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Geoff Johnson: Education ‘amendments’ not needed

If the practice of public medicine ever becomes as politicized as public education, we are all in trouble.

If the practice of public medicine ever becomes as politicized as public education, we are all in trouble.

Oncology, as one example with which I am now familiar, is a profession involving the same risks as climbing Everest or trying to fly a glider across the Atlantic — or teaching in a public school.

It is best left to the risk-takers who at least know what they are doing.

Trust is involved, trust that these people are doing what they can to deal with what is understood only at a relatively superficial level.

It is not an entirely inappropriate analogy because, at one level, say through the use of forms of standardized testing, it is possible to see at least a very narrow spectrum of the problem.

Nobody understands how learning happens, any more than how certain experimental cancer treatments might or might not defeat the disease entirely.

Yet our elected representatives seem to believe they are qualified to reform the practice of teaching specifically and public education generally.

Hard to understand, because B.C.’s system of public education, like B.C.’s internationally recognized inroads into cancer research, is demonstrably among the world’s best and does not need fixing, especially by people who do not seem to have much insight into what is involved in running a 21st-century classroom, school or school district, any more than they do into how to cure cancer.

Perhaps it is because public education is an easier target and politics down through the ages has always needed easy and obvious targets to deflect public attention from societal troubles not so easily remedied.

Bill 11, the Educational Amendment Act, for example, appeared apparently without much discussion with the trustees, administrators or teachers who actually try to make the system work.

It is, by all accounts, some kind of omnibus bill that “amends” three other laws: the Independent School Act, the School Act and the Teachers Act. Critics, those same folks who actually understand the public-education system, claim that it appears to threaten student privacy, cripple school boards’ autonomy and remove teachers’ control over their own professional development.

Whether any of those elements of the public school system urgently needed “amendment” is a moot discussion.

But conflict is an essential element of a good headline, though, and that, in turn, is the bread and butter of politics.

In the meantime, B.C. quietly tolerates one in five of its children being raised in poverty.

A new study, reported in the British journal Nature last month, tells us that poverty shrinks a baby’s brain right from birth, dooming the child before it even has a chance and dooming the teachers who try to save it.

Now there’s an issue a family-oriented government could really get after.

According to the United Way, 30 per cent of six-year-olds are not ready to learn by the time they enter school due to poverty and related factors.

Failure to address developmental needs early in life can lead to increased crime and unemployment rates. That’s when ignoring the initial problem becomes really expensive.

Childhood poverty is like some kind of serious societal cancer in the body of our civilized complacency about ourselves. And that is a cancer government could attack.

In fact, research indicates that more than 93,000 children in B.C. live in poverty and, despite the best efforts of teachers, schools and school districts, the outlook for those kids is gloomy.

There is no conflict here, though, no scent of battle, no headlines, no grim-faced union leaders and politicians making hard-faced statements on the evening news.

Teachers and oncologists also differ from elected persons in this way; they both work with potentially unsolvable problems every day and yet are motivated never to accept defeat. They work under the media radar with small successes understood only by themselves and those to whom they attend.

They also learn to live with failure, something no elected person ever wants any part of.

Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.

gfjohnson4@shaw.ca