourish and become significant in another sense.
A professional aircraft pilot has to pass upgrade exams and medical tests every six months to keep their flying certificate. That’s because when a job carries the responsibility for protecting human lives, we want a pilot to have the necessary competence to get people to their destination.
Why not do the same with our teachers, our nurses, and so many other trades and professions that take care of the population? Should we not create a professional ordr to help along the teaching trade? We say that it is in teaching that you get good at it. We lose 50% of our teachers in the first five ears of them graduating from teaching school and getting their first job.
The goal of a society is to watch over the education of young people, to furnish them with the tools required so that they can become educated. Can learning happen through observation, by trial and error? School should adapt to young people and all their differences.
As much as school should be different for kids with different needs, it should also be different for those at the head of the class. Slowing down a remarkably bright kid is scholastic suicide. A kid at the top of their class doesn’t want to operate at 75%, they want to operate at 120%… minimum. Dropping out doesn’t just happen to those who can’t follow along fast enough; it also happens to those who can’t stand waiting for the others.
The pandemic had us experimenting in homeschooling with remote courses given over the internet. Is this a possible alternative to big schools? A way of doing things differently, so that we can conserve youths being educated in their village?
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