Tabatha Southey: Education Minister Lisa Thompson think there's a magical solution to overcrowded classes. Why not double-down?
“To better balance student success and system sustainability,” the “our plan at a glance” section of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Government’s new education plan begins, and at least this is something of an honest opening. It doesn’t pretend that the government hasn’t decided the changes they are currently making to Ontario’s education system, the biggest changes in 10 years, will inevitably result in less “student success” and that this result isn’t perfectly fine with them.
“We’re hearing from professors and employers alike that they are lacking coping skills and they are lacking resiliency,” she said of Ontario’s students, “By increasing class sizes in high school, we are preparing them for the reality of post-secondary, as well as the world of work.” More students, as Ms. Thompson portrays it, is just more of the “team environment” that schools need to be fostering.
Did the minister fear that a smaller number of teachers serving a greater number of students might deny some of those students the individual attention they need to succeed? No, because “resiliency,” and because one teacher “enabled her students to mentor and coach” their classmates. More students in a class just means more opportunities for young people to pull double shifts as students and teachers, which they are prepared to do because some of them have parents who get them tutors, Ms.
Get ready for “Alright, class, this semester we’re going to study Lord of the Flies. Goodbye!” Shuts the door. Click. And from now on when the school bell goes off, only the first 200 students will be allowed back in the school and, excitingly, that number will drop by one per day. In the interest of equity, publicly funded baseball bats with nails through them will be available to students whose families cannot afford to arm them.
Speaking to reporters later, Ms. Thompson to justified her her “resiliency” talk with the story of an anonymous young job candidate. The minister had heard that this young woman, we’ll call her Annie Anecdote, had cried during a job interview. “The employer was emphatic that this young person was a bright light and a good hire,” Ms. Thompson bemoaned, “but again, they haven’t had that exposure, the coping skills to deal with stressful situations.
Ms. Thompson seems to have consulted with the entire Anecdote family in forming this policy. She may indeed have heard “loud and clear” from them that larger class sizes build character or some such, but she didn’t research it.
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