(Written in March 2000)

Learning; Apprenticing; Facilities; Colleges; Standards.

Amid the turbulence surrounding the critical task of helping Canada's young people learn in an era of rapidly expanding knowledge and technology, it is important to anchor on to some basic principles and to remember that all the solutions are already being successfully practiced somewhere in the world.

A renovated Canadian government would completely rebuild an education system characterized by national, public funding of personal learning. Among the system's keystone characteristics would be national standards for curricula, testing, professional assessment, and school accountability; decentralized local control of the process; and learner choice among competing options.

The provincial and territorial bureaucracies would disappear, not to be reconstituted at the national level. A useful precedent to use when considering the appropriate size of a national education bureaucracy comes from a comparison between the province of Quebec and the country of Denmark in 1993. Both had about one million students. However, Quebec had 90,000 teachers and 5,000 bureaucrats while Denmark had 180,000 teachers and 50 bureaucrats. On Denmark's scale, Canada could do with an education bureaucracy of about 350 people.

Unions must be barred from education. Teaching is a monopoly, publicly funded by all the citizens of the community. Teachers, like civil service and public enterprise employees, should have no right to withdraw their services. No tiny clutch of union bosses should be able to take that indispensable service away from the community. Union bosses have grossly abused their positional authority and have demonstrated a clear lack of concern for students. Teachers must be re‑professionalized and won back to their former appreciation of their importance to their students and to their communities.

Government must be removed from the process. It is just nuts for a government to descend to the level of legislating minutes of teaching time per day. Substituting "Canada"' for ''New Brunswick" and "national" for "provincial", a Globe & Mail editorial, April 29, 1998, said it: "…Canada needs to distinguish between the ends the schools must achieve, and the means chosen to achieve them. The nation must take responsibility for setting the outcomes that students and parents can expect the schools reliably to produce, such as a stock of shared basic knowledge embodied in a core curriculum, the ability to acquire new learning beyond the classroom, and an awareness of civic rights and duties in a democratic and multicultural society. It must establish demanding measures of school performance, such as nation‑wide testing, and publish the results.

What the nation should not do is to dictate how those ends are to be achieved. Here, local communities, parents and teachers must be free to create pedagogical and governance models that suit their needs.  Options should range from locally‑determined school missions and powerful school councils right up to charter schools, subject to the integrity of the non‑sectarian character of the public schools."

The world should be scoured for superior curricula and texts ‑ the instruments that are used by the students who regularly whomp Canadians in international competitions. In some subjects, foreign students are studying material three years earlier than their comparably‑aged Canadian counterparts. We need to stop underestimating our young people and start equipping them with the curricula and materials that will help them learn to be the best in the world. They can handle it. They are hungry for the challenge.

A multi‑location, national Teachers College system would become the centre for training, certification and recertification of teachers and schools, and ongoing teacher development. It would also coordinate the input and make the choices of curricula nationally. The Teachers College system would be accountable to the ministry in the Commons. It would assume a positional authority comparable to the medical, dental, legal, accounting and other professional systems. Like them, its legitimacy would be partly derived from the fact that its positions would be staffed by practicing professional teachers.

National testing at the completion of each course in each grade, and public reporting by school of the results, would provide fair and consistent measurement of real student performance and would enable constant improvement in personnel, methods and materials. Test performance would also be the major basis for continuing a school's voucher‑based funding certification.

Funding of the education system would be completely reversed. Instead of top‑down through multiple layers of educrats, funding would go directly to students in the form of vouchers. A voucher would be used like a coupon ‑ redeemed at one's chosen school. The voucher would turn to cash to the school when appropriately presented for redemption. Vouchers could be semestered.

Vouchers for 17 years of publicly funded support would be a birthright for all Canadians, and for landed immigrants according to the number of years of schooling they hadn't had. The first 13 years ‑ primary and secondary school ‑ would be compulsory. The final 4 years – tertiary ‑ would be an optional opportunity that could be taken non-consecutively and at a time of the student's choosing.

After completing the courses mandated for compulsory schooling, the normal expectation would be that a person would be intellectually, physically and civically fit to function successfully in the adult world and to enter whichever tertiary education program they chose.

                                                          Compulsory                                         Optional

Adding skilled‑trades apprenticing programs ‑ most likely conducted at industrial enterprises ‑ to the other voucher‑supported programs, would signal the importance to the nation of developing skilled Canadians in these areas.

In 1993‑94, total spending by all of Canada's education systems on themselves and their schools, universities, colleges and other institutes of learning was about $45Billion. There were about 7,150,000 students in all institutes of learning. The total budget of $33Billion used in this essay is about 25%, not 50%, less. That would have funded 7,150,000 vouchers averaging $4,500 each and left about $1Billion to pay for the Colleges system. Voucher values would vary from average ‑ less in primary, more in tertiary. Since available budget dollars would rise over the years of growing prosperity and takeout revenues, vouchers would be denominated in year terms rather than dollar terms. For example, in a $300Billion budget year, $41Billion could give 8,000,000 students an average $5,000 voucher each, and leave about $1Billion to run the Colleges system. Knowing births and planning immigration would make it possible to know the numbers entering schools five years ahead of the fact.

Vouchers would be printed under high security like bank notes, sequentially numbered, and issued to named bearers. A computerized redemption system would operate like a coupon clearing house. A small cadre of inspectors would investigate, identify and prosecute with maximum force the inevitable few who attempt to rip off the system.

It's important to think of the fact that a school attracting 200 students would attract $900,000 of voucher funding to pay for ten teachers, rent, utilities, services, and, if the school council was so inclined, to pay for former educrat's advice and/or share profits among the staff. A school that attracted 2,000 students would have $9,000,000 to work with.

There would no longer be any point in discriminating between private versus public or religious versus public schools. Students in all primary and secondary grades would get publicly funded vouchers, would be free and able to attend any institution of their choice, and would have to pass the same tests of the same material as all other Canadian students in the same grade in order to move on to the next grade or enter a tertiary program. In essence, since funding would be attached to a student, every school would be a private institution capable of competing for students (vouchers) on any basis including price. Published marks would determine the success and duration of their different marketing efforts. Some schools may elect to promise a "tough" approach. Others may stress academics or offer extra sports or arts or technical programs, whatever.  Only imagination, common sense decency and free choice would limit the options.

Eliminating all existing local school boards, with their encrustations of educrats, would be another essential step to restoring the primacy of the teacher/student/parent relationship. The process is learning, helped by a teacher and by supportive parents.

Principals would run their schools. Their authority would come from school councils whose members would represent local businesses, parents, municipal councillors, teachers and students. Operating authority would have to rest with the principals and their staffs if they are expected to be responsible for developing and executing the programs that produce learned individuals in their communities.

The curricula to be learned would be standard but the methods and materials used to help students master them would be open to the richest possible variation. Experiments that "work" would spread like wildfire and swiftly become standard practice. The uplifting joy of learning would again be a source of national pride and satisfaction.

Conditions would obviously vary between big cities, towns and rural townships. Nevertheless, decisions about facilities ‑ whether to merge schools in one building or merge school and community usage of the same facility or raise money for a pool ‑ would be local decisions, not hand‑downs from on high.

In some cases, particularly at the tertiary level, vouchers won't cover all the costs. Students wishing to attend these institutions would need more money. It could come from own earnings, family, bursaries, scholarships, and need‑based funding supports. Given the higher percentage of dollars that would be left in the economy by renovated governance, the community could reasonably expect an increase in student support from prospering foundations and individuals ‑ not just from a sense of payback obligation, but also from a self‑interested sense of helping to stimulate continued economic growth.

(Written in November 1999

Wisdom: People learn everything they think, say and do. Learning is the single most important activity any human being ever does. It is not only the first priority for the individual person, learning by its young people is essential to the continued survival of every community. The physical facilities in education systems are called "Institutes of Learning", not "Institutes of Teaching".

After paying the interest on the debts their governors have run up, and paying for their healthcare and income security systems, the fourth largest governance system that Canadians have to pay for is education ‑ about $45 Billion per year. Most of this is spent by the provincial and territorial education systems. The balance is spent by individual persons and families. The national government transfers some "education" funds to the provinces that nobody audits, and is supposed to be funding some university scholarships. However, all the authority, power, control and responsibility for everything that has happened to Canada's education system can be laid directly at the feet of the provincial and territorial governments.

They have much to answer for.

Most of the time, in most provinces, the educrats (bureaucrats, consultants, advisors, staff specialists and other hangers‑on) have exploited the importance of education, and their self‑declared expertise, to bamboozle and noselead their elected legislators. As for the unfortunate persons assigned the titular responsibility of "Minister of Education", those who went along got along. Those who dared to attempt initiatives unsponsored or unsupported by their educrats were overwhelmed, or even destroyed, by the people who were supposed to be their support staff.

At the local/regional level, elected board members quickly learned from their educrats to do what they were told, draw their pay and shut up. It's an embarrassment to watch hired hands tell elected board members what they will and won't do.

In short, while elected provincial governments and local boards were supposed to control all aspects of education in Canada, educrats have been in total control of the systems for more than three decades.

Before the crazy years began, Canadians were justly proud of their education systems and held the teachers, principals and superintendents in them in the highest regard. The reason was simple – Canadian students were able to demonstrate high levels of learned knowledge compared to students from most other countries, particularly the U.S.A. While the evidence was more anecdotal than quantified, (there weren't nearly as many surveys or competitions as there are now), it was believed by an overwhelming majority of Canadians that our education systems were superior. Sure, every grade in every school had a normal bell curve distribution of performances from A+ to F, but, the means and the medians were such that the vast majority of both students and parents believed they were being exceptionally well‑served by their education systems.

Students, parents, and teachers and their leadership, had a natural, three‑sided relationship in the community based on mutual respect for the dedication required by all three parties. The task – learning, and the goal ‑ an educated person, were acknowledged by all to be supremely worthwhile and supremely hard work. All three parties had an instinctual understanding that the activity was student learning and that parents, teachers and facilities existed purely to help students learn.

By the late 1950's, Canadians had good reason to believe that universal literacy would soon be a fact of life in Canada.

In the 1960's, it was revealed that the generations that were inventing silicon chips and personal computers, advanced telecommunications, space travel, life‑saving medicines and operations ‑ all the amazing advances that were so benefiting the human condition in the decades following WWll ‑ had had terrible educations in systems based on such awful techniques as "rote", "discipline" and "grades".

Early in the crazy years, in the 1960's, a host of reports from California and other fellow‑travelling jurisdictions began to appear. In Ontario, the Hall‑Dennis report typified their conclusions that all the education systems had been all wrong and that it was necessary to radically change them to the brave new world of child‑centred systems.

Children should now be allowed to progress at their own pace, study what/when they wished, endure no discipline whatsoever, and never have their progress measured. Structure was to be abandoned. The child's self‑esteem was all that should matter. The goal of education should now be to make the child feel good, therefore, there could no longer be grades, discipline, challenge, criticism, guidance, penalties, curricula, goals or consequences.

Educratic psychobabble hit the community at the same time as the "progressive" intellectual establishment was hitting its stride with its sickhead notions and newspeak jargon. "Anything goes." "If it feels good, do it." ''There are no standards ‑ everything is relative." "Free sex, loose sex, sex without marriage." "Dope is good for you." "Responsibility is only for fools." And the all‑pervasive, signature, rallying cry of the crazy years ‑ "It's all their fault!"

No doubt some of the educrats, board members and teachers sincerely hoped that a new process would produce even better outcomes. But, those in the education establishments who seized control were much more likely to be guided by the socialist mantra; "Give me the schools and I'll control the country in 20 years." Furthermore, everybody in the education establishments was getting rich and powerful in their hermetically sealed, self‑contained, untouchable empires.

The assault by the education establishments, aided and abetted by the union bosses and the "progressive" intellectual establishment, was widespread, dramatic and quick. The sensible majority of value‑holding citizens in North America had no warning and were ill‑prepared for the invasive violence of the unexpected attack on the welfare and future of their children. It took a generation for the ammunition of outcomes to come to their aid.

Leaving the unformed minds of young people to their own devices had, predictably, produced illiteracy and innumeracy. Studies began to expose the horrifying outcomes of the child‑centred process in the mid‑1980's, and, by the mid‑1990's, a host of studies had categorically confirmed the feared ‑ our young people can't read, write or do arithmetic.

The sad statistics are overwhelming. In the mid‑1990's, an O.E.C.D. study found that 47.2% ‑ nearly half ‑ of all Canadian adults were illiterate. (So much for our hopeful expectations 30 years earlier.) Most grade 3 children can't read at all. Different studies in different provinces find that 30% to 40% of high school graduates can't read things like the information on an aspirin bottle, a phone book or a road map. Most of the rest ‑ another 40% ‑ have barely passable literary and numeracy skills. University business course students cannot do simple whole‑number math without a calculator. Universities have so many illiterates entering their hallowed halls of higher learning that they have to put on remedial English (and French) classes. Their new students can't read their textbooks and can't write a coherent sentence, never mind a paragraph or essay.

How could anyone have thought that not being able to read, write and do math would be good for a person's self‑esteem? Instead of acquiring the basic intellectual skills needed in the adult world, children are learning that young sex is okay ‑ as long as it's safe. Teachers are being paid to show our children how to put on the condoms they are being given free of charge. The average age our children start having sex in this brave new world is 15. At that age, many still don't even understand how babies are conceived. Folly!

Reaction began in the 1980's and by the 1990's was in full swing. It was led by parents alarmed at seeing so many of their bright, lively, alert little children turning into dull‑eyed, brain‑deadened teenagers. Some private educators responded by opening or expanding remedial learning clinics to supplement the public education systems. Their business boomed. In desperation, many parents are making huge financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools ‑ away from the grasp of the public systems. Charter schools have been enjoying tremendous success in the U.S. To date, with a few isolated exceptions, the provincial education establishments have managed to keep them away from Canadian students. A few schools have somehow secured the necessary approvals to operate as independents within their local systems. People line up overnight to try and get their children into these "tough" schools.

The charter and independent alternative schools are thought to be so desirable because they offer serious subjects in serious curricula. They have written contracts covering discipline, homework, behaviour and performance expectations and study requirements. Their methods (process) produce students who earn measurably better marks (outcomes) on objective tests of the material covered. Principals, vice‑principals, department heads and teachers run the schools and accept responsibility for the performances of their students. There is also heavy parental and student involvement in defining the process.

Alternative schools are still very new in Canada. Their survival is not certain. The provincial education establishments are fighting furiously to destroy them with expensive advertising, brain‑dirtying propaganda, strikes ‑ the whole bag of "progressive" dirty tricks.

They've "divided‑to‑rule" their systems into religion/language/level-based/union‑dictated kingdoms. According to some investigators, half the money Canadians pay for their education systems is spent on the non‑teaching overhead burden largely caused by these divisions.

For years, teachers and principals from all across Canada have met to try and establish common curricula for the country as a whole. After all, 2+2=4, H₂O is water, and Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608 are facts everywhere in the country. Performance and progress can't be measured if different curricula, textbooks and standards are used. But, the provincial education establishments adamantly refuse to give up power over and control of their systems.

Provincial legislators are very, very slowly reacting to the agony of their citizens. Predictably, reactions have varied in kind and force. One province has eliminated all local boards and taken direct control of its schools. Others have created fewer but bigger local boards. Most have already pulled, or are in the process of pulling, financing up to the provincial level away from the local level. (Local citizens still pay for everything of course.) To date, a rough generalization would be that provincial governments are responding to the crisis by eliminating or reducing the powers and pay of the ineffectual local boards. They have yet to effectively deal with the provincial and local educrats, and the union bosses.

Thirty years worth of young Canadians have been cheated of a decent education, and their parents robbed, by provincial education systems. For that malfeasance alone, Canada's provinces and provincial governments deserve to be wiped off the face of our land.

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack. 1958 – Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack. 2008 – School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselor called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school. 1958 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies. 2008 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it

Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students. 1958 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again. 2008 – Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt. 1958 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman. 2008 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has affair with psychologist.

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school. 1958 - Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock. 2008 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

Scenario: Pedro fails high school English. 1958 – Pedro goes to summer school, passes English and goes to college. 2008 – Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a red ant bed. 1958 - Ants die. 2008- BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him. 1958 – In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing. 2008 – Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

As in so many other fields, Liberal policy regarding public education is determined not by solid research but by misguided political correctness. Cases in point:

Class Size

Everyone “knows” that reducing the size of classes will improve student achievement. It goes without saying that with more individual attention, a student’s marks must improve. Only thing is that it isn’t true. In the late 1950’s there was a great effort to demonstrate this linkage but study after study, at various grade levels, showed “no significant difference” (which is a statistician’s way of saying that the whole idea is a crock.)

Recently, the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario set a limit on class size. It mandated that no class in Ontario’s public schools should exceed 20 pupils. Immediately, split classes showed up all over the province. Before, if you had 35 kids in a grade, they studied together. After the legislation was passed, if you had two classes of 30 studying under two teachers at two grade levels, you now had to split them into two classes of 20 (one for each grade level) and a split class of 10 at one grade level and 10 at the other. The next teacher you meet, ask her how much is achieved in a split grade and how easy it is to teach.

The expense, of course, was half as much again. In the first instance, you needed only two teachers to teach 60 students. After the law was passed you needed three. Cost of option 2 is one and a half times that of option 1.

Once again, however, union appeasement won out, not only over common sense, but also over empirical research.

Afrocentric Schools

Until the 1950’s the education of blacks in the U.S. was pretty pathetic. Those of us over 70 can remember when the first black athletes broke into the big leagues. Jackie Robinson, as I recall, was the first in major league baseball. You will also recall, when they were interviewed, how difficult it was, at times, to follow what they were saying. These were individuals out of either the deep south or the ghetto.

Among educators, at the time, it was conventional wisdom that school achievement was related solely to innate ability. Either a kid had it or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, there wasn’t much you could do about it. As evidence of this they could show you the OSR file of an underachiever in Grade 10 and you would note that he had also been an underachiever in Grade 9, Grade 8, Grade 7 and so on right down to Grade 1. What better proof then of what the psychologists were saying that achievement relates to ability and ability is innate. And if black kids were doing more poorly than whites, it was simply because the black kids were not as intelligent as white kids.

My wife and I were missionaries in Angola in the late 1950’s and we had a son who was more native than the natives. He spent his early years wandering the thousand acres of the Mission, getting into mischief and picking up chiggers in his feet. Everyone on the Mission knew him and kept an eye out for him and he probably spoke as much Portuguese and Umbundu as he did English. His name was Ray. They called him Reizinho (little king) and he lived up to it. He was six years old when we got home and we put him into Grade 1 where he regaled the teachers and his fellow students in “show and tell” with snake skins and other stuff we had brought back with us and with long stories about Africa, some of which were even true. He couldn’t sit still and at the end of the year he failed.

The Principal, Mr. Bates, was brought up on the conventional wisdom of the time. He told us that if a kid didn’t show that he had it by Grade 1, then you could pretty well write him off. After all, didn’t he learn at teachers’ college that achievement was related to ability and ability was innate?

Then came along an American sociologist – a Dr. Coleman who didn’t believe it. He thought that the underachievement had as much to do with nurture as it did with nature. He took some black kids from the ghetto, divided them in two groups at random, bussed one of the groups to suburban schools and left the other group where they were.

The results were astounding. Those left in the ghetto did as poorly as they had always done but the ones sent to the suburban schools did almost as well as their white classmates. The die was cast. Governments took up the cudgels and set up bussing programs that, in the years following, remade the blacks of America.

Now, here in Toronto, we have some starry eyed (and muddle headed) Liberals wanting to set up an “Afro-centric” school where the black kids can learn black history and can be presented with black role models as if their history and role models were something distinct from general history and role models. Talk of racism! This is racism in spades. In fact, due to Coleman’s study and to those who implemented its recommendations, they have produced role models that anyone would be proud of. And look who they have in government: Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and now, Barack Obama.

Liberalism gone mad!

Fortunately, it seems that black parents in Toronto are not buying it. The last I heard was that they were having a tough time finding enough students who would agree to be re-ghettoized.

By the way, the boy they wrote off in Grade 1 ended up as an Ontario Scholar in high school and went on to take an honours degree in microbiology and biochemistry where he graduated with a B+ average.

Education for a Citizen Living in a Democracy

In 1832, the British Parliament passed the Reform Act which, among other things, broadened the franchise to all property owners. At the time, William Wilberforce, the author of the Bill was heard to remark “Now we must educate our masters” however, since that time, very little has been done to educate the common man that he might cast an intelligent vote. One would think that society would recognize certain core learnings that every citizen would have to master before being permitted to graduate from high school. At the very least these should include:

1. sufficient literacy to be able to get along in society.
2. sufficient arithmetic and mathematics to be able to get along in society
3. the rudiments of biology, physics and chemistry
4. some idea of the health sciences including reproduction and sex
5. the foundations of our democratic system in Great Britain and Greece
6. the history of the world and, in particular, the English speaking world
7. a good grounding in the economic theory upon which our society is founded
8. an understanding of our own political system
9. some English literature
10. a smattering of French perhaps

Unfortunately, requirements 5 to 8 are sorely lacking today. In my day, English was the only compulsory subject in all five years of high school and, stressed though it was, it did very little to prepare me for life in a democratic society. Its importance seems to have been inherited from the English Public Schools where it had recently taken over from Latin and Greek. Many is the story of the British general who read his Homer (in the original Greek) as he awaited his marching orders. He was a “generalist” and this illustration, somehow, demonstrated the value of a “generalist” education. When I complained to my father about the ridiculousness of having to learn Latin in this modern day and age, he brought out the “generalist” argument and tried to convince me that the study of the Classics would prepare me for anything just like it had done for him. My father always beat me at the Readers Digest “Increase Your Word Power.” He argued that it was his knowledge of the Classics that allowed him to beat me until, one time, I tested him on the roots of the words. His Greek roots turned out to be Latin. His Latin roots turned out to be Frisian etc until he finally gave up and had to admit that he did better that I did because he had been reading thirty years longer than I had.

I’m afraid that, by now,“generalist” education has been debunked once and for all but what have we done to replace it? Lets face it, in this modern world we all must specialize in something or other and, as we make our way from elementary school to high school to university, an increasingly greater portion of our education should be directed to this end, however, not only do we have to specialize to find our niche in society but we also have to learn enough from 5 to 8 above to allow us to cast an intelligent vote.

These are the studies that should be compulsory in a democratic society and, until they are, we will be led by demagogues spouting political correctness as policy and following every fad that comes along.

Students once identified with Schulz’s patient, hard-working also-ran. But today, everyone expects recognition–even if they failCollege and university professors across the country had some fun this past week forwarding to one another a National Post news item regarding the era of entitled students. Ellen Greenberger, a research professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California-Irvine published a study examining students’ sense of entitlement; entitlement to good grades and recognition regardless of quality of work or performance. In essence, the study reports that students feel they deserve a decent grade so long as they show up to most classes and at least try. This revelation hardly comes as news to those of us teaching at the post-secondary level.

For well over a decade, students have become increasingly demanding and adamant they should get a pass merely for being on the class list. Educators have become service providers, and students are now consumers in an academic world that is far removed from yesteryear.

Not unlike my colleagues, every semester I receive requests and demands to increase grades and give credit where none is due. I’ve had students insist that their stress-filled lives and exacting parents must be taken into account when calculating their letter grade. I’ve received angry e-mails that an assigned grade is “unacceptable,” accompanied by demands that I “do something about it at once.” I have a student who has been AWOL since the start of this semester and approached me three-quarters through the term with the vague explanation that she was going through a difficult time. Her solution was for me to revise the course format so she could get full credit for playing “catch-up” during the last few weeks.

We share these yarns during department meetings and recall our own university days when we wouldn’t dare confront a professor over a grade. Then we hypothesize about where this new attitude is coming from and how we should deal with it.

Perhaps, though, this phenomenon of entitlement should be considered a cultural inevitability rather than the end of the academic world as we knew it. The halls of academia have always been a microcosm of the larger society, and what’s happening in the lecture theatres and classrooms may not be so distinct from what’s going on in the real world, after all.

Without ever electing, or even coming close to electing, a single Member of Parliament, the Green Party demanded — and with near unanimous agreement across the country, was granted– the right to take part in the televised election debates; just like a real party with real parliamentarians. When the votes were counted, it turned out they hadn’t managed to mount a serious challenge in even one riding. But they “tried,” and for this they will surely be invited back during the next campaign. This is how things work in the real world.

For decades the Big Three North American automakers have been driven to the cleaners by their Japanese competitors. They ignored changing consumer habits and preferences despite a plethora of data confirming a need for new directions. They paid workers 50% more than the competition and gave their CEOs obscene bonuses as sales dwindled. In response, taxpayers will chip in billions of dollars so they can continue to perform miserably and high school graduates can pull down a hundred grand annually on the assembly line. This too, is how things work in the real world.

Public sector employees are often blessed with jobs for life. Seniority trumps performance, innovation and success. In many professions, teaching for instance, it is virtually impossible to remove even the worst-performing employee: another real-word example for college and university students.

It’s somewhat hypocritical, if not downright disingenuous, to lament student entitlement when “cap in hand” has very much become the new work ethic. Medal-less Olympians want more subsidies. Artists who can’t find an audience want bigger grants. The CBC wants more funding to keep producing programs no one watches. Now the banks want someone to pick up their tab. Aren’t we all entitled to our entitlements?

The post-secondary system is dominated by us Boomers who grew up watching the lovable loser Charlie Brown; an enduring underachiever to be sure. But he never gave up. He’d always try kicking that football one more time or attempt to woo the red-haired girl who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Meanwhile, our students came of age watching Bart Simpson, who is not only another underachiever, but takes a certain pride in it.
While Charlie Brown dealt with his enduring failures through self-loathing and determination, Bart celebrated them. In light of this paradigm shift in popular culture, the student era of entitlement is hardly out of line.

When all is said and done, a university education is all about preparing eager, young minds for the real world. In a nutshell, that’s what we pointy-heads do. So if students expect reward for little or no effort and recognition regardless of whether they succeed or not, I’d say we’re doing a helluva good job.

john.martin@ufv.ca – John Martin is an overpaid, under-producing criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley.