To put it in the vernacular, “Things are a changin’. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
Here’s my first-hand take on changes in education, starting from the perspective of a five-year old boy in Toronto in 1945. I was born in 1939 in Coniston, a Northern Ontario village. Ukrainian was the language in our home and in our corner of the village. Down the hill were the French and the Finns and some‘Angleechkee’.
In 1945 we moved to Toronto. I was delivered to my age-appropriate grade one class. I didn’t understand a word of my classmates or of the English-speaking black-robed, veiled teacher nun. Unlike today, there was no such thing as the accommodation of ESL classes (English as a Second Language). I was sent home, told to come back a year later.
During the next school year I struggled, but went on to a mixed grade two and three in the following year. There I became engrossed in the set of turn-of-the-century encyclopedias, a legacy of someone’s downsizing. The faded sepia illustrations sparked alife-long interest in ships, airplanes, foreign places and old buildings.
When it was time for high school I was ready. Gone were the orderly rows of seats and desks secured to the floor, ink wells, fountain pens, opaque projectors, yellowed newsprint, religiously adhered-to timetables and rigid curricula. Blackboards and wall maps of the world with Neilson chocolate bar ads were no more.
By the time my six years (not five) of high school were over, Bic ball points were in, the word of the teacher was stilldefinitely not to be questioned, the disciplinary role of the vice-principal was to be feared and hard-earned marks were the only way to be promoted.
Then, in 1959 I found myself in front of a class of 40 grade six and seven boys. I fought for the enlightened practice on interdisciplinary teaching, the use of audio-visual aids, field trips, and evaluation based partly on projects. The teacher was still to be respected. Then came the ill-conceived mandate of open-plan,multi-grade classrooms. Teachers hunted for noise-muffling moveable privacy walls. Another bandwagon was the sight-word philosophy replacing phonics and a useful degree of rote learning, and the fad known as ‘New Math’.
That brings my rant up to 1976, when I moved from the big city to Eastern Ontario. Some day, I may choose to share about the education situation during the following era, up to the near-present.
