Education and the Knowledge-Based Society

Ronald Goodall

Education is in the news again. Some teachers are a little unhappy with hours of work. Some chairmen of boards of education are a little concernedwith the perceived need of a strong public education system. There is debate within business groups about an education crisis, evidenced by high drop-out rates from school and increased illiteracy.

Is the work of the teacher impeded by the nightly obsession with the TV set and by ready acceptance of actors' performances as patterns of behaviour? Does the everyday and omnipresent computer use processing routines which require merely a mechanical selection process and not an inquiring thought process?

Have the ready availability of social welfare and assistance from government and the urgings of social workers to exercise one's independence and rights destroyed teacher and parent control over students?

Fortunately, to face these problems and to meet this challenge to educators, we still have those relics from the past, the schoolma'am and the little red schoolhouse. Perhaps not in the same shape-the schoolma'am is quite emancipated and the schoolhouse 20 or more times larger-but that dedication to a vocation still exists. Education is recognized as a basic necessity, not only until one reaches the teenage years but throughout a lifetime. The cane is gone (it did me no harm, I can still sit down) and perhaps the French teacher is no longer known as Killer Dawson. The only advice I can offer you and your colleagues, Mr. McAndless, in meeting this challenge, is to pass on the words of Oliver Goldsmith: "Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, with grammar and nonsense and learning,! Good liquor I stoutly maintain gives genius a better discerning:"

The Empire Club has a history of connection with the world of education: three recent past presidents-Dr. C.C. Goldring in 1955; Dr. Z.S. Phimister in 1961; and Graham Gore in 1967-were Directors of Education of the City of Toronto.

Doug McAndless was raised in a small village north of London, Ontario. He grew up on a farm and a bake shop and graduated from a one-room country schoolhouse. He attended London Teachers' College and commenced teaching, specializing in history and mathematics.

He graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a Bachelor of Arts degree and earned his Master of Education (administration) degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.

He was vice-principal at the Ryerson Public School (London) and has served as principal teacher at Lord Roberts, Ecole Alexandra and Chippewa Public School.

Doug has been very active in London and Ontario teacher federation committees and organizations. In 1986, he was elected President of the Ontario Teachers' Federation. He has served as a Director of the Canadian Teachers' Federation since 1983.

Doug has been active in his home community in London where he has served in the Canadian Armed Forces (militia) for 28 years achieving the rank of lieutenant-colonel and commanding both the 22nd Service Battalion (London) and the Elgin Regiment. He has served as an elder and Sunday school superintendent of Robinson United Church, president and founding director of Stoneybrook Sports Association and a member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

Doug is married to Jacki and they have three grown children and two granddaughters. He has been honoured as Teacher of the Year in London in 1976, earned the Canadian Forces Decoration, been awarded the Queen's Jubilee Medal and he has been made a Fellow of the Ontario Teachers' Federation.

Please welcome Douglas McAndless, Past President of the Ontario Teachers' Federation, to address us on "Education and the KnowledgeBased Society."

Douglas McAndless

During the past year, education has become the hot news item. The Throne Speech last spring highlighted education and had us all excited-unfortunately, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing because the budget which followed fell flat when it came to the government putting their money where their mouth had been. Then the election promises poured. As a teacher in Ontario I could have been lulled into believing Bonanza Days were about to begin. The government has been elected and we in education will endeavour to ensure that Ontario's youth is not shortchanged.

The Toronto Star-and I hesitate to even use that fourletter word-has stated that education will be their paper's priority for the next number of years. If the future is painted as black as the present, and I refer to the six lengthy articles that appeared last May, teachers and education are certainly going to be damned. My guess is that they have commenced in a very negative tone in order to take full credit for the tremendous improvement a few years hence.

Do not get me wrong. Education and educators are not perfect. They never have been nor are they likely to ever achieve that exalted position. But it is well to note that education has currently the most highly qualified teachers with the greatest amount of experience that we have had in the history of Ontario. Yet the challenges of the knowledge/service-based economy are not being met at present and it is not due to a mass of unmotivated teachers.

At this point in my address I was about to embark on a litany of criticisms made by the Star. I'm not going to do that. At 4:45 one morning I was lying in bed wide awake trying to come up with ways to improve my school. I believe these real problems may help to make my point.

I have an experienced Grade 8 teacher. She has 27 pupils, three who are "general learning disabled," two who are on "individual plans." Simply put, she has 22 regular students with their broad range of abilities and five children with special needs. These five are withdrawn for resource help-the three for about one-quarter of the day, one twice in a six-day cycle and the other one once. The class is on rotary so four other teachers must make special program arrangements. Sue also teaches core French to a couple of classes, one of which is a Grade 4 made up of 40 pupils. Sue arrives at school by 8 each morning and works at home each night until well after 9:30. True, she has spent a couple of hours whipping together dinner and eating but her children are old enough to do their own homework and get ready for bed. This is no novice but an experienced teacher. There are tens of thousands of "Sues" in Ontario's teaching force.

In my primary division, I have one small Junior Grade 1 with 19 pupils. These are children with learning problems or very slow to mature. They are functioning like kindergarten or earlier but are at least six years old. The rest of the primary has more than 27 pupils per class, most at or above 30 and many of these classes are split grades.

In a school of 434 pupils, I have almost 60 who are new Canadians with virtually no capacity in English. They come from Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Honduras, Germany and Poland. They receive English-as-asecond-language help for about one hour a day. The rest of the time the regular classroom teacher must provide a program for these children.

My Home and School were so ashamed of the appearance of the drapes on the windows at the front of my school that they wanted me to make them a priority on my furniture requisition. They are, but first are carpets for the primary classes, bookcases for three classes and I can maybe do one or two classes with drapes. Our staff room furniture is old and much has had to be discarded to the point where most of the staff must sit on metal folding chairs for lunch.

I'm in a pretty good school. The children are proud of their school and we have very good parental support. The school, comparatively, is pretty well equipped. It is one of the better communities in which I have worked. I have a dedicated and hard-working staff who come up with hundreds of ways to make education come alive and we are accountable. We are accountable to our students, their parents and to society but the idea of province-wide testing will not make us more accountable and could reduce the effectiveness we are currently achieving.

OTF is and has been prepared to work with the Ministry of Education in developing matrix testing which can and will give province-wide achievement levels without reverting to an archaic form of testing.

A second process is the standardized OAC English exams. The evidence which prompted the move was some very simple research which indicated that Grade 13 examinations varied a great deal from teacher to teacher and school to school. It was not necessarily that teachers had been too easy in setting the exams but that with no guideline it was not fair for the students. It is, after all, a bit like flower arranging. Each teacher has the same set of flowers but there will be different ideas as to how they might look. The new process will hopefully allow teacher-autonomy and produce a more equal product and a fairer test for all students.

We have research which tells us clearly that most learning problems start in the primary grades. We know now that many of the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy develop quite irregularly in spurts with frequent reversals. We know that if we can provide the type of individualized learning in the early grades, the vast majority of problems in later years disappear or are significantly reduced. So, where do we have the smallest classes? At the secondary level. Where do we have preparation time? At secondary again, and that if you do not count college and university.

The other piece of information which I believe impacts on educators is a major research work by Dr. A.J.C. King from Queen's University for the OSSTF entitled, "The Adolescent Experience." I will quote but a few facts from this study which is the result of examining the responses of 45,000 students in Ontario. I urge you to read the whole research paper. Teachers are trying to identify the problems and find cures.

Dr. King found that students who participated in extracurricular activities were far more likely to do well at school. It may be that good marks and a white-collar background promote such participation but I believe that teacher dedication and the participation may promote a good attitude and better marks.

These extracurricular activities don't just happen. They too add to the teacher's workload.

Another startling revelation was that of all the students who enrolled in a General-level program in Grade 9 only 1 in 25, a mere 4 per cent, ever graduated from a college of applied arts and technology. Something is seriously wrong with the way we are dealing with the General-level student. The Minister of Education has made this a priority and OTF is very involved in a small work group examining the General-level program. But again I emphasize that most learning problems begin to appear in the early grades and it is easier and less expensive to solve them at that level than it is to wait and try to remedy them after they have left school.

In the past couple of months there have been groups proposing that the educational system should be teaching daily physical education; providing explicit instruction on the use of condoms and the prevention of AIDS. Bill 80 from Tony Grande would have put Heritage Languages on an equal basis with Part XI, French-language schools, and there was a leaked report on "mandatory" race relations policy. These have been issues on which OTF has attempted to protect the rights of teachers and students to ensure the best quality of education is provided and not eroded to meet the demands of every vocal group.

However, let us look at the future for Ontario and the challenging and changing role education must assume as we approach the 21st century. To do this, I would ask you to rethink Canada's position in the world today.

Canada-to the north of us is mystery, to the south importunity, to the east history and to the west, the east. Let me explain briefly, and I confess these images are not my own but those of Dr. Robert Moore, a speaker at Mont Ste. Marie. To the north we find the ice age still at work. God's work has not been completed and there is still mystery to unfold; and beyond the Arctic-Russia-cloaked in secrecy. To the south we have the United States with its tremendous power, influence and totally undaunted arrogance. To the east we have Britain and France, our two founding peoples, and a host of other European cultures who have added to our Canadian mosaic. And to the west the Pacific rim, 15 years ago a hopeless jumble of struggling humanity but now emerging as industrialized nations. We may be wise to cast our eyes to the west: Hyundai, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, just to mention a few household names of the '80s.

Canada is a trading nation. More than 30 cents of every dollar is achieved by foreign trade. Our traditional trading partners have been the United States and Europe. In this decade our trade with the Pacific has surpassed our trade with Europe. An interesting fact is that Canadian industry devotes an average of two hours of upgrading training per employee. Korea spends 200 hours on the same type of training. Korean salaries are 20 per cent those of Canadians and they are fearful that Third World countries will usurp their trading position and I do not suggest that salaries are the place to start our competition.

The challenges are before us. I have touched on the economic future of Canada but I could also spend time discussing the dangers to our environment. Daily we pollute our air and water so that by the middle of the 21st century the nation with the world's largest supply of fresh water will have destroyed most of it. How much more acid rain will it take to make us realize we must stop? The rain forests of the world are being destroyed annually by an area the size of Northern California and they may never be replaced.

Or look at the debt of the Third World, $3 trillion. The interest on it exceeds by a wide margin the total aid provided by the wealthy, and so again the cash flow is out of the poor countries. How long will these nations be satisfied to live in poverty without striking back.

Tons of top soil are lost annually through floods and wind and careless soil management and our food production capability declines. Yet the population by 2020,I am told, will be more than 20 billion people. How will we feed this horde?

These are a few questions and I could throw in nuclear armaments and the tremendous increase in technology as challenges our educational system must address. I would suggest that we must teach children how to make value judgments because the crises facing the world today are not all economic nor technological. Some are a matter of the survival of the world. If you want changes in the end product of education you must make the real changes in the process 15 years ahead and you must start in the primary grades. The students in Grade 1 will be graduating from high school in the 21st century. We have 110,000 teachers, the vast majority of whom are doing a superb job but they are not receiving the support they need to achieve all the goals that Ontario citizens have set out for them. Criticism alone will not make it better. A concerned public can help, ample resources, clear direction as to where we must go and a small thank you now and then for the tasks accomplished.

I have one small example of a supportive corporation. Pizza Hut and their "book-it" program to encourage students to read. True, it is probably not totally altruistic but it is more likely to produce positive results than sitting back and taking pot shots.

Education is the most important primary industry of this decade. If Canada and Ontario are to prosper for all citizens we must start now to put in the resources to guarantee our future in the 21st century.

The appreciation of the audience was expressed by Angus Scott, a Director of The Club.