This warms the heart because it is important but seldom stated: “Standardized tests are evil in the eyes of Faculty of Education professors and have fallen out of favour with School Boards and Teacher Unions because, you guessed it, they are “racist”. Yes, it’s true, Asian kids blow away others on those tests. I guess Canada is Asian Supremacist?”
Education leaders are the greatest levellers. They want all races equal in achievement, which means knocking down Asians a few pegs as much as lifting up Blacks. The goal used to be to have every child reach his or her potential. Now it’s enforced communist parity.
Imagine my surprise - shock is a better word - hearing CBC's Toronto lunch hour program in the 2010s talk about just how intentionally 'racist' was the legacy of academic streaming for high school in Ontario. You see, I was at the dinner table hearing my father, who was invited by then education minister Bill Davis to work with a select group of people (especially Stackhouse), to come up with some suggestions about Ontario's education system. As an RCAF veteran, a formidable athlete, a successful organizer of community hockey leagues involved working with all kinds of political entities, a very successful teacher with multiple championship teams he coached in various sports, and committee work designing new multi-purpose high schools not just for strict academics but also a trade, arts, and sports component (his floor design for multi-sport gymnasiums is now the standard), it was not unusual for his opinion to be sought because it held some sway with the rather small cadre of influential people - bureaucrats and politicians - at the Ministry.
My father from his war experiences was very impressed with the German system that produced so many well qualified trade and profession graduates and technologies. This is where the somewhat similar idea of streaming germinated. But the lack of organizational support (like various school-based industrial and agricultural infrastructure and instruction) for anything similar obvious. A key missing component was schools designed specifically for the trades. Hence, the Ontario College system (and why it used decommissioned RCAF bases for College properties) was born out of this committee work and was designed specifically for the 4 year students to have, what my father called, an educational avenue to higher paid trades employment necessary for a growing and functioning country. Academic streaming, he thought, should be equally available but not so dominant as to overshadow the vital role for essential trade schools. Because my mother was a 'blue blood' and thought 'culture' should reign supreme, my father fought very hard to have arts and sports receive equal funding in high schools. My father couldn't have cared less about race. But he cared deeply about educating young minds and bodies and using the state through a sound education system to provide a pathway for all citizens to have some means to first recognize their interests and potentials and then find their own way to the unlimited opportunities Canada represented.
What we have today through institutional capture of 'progressive' ideology is basically the antithesis of his life's work and the country's 'education' both academically and in the trades has produced its expected highly dysfunctional results. Education for our post elementary youth have been morphed into profit-oriented goals of these very institutions that have quite intentionally recruited tuition-exorbitant international students to 'grow' while their finished product becomes ever less useful. Opportunities for Canadian youth dry up and often evaporate in the name of governmental and institutional 'savings' while both double down on ever more 'progressive' ideology implemented in policy and practice right across the educational spectrum which continues almost unabated by every political stripe right across the country. Standardized testing may help identify just how academically broken our education system is, but altering its self-destructing systemic direction I think will require far more than what the population today is willing to support. The education system is broken and there are no quick fixes.
Great article. I think Ontario education standards were seeing 'woke pressure' when I left high school in the late 80s. The inception of the OSSD in 1986(?) may have been a clue. The OSSD (Ontario Sec. School Diploma) was the 4 year fast track to university where you took specific classes to 'speed through' high school without much for electives or fields of study that might have shown your personal strengths to a university on application. If you were inclined to simply have the basics, go to a trade college or simply get out of Dodge, you graduated Grade 12 with an OSSGD. I opted to take more electives (Grade 13) and gained my OSSHGD (Honors Grad) with hope of becoming a professional engineer. The second clue of early "wokeness" would be at this point in the early/mid 80s, high school courses had 3 academia streams in place, Level 5 for University hopefuls, Level 4 for College and general workforce grads, and the notorious Level 2, for those students with learning disabilities who would easily function in the general workforce but who needed more help with academia to complete high school. Notorious I say, in the eyes of a school board wanting to show what it could do with anybody, no matter the situation. Level 2 it seems, is not without a sense of irony, looking forward to today. It was the beta program for pushing all students through high school, regardless of their personal abilities.
Our educational system and educators have gone beyond the level of ridiculous into the theatre of the absurd! Ask them all this, do they want a surgeon operating on them if said person only breezed through their courses because of their 'race' vs actually LEARNED and mastered their skill? Do they want to get on an airplane with pilots and control tower personnel who were 'passed' solely because of their 'race' vs mastering the 'stress tests' required to provide optimum performance because the lives of others depends upon their ability to safely, with expertise, perform their job? It appears that both some degree of laziness apart from a lack in critical thinking, as well as the issue of 'hurt feelings' are all tied together in this nonsense, and that's what this is NONSENSE! Meritocracy IS important, it is what's needed in both the educational system and practical working environments otherwise we might as well have robots doing the work of human beings because they're going to be the high level performers skilled in the fields they're 'programmed' into. Having said that, maybe that's where all this woke - DEI nonsense was designed to lead us to?
Solid article and well done. For sure engineering schools need to weed out the incapable before they start to invest. Despite what the incompetent Marxists in academia and the education ministry say, not everyone is created equal.
Strong piece on the accountability gap. The disconnect between high school grade inflation and actual university readiness is real, and the AIF workaround is basically admissions staff trying to reverse-engineer what standardized tests used to provide. I've watched this unfold in hiring too, where credentials don't match competencies anymore. The "blank slate" framing is helpful becuase it names the philosophical root, not just the symptoms.
Woke academia is a very serious, dangerous problem. Getting somewhat fixed in the US. Is it hopeless here in Canada?
This warms the heart because it is important but seldom stated: “Standardized tests are evil in the eyes of Faculty of Education professors and have fallen out of favour with School Boards and Teacher Unions because, you guessed it, they are “racist”. Yes, it’s true, Asian kids blow away others on those tests. I guess Canada is Asian Supremacist?”
Education leaders are the greatest levellers. They want all races equal in achievement, which means knocking down Asians a few pegs as much as lifting up Blacks. The goal used to be to have every child reach his or her potential. Now it’s enforced communist parity.
Imagine my surprise - shock is a better word - hearing CBC's Toronto lunch hour program in the 2010s talk about just how intentionally 'racist' was the legacy of academic streaming for high school in Ontario. You see, I was at the dinner table hearing my father, who was invited by then education minister Bill Davis to work with a select group of people (especially Stackhouse), to come up with some suggestions about Ontario's education system. As an RCAF veteran, a formidable athlete, a successful organizer of community hockey leagues involved working with all kinds of political entities, a very successful teacher with multiple championship teams he coached in various sports, and committee work designing new multi-purpose high schools not just for strict academics but also a trade, arts, and sports component (his floor design for multi-sport gymnasiums is now the standard), it was not unusual for his opinion to be sought because it held some sway with the rather small cadre of influential people - bureaucrats and politicians - at the Ministry.
My father from his war experiences was very impressed with the German system that produced so many well qualified trade and profession graduates and technologies. This is where the somewhat similar idea of streaming germinated. But the lack of organizational support (like various school-based industrial and agricultural infrastructure and instruction) for anything similar obvious. A key missing component was schools designed specifically for the trades. Hence, the Ontario College system (and why it used decommissioned RCAF bases for College properties) was born out of this committee work and was designed specifically for the 4 year students to have, what my father called, an educational avenue to higher paid trades employment necessary for a growing and functioning country. Academic streaming, he thought, should be equally available but not so dominant as to overshadow the vital role for essential trade schools. Because my mother was a 'blue blood' and thought 'culture' should reign supreme, my father fought very hard to have arts and sports receive equal funding in high schools. My father couldn't have cared less about race. But he cared deeply about educating young minds and bodies and using the state through a sound education system to provide a pathway for all citizens to have some means to first recognize their interests and potentials and then find their own way to the unlimited opportunities Canada represented.
What we have today through institutional capture of 'progressive' ideology is basically the antithesis of his life's work and the country's 'education' both academically and in the trades has produced its expected highly dysfunctional results. Education for our post elementary youth have been morphed into profit-oriented goals of these very institutions that have quite intentionally recruited tuition-exorbitant international students to 'grow' while their finished product becomes ever less useful. Opportunities for Canadian youth dry up and often evaporate in the name of governmental and institutional 'savings' while both double down on ever more 'progressive' ideology implemented in policy and practice right across the educational spectrum which continues almost unabated by every political stripe right across the country. Standardized testing may help identify just how academically broken our education system is, but altering its self-destructing systemic direction I think will require far more than what the population today is willing to support. The education system is broken and there are no quick fixes.
Great article. I think Ontario education standards were seeing 'woke pressure' when I left high school in the late 80s. The inception of the OSSD in 1986(?) may have been a clue. The OSSD (Ontario Sec. School Diploma) was the 4 year fast track to university where you took specific classes to 'speed through' high school without much for electives or fields of study that might have shown your personal strengths to a university on application. If you were inclined to simply have the basics, go to a trade college or simply get out of Dodge, you graduated Grade 12 with an OSSGD. I opted to take more electives (Grade 13) and gained my OSSHGD (Honors Grad) with hope of becoming a professional engineer. The second clue of early "wokeness" would be at this point in the early/mid 80s, high school courses had 3 academia streams in place, Level 5 for University hopefuls, Level 4 for College and general workforce grads, and the notorious Level 2, for those students with learning disabilities who would easily function in the general workforce but who needed more help with academia to complete high school. Notorious I say, in the eyes of a school board wanting to show what it could do with anybody, no matter the situation. Level 2 it seems, is not without a sense of irony, looking forward to today. It was the beta program for pushing all students through high school, regardless of their personal abilities.
Our educational system and educators have gone beyond the level of ridiculous into the theatre of the absurd! Ask them all this, do they want a surgeon operating on them if said person only breezed through their courses because of their 'race' vs actually LEARNED and mastered their skill? Do they want to get on an airplane with pilots and control tower personnel who were 'passed' solely because of their 'race' vs mastering the 'stress tests' required to provide optimum performance because the lives of others depends upon their ability to safely, with expertise, perform their job? It appears that both some degree of laziness apart from a lack in critical thinking, as well as the issue of 'hurt feelings' are all tied together in this nonsense, and that's what this is NONSENSE! Meritocracy IS important, it is what's needed in both the educational system and practical working environments otherwise we might as well have robots doing the work of human beings because they're going to be the high level performers skilled in the fields they're 'programmed' into. Having said that, maybe that's where all this woke - DEI nonsense was designed to lead us to?
Solid article and well done. For sure engineering schools need to weed out the incapable before they start to invest. Despite what the incompetent Marxists in academia and the education ministry say, not everyone is created equal.
Strong piece on the accountability gap. The disconnect between high school grade inflation and actual university readiness is real, and the AIF workaround is basically admissions staff trying to reverse-engineer what standardized tests used to provide. I've watched this unfold in hiring too, where credentials don't match competencies anymore. The "blank slate" framing is helpful becuase it names the philosophical root, not just the symptoms.