Living and Learning in School

MR. JOLLIFFE:

"Readin', Writin' and 'Rithmetic,

Taught to the tune of a hickory stick."

This was the simple formula for education in another day and a pioneer society, symbolized by the log schoolhouse from Glengarry which you can see at Upper Canada Village, and later by the little red schoolhouse, now just about gone in Ontario--but not quite forgotten.

In our own time the school system has suddenly been confronted with competition and crisis. Competition from the message purveyed by television and all the other media, printed, taped, canned, delivered anytime and anywhere, including the nursery. Crisis in the global village, its technological revolution, its conflict of ideas and interests, its changing way of life and uncertain scale of values.

We had advance warning about all this from an American philosopher 60 years ago--long before TV or cybernetics or nuclear weapons. John Dewey thought our difficulties are those of a chaotic adolescence and the disproportion between our powers and our wisdom. He said: "Physical science has far out run psychical. We have mastered the physical mechanism sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have not gained a knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard and hence of force .... With tremendous increase in our control of nature in our ability to utilize nature for human use and satisfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values, growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as though we were caught in a contradiction; the more we multiply means the less certain is the use we are able to make of them."

One of those who has risen boldly to the immense challenge of such competition and crisis is another far-sighted man, Mr. Lloyd A. Dennis. A native of Muskoka, he left the Huntsville High School to serve in the Army and completed his post-war studies at the Universities of Toronto and Chicago. After some years as a public school grade teacher, and then a science teacher, he became a social studies consultant, published several books, was the creator and editor of the Children's page in the Toronto Telegram for six years.

But not only the children--the parents, the teachers, the trustees and the government have also heard from Mr. Dennis. Only last week I was in Belleville. Mr. Dennis was there, speaking to a Regional Conference of School Trustees.

Almost three years ago he resigned as Principal of Deer Park School to serve as Secretary and Research Director of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education, a group of 21 outstanding citizens. A year later he was appointed its Co-chairman with Mr. Justice Emmett Hall of the Supreme Court of Canada. Their report, the Hall-Dennis Report, appeared a few months ago and it has been described as "revolutionary". I don't know: perhaps it is the time in which we live that is truly revolutionary. Or he may tell us. We are going to hear from the co-author of the Hall-Dennis Report--Mr. Lloyd A. Dennis.

MR. DENNIS:

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I first wish to express on behalf of the committee, Mr. Justice Hall and myself, our gratitude for the opportunity to present to you the conviction that underlies the document called Living and Learning and at this time I would also like to express the regrets of Mr. Justice Hall who had also been invited to come here today--perhaps by the time I finish you will wish he had.

He sincerely wished to be here but was unable to be and he asked me to convey his regrets to you.

I would like to make this point here--I am not the sole author of these convictions in the Report but I am happy to espouse them. I am this--I am a man who entered this exercise some three years ago with a good deal of self-satisfaction about his role in education. I came out of the exercise, however, I think, considerably humbled regarding my position in education and I hope I found a new dedication in this venture called "Living and Learning" and a new kind of commitment, and I believe that the others who served on the Committee feel this way, too.

And now we hope that you will share this conviction in that we have to say in the Report.

And so what I offer today is not the expression of Dennis, but the expression of this book which begins by saying:

"The underlying aim of education is to further man's unending search for truth. Once he possesses the means to truth, all else is within his grasp. Wisdom and understanding, sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility, as well as intellectual honesty and personal integrity, will be his guides in adolescence and his companions in maturity.

"This is the message that must find its way into the minds and hearts of all Ontario children. This is the key to open all doors. It is the instrument which will break the shackles of ignorance, of doubt, and of frustration; that will take all who respond to its call out of their poverty, their slums, and their despair; that will spur the talented to find heights of achievement and provide every child with the experience of success; that will give mobility to the crippled; that will illuminate the dark world of the blind and bring the deaf into communion with the hearing; that will carry solace to the disordered of mind, imagery to the slow of wit, and peace to the emotionally disturbed; that will make all men brothers, equal in dignity if not in ability; and that will not tolerate disparity of race, colour, or creed.

"This above all is our task: to seek and to find the structure, the organization, the curriculum, and the teachers to make this aim a reality in our schools and in our time."

Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is the rock on which we split the wood in this Report. We need go no further, perhaps, to look for the conviction than that first statement. But that, of course, forces us face to face with the issue of our Ontario culture and what we are going to say about the enterprise in which we are engaged.

And so to quote again from the Report, we note this:

"We stand today in the dawn of our second century and assess the field of future education. Surrounded by the greatest array of learning paraphernalia we have ever seen, and immersed in new knowledge, we must not lose sight of the human needs that the new dawn brings. We are at once the heirs of the past and the stewards of the future, and while we take pride in our inheritance, we can ill afford to bury our talents in the soils of satisfaction. We have in our hands means of change for human betterment that few people of the world enjoy. We must find a way to their application that will germinate the seeds of a more fruitful way of life, not only for the people of Ontario but for all Canadians; and hopefully the harvest will make its contribution to all mankind."

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you and I sit here today, the elite of the world-and we should recognize that fact. We, the hard-working great Canadian lot, so productive and so utilitarian, so proud of it all, have now perhaps been offered a new kind of opportunity; and knocking quietly on the door of the Empire Club today and on every classroom door in Canada, if you like, is this new opportunity pleading for us to respond. Perhaps by God's design-if that is your inclination-or by an accident of time, if that is, we Canadians have found ourselves in the midst of one of the biggest cupboards of resource that the world has ever seen. Few in number we are, with a new insight we should be able to find by rubbing shoulders one with the other in our difference, in a place in time that enables us to look back upon the ages and see the mistakes, the tragedies and the glories of other nations. We now have an opportunity to find a new way of life for all men.

What a challenge it is. Why, it is hardly likely that we might notice it, so profound is this responsibility handed to the teachers and to you, the body public. We should note that we haven't got the right to abdicate this responsibility.

So that is what is knocking on the doors of our schools and that is what knocked on the door of this Committee when we approached the task.

We quote again from the Report:

"Today, on every side, however, there is heard a growing demand for a fresh look at education in Ontario. The Committee was told of inflexible programmes, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization, and mistaken aims of education. We heard from alienated students, frustrated teachers, irate parents, and concerned educators. Many public organizations and private individuals have told us of their growing discontent and lack of confidence in a school system which, in their opinion, has become outmoded and is failing those it exists to serve."

Now, we need waste no time, ladies and gentlemen, in condemnation. In fact, I would be the first to say I am proud to be a product of the educational system, hit and miss as it was in God's country called Muskoka. We can be pleased with the fact that we have been able to build a very exciting system of education and we have many things to be proud of.

It is worthy of note, however, that our educational system which we now enjoy was built in another era, and to a degree, it tends to serve that other era, a time now passed; the era of the well-ordered society, so well ordered that we assumed that order and the static position was a good thing to espouse and hang on to.

Naturally, one would expect an educational enterprise to grow out of that static position that itself would reflect the principles of the status quo.

And so, it wasn't hard for me to establish a school and place it over on the right-hand side of the road with the church, and to make it a place of mystery where only a few people could go, and fewer still could teach; and because it bore that aura of mystery, I attached to it solemn purpose, and it became a place of good order and authority and obedience that one would expect in a well-ordered society.

And so my school took on this kind of attitude that its main function was to develop a young man, a young woman, to look like the teacher, to be like the teacher, to dress like the teacher, to act like the teacher in order to reflect and maintain the good order in the good society.

And of course I realized that, in order to maintain authority, I had to operate from a position of central control. So I built an educational system based upon the theory of central command. That was good, for it was comfortable and it kept everybody in a regimented position. Then I tended to regiment my schools for that same purpose and in doing that I found that I had to prescribe what people learned and prescribe also how they would learn it and what they would do with it after they had learned it. That, too, was a comfortable position for me in an establishment that sought to keep everyone in his place. And in order to prescribe something I had to consider education to be packages of content to be absorbed by people who learn.

So my children come into the school essentially empty-headed to be packed with the fact, and to be periodically tested with a dip stick called an exam. When it was pulled out reading "full", the teacher said, "Go man, now you're educated, just like me."

It was demanded that the school serve society. Therefore, I attached a utilitarian purpose to the school and my assumption then grew that children came to school to learn something, a craft perhaps, to get a job. Scratch any child and he will tell you, "I go to school in order to get a job one day." Thus my school became a utilitarian kind of establishment. Then I attached to it all kinds of hardware to support that utilitarian function. With severe organization, efficiency and specialization, I built my machine for the education of the young-and in the process I made my school the utilitarian handmaiden of my culture.

This Committee approached the question philosophically and felt that this was not enough for a school. Because a school is a place where man comes to learn, a school has a greater role to play in our culture. Since it is one of the major change agents of our culture, it must be a headlight, not a reflector.

This is a difficult position to assume for a school. No society establishes an institution like a school in order to destroy itself. Nevertheless, we say that the main purpose of the school is not to pack the content of the past into the people so that they can regurgitate it at periodic intervals. I must be an arena for exploration, where people come to explore the unknown, to puncture the mysterious, to pull out new facts and new convictions that even the teacher may not have. Maybe that is what a school is for. If it is, the school must assume the responsibility of examining its culture in order to make good men better men. To quote from the Report again, "That the school has probably a less profound but more specific task on its hands now. It must constantly deal with the societal conditions that have a direct influence on the welfare of children and young people." The adult community cannot escape the fact that it provides the milieu in which young people live and so must accept the responsibility of influence.

If our community, for example, has a value system that is contradictory one can hardly expect anything more than confusion in young people.

If our community lacks commitment it can hardly hope for more in youth. If it is inclined to disregard the nobility of purpose that is the right of all men to enjoy in favour of indiscriminate gain, it may expect a similar inclination in the adults of the future.

And so we take a look at this from the Committee's viewpoint and we say there is a new role for the school.

Some schools have already found it, some always had it. But we are saying that, as a state exercise, we should accept the fact that the school is a vital change agent in our society and it is about time that we are mature enough to recognize this great service that the school has to play. And if that is true, we might as well talk about what we hope for as a product of the school-and we find that it is hardly utilitarian.

What shall we ask of the mature citizen of our future society? Three qualities perhaps.

We ask that he be a self-disciplined man. We ask that he be a man of responsibility. We ask that he be a man who enjoys a sense of freedom. Of course, those are the tenets of my culture.

Why wouldn't he have the right then to come to me and knock on the door of the school and say, "Provide a learning experience that will do those things for me." But when I take a look at my school I note a striking similarity between it and the last company that I commanded in the army.

It wasn't long ago, ladies and gentlemen, that I marched little children into my school-six years of age, left, right, left, right--to military music. March in, sit down, shut up, stand up, sing the Queen, salute the flag, now sit down and listen.

We don't offer this observation in condemnation of all of our schools. We are suggesting, perhaps, this is not the road to self-discipline. It is the road to the disciplined man, perhaps. One could hardly expect that after an extended experience in an authoritarian position, of law on one side and obedience on the other, anything better than a disciplined man, or a man full of revolt and resentment, or the man who would not be able to take care of himself on his own without a maximum number of rules and regulations and laws by this society.

And so we say one of the jobs of the school and one of the basic attempts of this Report is to find that kind of learning experience that will allow this power to develop in the individual.

At the end, we want a man of two great qualities. We ask for a person who has a critical mind, so that, as he walks through life, he will seek out the evidence wherever he can find it and put it together to form a conviction for himself and stand up and say what it is. And the other thing we hope for him is a compassionate and understanding heart.

Running through the whole sentiment of this Report is the argument that those are the things, those third dimensional things if you like, that are to be found in my school whose job is not just to educate for manpower but manhood. These are the invisible things that I must provide in my school. I must find a way to do it, because those qualities are the foundation of our future, and I might as well admit that that is the major responsibility in my school. If that is true, I must recognize the learning process.

Learning is a highly personal matter. Perhaps God made it like that, I don't know who made it like that, I didn't. I know that I have to bring order out of chaos to masses of people. The public tells me to teach too many children too many things in too short a time. Too busy am I doing too many things but I know that learning itself is an individual experience, and schools must reflect that condition.

More than that, learning is a continuous process. It began when my students were born, it will stop when they die--and no man has the power of God to come in and wrap it up, and package it, and dole it out like chewing gum.

Yet, that is sometimes how I treat students and their learning. I put them on the assembly line and I twist them and mold them until they come out new and shiny products to fit my good culture. The learning process is not like that. Its qualities are, in the end, invisible qualities, and therefore by some method I must provide for learning in an atmosphere that is warm and inviting and exciting and challenging, oft times frustrating, of course, but essentially pleasurable for the people who come to find it.

So I have to build my school to do those things. Obviously then, I would argue for a just society that would provide equality of opportunity to all children in Ontario. Why not? But then, why don't I recognize that my province is very diverse in its environment? Why should I be so sure that I can establish one educational system for the whole province? It is now time for me to argue for great diversity in education, greater individuality in the power of learning? Not to pamper students, not to mollycoddle them-just the reverse. I have already done that to youth. Now we are arguing for a new breed of men who are more responsible than I am. The road to it is through individual experience and to the greatest degree that it can be provided.

So in terms of curriculum as we see it in our Report, we are talking about curriculum being a learning experience that is wide in its diversity, highly individual, and that reflects the continuity of the learning process. It reflects also the invisible nature of the learning that goes on. A school organization that plays a different kind of role, with less emphasis upon the content absorption theory and more on the development of concepts, of attitudes, of those kinds of skills that we look for in men of nobility.

In this great diversity of our province we ask for greater local autonomous exercises in curriculum design. We see a changing role for the Department of Education, to one of less authority, perhaps, and more in terms of satisfaction of needs through task force operations. The Department is already moving in this direction, and we hope to help it with our Report.

The teacher is not the low man on society's totem pole. He has the most profound responsibility in my community, since he is the only man who has been given the right by law to take young people and hold them for a long period of time, to do with as he will.

What kind of man or woman would we expect to find in the classroom? Surely one of great excitement, great warmth, great empathy--and severely competent. So competent must he be in the world of education and men's affairs that men beat a path to his door in order just to talk to him, and to be with him, to discuss psychology, philosophy, economics, law, and religion. Why not? These are the affairs of men.

In our description of this kind of approach to learning we would argue for a school system that is more comprehensive in its major and less dedicated to the utilitarian purpose of society.

We therefore argue for the kind of organization for learning which does not severely trap children into narrow paths of endeavour but establishes a kind of arena for learning where he may experience the many facets of learning that are available to him.

We have finally realized that we never did have a magic wand that we could wave over a child's head at the age of 14 and severely stream him off towards law, towards medicine, towards mechanics, towards pressing pants or whatever; and now we are arguing for an educational facility that will allow a student to change his mind and test himself, as I said, against many experiences and not be so caught up with the idea of regimentation, content absorption, and prerequisites for higher levels. We have a preoccupation with segregating people for efficient reasons and now we are known around the world as people who are pretty good at cutting kids out for different kinds of learning experiences according to their apparent aptitude, lack of ability, or lack of sight, or whatever. The school system is too ready to segregate people for special learning situations-sometimes irrevocably. We suggest that any society that calls itself a pluralistic society must be one that tries hard to integrate people in their learning experiences as much as possible. When it is necessary to segregate a student in order to serve him better, I should always have one thing in mind; and that is to bring him back into normalcy if I possibly can, as soon as I can. In order to do this, we talk about continuous learning experience to be found in a programme that ranges from kindergarten and 12 additional years of schooling, to be found in comprehensive schools. We argue that with our new insights in learning, our new clusters of arrangements for learning, our new powers and human resources, we should be able to send a child out into the world or into the tertiary level for further learning experience at the end of the twelfth year of schooling after nursery and kindergarten.

Of course, we also suggest that there is nothing mysterious about this place called school and so perhaps it is time to say that if we are really dedicated to the service of young people and their needs in education that it may be possible to serve them more individually. There are many young people, for example, who perhaps would be better off in the world of work than in the world of school, perhaps sharing responsibilities and experiences with the work world and the school world simultaneously. We plead for that kind of flexibility in the arrangement of the curriculum and in the arrangement of the legislation regarding the attendance of school. There are many recommendations in this Report that suggest ways and means of improving education and in the drawing of these designs we examined what we now have. As I said, we have found many excellent things going on in Ontario. And, of course, we found some things that we would criticize. That was our task.

We might note that when we have a large research institution like the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, one must be very careful that its staff does not withdraw itself and become an isolated kind of group only doing things for themselves, losing touch with the very people the Institute was designed to serve, the people out in the field of education.

We should watch that kind of operation when we build quickly and precipitously to satisfy immediate needs. We know, for example, that we have educational television for use in the schools. Why not? It is obvious. But again, it is a temptation for me to jump onto the bandwagon of educational T.V. facilities and then think I have the problem solved--even though, when I go around the province I find that a disturbing number of T.V. sets are safely hidden in the closet unopened yet because they interfere with the lesson.

And so we suggest that perhaps it is time to, if we are really in the business of dedicating ourselves to the education of young people in terms of their individual needs, that the big problem still staring us right in the face is the need for counselling in my schools. Students have every right to receive competent counselling and guidance in their schools yet we note that we are very superficial in this regard and we plead for quick action in this area.

Naturally, we say that in this time, the parent and the public generally should come back to the field of education where you always belonged. A long time ago I put you out of the school when I made it that place of mystery, and you first became concerned. Then you became intimidated by me. Now when you come to visit the school you revert to 12 years of age because that is the way you remember it, this solemn place. And in the process, of course, you have to a degree become apathetic about what goes on in education. We argue in this Report that this thing called education for your young people is too vital for you to abdicate.

I am not in the business of education for myself and neither are you as a parent. Thus we plead for a new kind of approach to education in terms of a partnership shared by the public and the profession. In that regard, one of our more specific recommendations deals with the appointment of an advisory council, an autonomous, non-political body of people representative of society, and reporting directly to the legislature on a regular basis, concerning the affairs of education in the Province.

That, of course, led us to the other recommendation that I would like to note for you. The appointment of an ombudsman in education-not because it's a European bandwagon that we would like to jump on, but because we think that in this morass of education it is very difficult for individuals to keep their individuality and to have their problems solved as quickly as they should be solved. We feel that this kind of approach might help.

All of this we say about education is not relevant at all unless we do something about the power of human resources that we place in our schools.

We can no longer afford to maintain a superficial attitude in this regard.

Now we don't condemn our province in this regard. We haven't even had time to catch our breath in Ontario since World War II. We can't even build schools quickly enough, let alone staff them. But if the aims embodied in this Report are what we want, the only way we are going to achieve them is through powerful human resources in our schools. And we won't achieve this just by providing more teachers with more degrees, but by providing a different kind of educational depth and diversity for those teachers. We need the support of the public to recognize if this is a prerequisite to success in this area.

Ladies and gentlemen, if this Report could speak for itself, it would say:

Mr. Public, you have the prerogative of condemning me, if you like. That is your right. You also have the right to commend me, if you like. But you don't have the right to ignore me. I am, after all, the most current public statement on education now before you. As such, I deserve your attention.

Thus the Committee offers Living and Learning, a document that hasn't got all the answers but certainly poses a lot of questions, offered not as a prescription, but as a grand design. We hope that you will find something about it worthy of your interest and your action.

I would like to close, as I began, with a quote from the Report:

"We now relinquish our task, conscious that the broad design for education which we have recommended may be found to be inadequate by some and unsatisfactory by others. We trust that this Report will be studied as a whole, and viewed as such, and not as a collection of unrelated topics. Our dominant aim throughout has been to see and to delineate education as a complete and integrated endeavour for the children of Ontario--the children who very soon will have committed to them the responsibilities of adulthood and the destiny of a province in a united Canada, her citizens in harmony from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and at peace with all peoples.

In this setting of unity, harmony, and peace, the educational endeavour will flourish and truth will make all men free."

Thanks of the meeting were expressed by Dr. H. V. Cranfield.