For Ontario's Education, Basic Just Means the Bare Minimum
How Ontario has chronically failed its youth
This past week the minister of education Stephen Lecce announced a new program that would help fund an improvement in math and English in public schools across Ontario. Anyone hearing this announcement may come to the conclusion that education in Ontario is well below standards for a developed country. One may even think that our teachers are simply too busy teaching our children about their feelings rather than teaching them useful things like the Pythagorean theorem and digits of pi for fucks sake!
In reality, Canada as a whole scored in the 90th percentile of G7 countries in test scores and Ontario just happens to be the most populous of provinces – I learned that in geography class–. But don’t get me wrong, schools in Ontario are suffering, teachers would tell you that themselves. Unfortunately, for Lecce the problem with our education system is not what’s being taught to kids, but the environment they are being taught in.
For well over a decade Ontario’s education infrastructure has been crumbling due to lack of funding. In response, Ontario only increased the budget for education by 3.6% for a year in which interest rates were above 5%, essentially a pay cut. This too common trend has created an education system that lacks the necessary staff and resources to ensure every kid has a safe and suitable learning environment. This lack of educational infrastructure combined with an ever increasingly stressful world for youth to grow up in has deteriorated the conditions for youth to learn in Ontario.
One of the many ways this lack of investment in education has manifested is an increase in school violence. Violence in schools can be a difficult topic to discuss nowadays. With school shootings becoming an accepted norm in the States it makes talking about some kid who got given a swirlie at school seem a little less important. But nonetheless school violence in other forms is still a very important topic to discuss, especially since it has been on the rise in Canada primarily since the pandemic.
According to publications like the National Post and National Review this rise in violence is strictly due to changes in disciplinary measures and how to best approach “trouble” students. Ah yes, an increase in school violence must be due to kids not getting suspended enough. I assume those writing these articles have not been in high school since 50 Cent was the next up and coming artist. Only someone with a woefully misconstrued understanding of what public school is would think suspending someone does shit all. I know that when I was in high school kids who got suspended did not give a fuck that they were being suspended. All suspending someone ever did was send them to another school, where they don’t know anybody and if anything, are more likely to be violent again.
The only time “discipline” actually mattered to a kid was if it was from a teacher they respected or if they were afraid of what their parents would say. Not to say shitty teachers or parents caring less is the reason for a rise in school violence. In my mind parents and teachers are just as much victims as the kids are to the forces causing this increase in violence.
To understand why violence in schools is on the rise one must ask themselves “ what makes kids violent?”. It seems like it would be the obvious starting place, but reading the National Post and National Review story gave me no insight into this, perhaps they were too undisciplined to do research to back up their opinions? My pet peeves with media outlets aside, what makes youth more violent is really not much of a shocker. Some of the leading causes for increased violence in youth are stress, exposure to violence, family instability, and poverty. None of these factors are a guarantee for a child to be violent, in fact, no characteristic will guarantee someone will be violent, but rather they just increase the chance of violent outbursts.
To actually prevent kids from becoming violent we must address the underlying issues, an action that is unfortunately much more difficult than suspending someone or teaching them more math. Violence in schools is simply another symptom of an education system that has its infrastructure crumbling, and in 2020 the pandemic pushed this system to its absolute limits.
The pandemic was the most traumatic and stressful event in our lifetimes, and this was no exception for kids, teachers, or parents. As the realities of the pandemic set in kids' lives immediately began to change. Youth across North America were being told to go to school, then to leave school, then to go again, and this back and forth continued for nearly two and a half years. When they were at school, they had to deal with the reality that they may bring home a virus that could put their entire family out of work for weeks if not much worse and a school day that resembled none they had experienced before. When they were at home, they were stuck to their screens all day having to watch teachers who were just as lost as them try to figure out zoom whilst fumbling through the history of the WW2. When they did have “free time” the activities they had were to go on the internet or, uh, hmm, hang with your stressed-out parents?
Unsurprisingly many youth during the pandemic became a little socially inept due to the lack of well socializing – much like the rest of society --. When youth experience difficulties socially it can make it difficult for them to properly express their emotions, such as frustration, which can lead to this frustration becoming a bigger problem and may cause physical aggression. Similar to adult men not knowing how to properly communicate their frustrations in life so they instead try to pick fights at dive bars while insisting that “it's just because my team lost today babe, you don’t get it”. And let me ask you this, has a man who’s outlet for emotions is violence ever done some self-reflection after a night in the drunk tank? If a night in jail doesn't stop violence in adults, then I don’t think suspension, or some detention will be discouraging for kids.
As stated, violence is simply a symptom of the conditions children are facing in and out of the education system throughout the pandemic and after it. Quite frankly the stagnation in test scores that Lecce sighted for going "back to basics" can be single handedly chalked up to the conditions brought on by the pandemic. I mean you try finding the motivation as a highschooler to do your math homework in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
As violence becomes more prevalent in schools it begins a positive feedback loop by adding to the stress levels in kids and subsequently bringing on a higher tendency for violence. Really this can be said about most of the factors that have contributed to the collapsing education system in Ontario.
First and foremost is lunch. Kids do notprioritize feeding themselves throughout the day.Of course it is on the parents to feed their kids properly but the reality is a lot of children face poverty in Canada. With the rate of child poverty being 17% in Canada, the least that can be done is provide all of its youth with breakfast and lunch, a step that would go much farther to improve the learning conditions of youth than teaching kids more fucking math. It is no secret that being hungry affects your ability to learn, or function quite frankly.
Kids who live in poverty also have a lack of school materials, funds for extracurriculars and general instability, issues that affect their ability to learn. Unfortunately these issues are not made better by the education system. Perhaps the most concerning and common of these issues is the lack of extracurricular activities. A general lack of extracurricular activities for youth has become prevalent after the pandemic, even for kids out of poverty this is the case. After-school programs and the like offer a valuable social setting for kids to grow their social skills while learning new hobbies. The most valuable aspect for kids is simply taking up their time, the more time kids spend occupied and entertained the less time they have to do bored kid shit. To remind people, bored and unoccupied kid shit consists of just dumb shit. I used to fling my shoes into a person's yard from a swing set while playing a game called swing baseball. And when I reached an age where I could no longer retrieve my shoes from someone's back yard without the risk of getting the cops called on me, me and my friends just did drugs. So that is what bored kids do, essentially.
This boredom unfortunately stretches to the classroom especially when there is one teacher per 30 students and kids are left to their own devices for the majority of a school day. This is increasingly an issue in the age of having the internet in your pocket at all times. Not to mention the fact that youtube and tiktok have made anyone below the age of 25 have an attention span of approximately 30 seconds, myself included. This plus an understaffed classroom results in dozens of kids who spend approximately 30% of their time learning, if that. Ultimately the boredom kids face in and out of school results in them desiring excitement and new experiences which can lead to drug experimentation and violent rowdy behavior, something I learned first hand when me and my friends who had no after school activities would do hockey boxing and smoke weed at the grand stands after school, THIS is what bored kids do.
Ultimately many of the problems I have discussed in the Canadian school system come down to a lack of funding, and no one understands this more than the teachers. Teachers have a bad reputation in the general public, parents blame them for essentially every issue their kid has and expects teachers to dedicate their entire lives to the job. Meanwhile anytime teachers actually try to demand better education conditions and make their pay sufficient they get publicly shamed. What is often not understood is that nearly every single teacher spends their own money to provide kids with books, learning materials, and sometimes even food. But ask any parent and they will say teachers get paid too much. Oh and those after school activities I was discussing? Those rely on the volunteer time of teachers.
Sure some teachers suck, but nearly all cops suck and I don’t see us reducing their pay anytime soon, so why the fuck are we so critical of teachers? Teachers in Ontario currently operate with a 22.5 students to 1 teacher ratio. Meaning in a 90 minute class with a 30 minute lesson a teacher has 2.5 minutes of 1 on 1 time for each student. 2.5 minutes is simply not enough time to help a kid learn something, simple as that. And quite frankly when I was in school I did not learn a topic without being able to ask numerous questions and requiring assistance most of the time. So, in Ontario’s current educational system teachers are left deciding between stretching themselves thin trying to give each kid even amounts of 1 on 1 time or picking and choosing between which kids deserve their time. Unbeknownst to Lecce this issue is not only a problem in math class, but hey math is clearly the subject that taught everybody the most useful things we would ever learn, right?
Ontario has been shortchanging the education system for a decade. On the surface the budget has increased, but once factoring in inflation some districts have lost 800 dollars per student in funding. All of this has resulted in an education system that does not provide kids with suitable learning conditions. Which has manifested in increased school violence as previously discussed, but along with increased violence there has been notable increases in mental illness in youth as well as drug use. Of course poor learning conditions is not the primary reason for this, an ever collapsing society and a looming threat of climate change may play a bigger role, but the poor learning conditions certainly don’t help.
The way in which Ontario approaches its education system is similar to how it has been treating its health care system. Starve the beast until you can convince people that it doesn't work anymore. Ford has already done it with the healthcare system and the education system is next. What does this mean for all of us? Well a dysfunctional education system that can only be improved if you have money to send your kids to private school. What little social services we have are slowly being stripped away to allow for clearer distinction between the poor and the rich in Ontario, good luck.