By Barry Stagg
August 1994
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN
I read an article recently in the Globe and Mail about private schools and the problems that some middle class Canadians were having with their young son in private school. It seems that the expensive, private primary school was dedicated only to taking the best and the brightest from public schools and then cranking out as many scholars as $7,000.00 a year could buy. It appears that this particular private school was uninterested in helping a child who actually needed a bit of guidance and extra work to get him on the track toward academic victory.
The dilemma of private schools is often not a worry or consideration at all for many parents. The reason that private schools aren't a factor for these parents is quite simple. Parents do not have the money to send the children to private schools so it is public school or nothing. The public schools do a reasonable job and parents often find that the real work in making a good student is not at school at all, but rather at home where the parents have to provide the proper environment and encouragement for a child to succeed.
It may well be that a private school with extra instruction bought with hard earned dollars can overcome some of the inadequacies that exist in a home where the only books that show up are the television guide and the latest designer furniture catalogue.
All of this middle class turmoil reminds me of an idea that I have thrown around from time to time about the status of our old Newfoundland one and two room schools. In my mind the old school houses provided a form of intensive instruction that the public school with its segregated classes and large population cannot provide today. Parents often find they are looking for an environment where the child can be exposed to ideas and concepts that are a little beyond the child. The idea is to allow the child to be bathed in knowledge with the expectation that the child will absorb many things while actually learning the specific skills that are required of his particular grade. This is probably called academic environment exposure in some circles, but in my day it was simply called going to school in a two room school house.
I remember well September 1959 when I marched my five year old frame down to the Boswarlos United Church School with my new plastic book bag and promptly found myself the biggest desk that I could haul to my intended position in the classroom. The fact that the desk towered over me even when I sat up straight did not bother me in the least but the bemused school principal thought that I might do with a smaller model more in keeping with my modest frame.
The first year of school, which was grade one in these days, consisted of sitting in a classroom of forty children while the single teacher taught grades one to four. Forty kids were fairly evenly distributed among grades one to four with a slight population advantage to the lower grades. Out beyond the wooden dividers in the "big classroom" were grades five through nine.
I put in my time in this old hardwood-floored museum piece up until grade five when the Protestants of Newfoundland managed to unite their various schools and all of a sudden the United Church School and the Anglican school became one operation thus combining the two two-room schools and making one giant Boswarlos school.
The thing that I remembered best about this schooling is that in grades one and two you were taught your work by the teacher, but at the same time you overheard and viewed the instructions for the children in the higher grades. This meant that by the time I got to grade four I had environmentally absorbed three previous years of grade four instruction. While sitting back in grades one, two and three I listened to the teacher instruct about "Bunga" in grade four geography and other characters that I now forget but which were very exciting and meaningful things to me at the age of eight.
Now in Public school, whether in Newfoundland or Ontario or British Columbia, children are taught in classrooms dedicated to one grade only. Often there are many classrooms for a particular grade and each class is taught according to the wisdom and the whims of its particular teacher. In the lower grades this means that the child is deprived of the environmental exposure to the higher grades and often with children who are not being overly exposed to academia at home, this deprives them of the opportunity to see that down the road in school there are vast panoramas of learning which they will get to in good time.
Now parents often look to private schools to give deliberately what the supposedly crowded conditions of the multi-grade school gave accidentally in years past.
I wonder if it might not be a good idea to start combining some grades in school to a limited extent. While the advantages of single grade classes are obvious, certainly it could not hurt the child's development if there were to be a mix of grades in classes for one or two periods a day. There might be less need for concerned parents to look for pay-as-you-go education if the considerable resources of the large modern school were put more to the advantage of the children rather than to suit the demands and requirements of teaching staff, board members and school administration. There are so many ways to pretend that schools are functioning perfectly now. The wholesale importation of computers in the schools has served as a useful foil to deflect criticism. Merely putting computer screens before school children and showing them how to play games and to type does not substitute for teaching. A return to the basics in school requires more than extra work on spelling. It requires digging deep into our school history and seeing that some of the incidental benefits of crowded and poor school conditions such as the multi-grade classroom can be turned to the advantage of modern children and modern schools.
We must not let our resources waste away. Our children are the most precious and vital resource for any country. We must not let them be locked into classrooms with electronic furniture while the tasks of teaching go undone.