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Much to celebrate as B.C. schools open

With schools opening across B.C. this week, there is much to celebrate and much to keep in perspective.

With schools opening across B.C. this week, there is much to celebrate and much to keep in perspective.

In our public system alone, from kindergarten to Grade 12, more than 500,000 kids will meet 40,000 teachers and begin a year of teaching and learning in classrooms. We can, as a society, feel justifiably pleased about that. The fact that our public schools are open to all kids this week is a major cultural, political and educational event.

And one that is too easy to take for granted.

Consider for a moment the plight of public education, children and their teachers in much of the rest of the world.

According to new data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 67 million children were out of school during the school year ending in 2010 . This figure has been falling, especially since 2000, when the international community reinforced commitments to achieve universal primary education, but globally, 51 per cent of all primary age out-of-school children are expected to never enter school. A further 19 per cent have attended but left school, and the remaining 30 per cent are expected to enter school some time in the future.

Among industrialized, nuclear-powered and armed countries, Pakistan has the highest number of out-of school children (7.3 million in 2009) including 34 per cent of the country's primary school-age population. Girls account for 57 per cent of children excluded from primary education.

Teachers are often poorly trained, if at all.

Our teachers in B.C. are well trained, and it is a tribute to the general esteem in which the profession is held here that we still have lineups of university grads wanting to qualify as teachers and commit themselves to 35 years of working every day of the school year with kids.

But there are places where teaching is not just challenging, it is lifethreatening. A recent story in the respected British newspaper The Guardian puts that in perspective.

Writer Rina Saeed Kahn tells the story of a rundown building in the village of Sijban, a pothole on the MattaSawar road on Pakistan's northwest frontier.

Kahn describes girls sitting at their desks, hair loosely covered in white or black scarves, staring raptly at their teacher. They say they want to become either doctors or teachers when they grow up. It is a distant goal with obstacles that would render it unimaginable for kids in our classrooms.

This is the one government primary school for girls in the Swat valley that was spared destruction by the Taliban.

Their head teacher, Gul-e-Khandana, is no ordinary teacher and no ordinary woman. She stood up to the Taliban and managed to save the school where she had taught for more than 20 years.

Khan's account depicts how Gul-e-Khadana still shudders as she recalls what happened: "A group of Taliban arrived with Kalashnikovs at the school building just before the school holidays in June 2008. I ran out and told them: 'You will have to kill me first before you torch my school.' They called me a kaffir, a non-believer, and said they would be back."

That is one amazing teacher and principal.

Other reports indicate that the Taliban has destroyed more than 400 of the 1,576 schools in that part of Pakistan. "Seventy per cent of them were girls' schools," recalls Ensaullah Khan, who serves on the board of the Sarhad rural support program, an NGO helping to rebuild schools.

A review of the perils inherent for kids and teachers in other destabilized regimes in relatively recent times describes the purging of teachers during the 1966 cultural revolution in China and the "removal" of teachers with the wrong political leanings during the Pinochet regime in Chile.

And not far from our own doorstep, things have, at times, been no better.

According to files edited by Kenneth O'Reilly, professor of history at Marquette University, Wisconsin, because of the McCarthy hearings in the U.S., the FBI recommended a purge of public-school teachers on the grounds that "daily contact of teachers with pupils forms a close association and enables the teachers to effectively control the thinking of the pupils and thus insidiously instil into the minds of children the Communist party line."

But our taxpayer-supported system here in B.C. and in Canada is essentially free, certainly safe for our teachers and universally available for our kids.

And while fewer than 27 per cent of B.C. taxpayers actually have kids in public school, and even though education takes a major bite out of the provincial budget, schools open this week because accessible public education is a big part of who we are and what we believe in.

That is something of which we can all be very proud, especially this week.

Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.

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