All Posts Tagged With: "Manitoba schools"
Hey look! Another university fell off a truck
Maybe we should just convert high school diplomas to degrees
One way to create more university spaces is to build classrooms, or erect new universities. Another is to just rename an existing institution a “university.” While Dalton McGuinty is not adverse to creating more classroom space, largely by shifting the classroom to the internet, his Open Ontario plan also includes a rebranding of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), as a university. Well sort of. Judging from the proposed name change–the Ontario College of Art and Design University–suggests that OCAD will still just be a lowly college but also a swanky new university.
(editor’s note: OCAD received independent degree granting status in 2002)
This bipolar approach to naming institutions is something of a fetish in Canada. As is the presumption that renaming every college a university will somehow improve educational quality. For years, British Columbia designated several schools as “university colleges” before renaming them universities in 2008. The name change, of course, didn’t bring with it any new expectations for the institutions.
More weirdly, last spring the Manitoba government gave William and Catherine Booth College, the right to market itself as “A Christian University College” despite the fact that the school has no plans to include the word “university” into its title. Advanced education minister, Diane McGifford, defended the decision by dismissing concerns that Booth College has been granted amnesty for lying. “They’re using the term university college solely for the purpose of advertising,” she said at the time.
We use to take universities to be institutions that offered a broad range of degree programs and research in at least the core arts and science disciplines. Now we take the term to mean any institution that offers a degree in anything. I don’t intend to diminish OCAD, but is a specialized school that only offers degrees in fine arts and design. If it were an American institution, it would be a college, and it would not feel too bad about it.
To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with a college education. Colleges are not inferior to universities, but they do have different goals, and this name game is little more than a gimmick designed to confuse.
Sometimes schools evolve and become legitimate universities (Ryerson for instance) but the problem isn’t so much with what we call schools, but with the fact that all you have to do to elevate your institution is lobby the province. The same way one might lobby city council to change the name of a street.
Rebranding allows the government to say it is creating more university spaces, without actually having to do anything. So I have a suggestion for McGuinty, if you think the proportion of Ontarians who are university educated is too low, why not just convert high school diplomas to degrees? No good?
Cooperating with strangers
Will separate school board ensure Aboriginal student success?
These are tricky little quandaries. A community struggles to get its kids through high school, and every Tom, Dick and Sally thinks he or she has the answer. It happened when the Toronto District School Board talked about opening its first Africentric school, and it’s happening again now, with calls to create an Aboriginal school division in Winnipeg.
So, Sally here, with another opinion to throw into the mix. The difference? I’m not an enthused parent, community advocate, political leader or sociology PhD candidate. In contrast, I still wear many of the same clothes I wore in high school, and feebly swap university lecture notes with friends (some of whom happen to be Aboriginal) the night before exams. My point: I may not be any better informed than Tommy-PhD, but I am a little closer to the action.
Granted, I didn’t go to high school near a reserve, and I can’t tell you why the native dropout rates are where they are. But I do know teens who didn’t make it through high school. And no one’s proposing an “I have an unstable home life” school board, or a “Who needs school when I’d make so much money working full time!” committee.
My position is that kids don’t drop out because the curriculum doesn’t speak to them. A discussion of the “mothers” of Confederation wouldn’t have kept the 16-year-old pregnant student at my alma mater in school. Advocates for race- or gender-based alternative schools seem to rely on the premise that relevant material will keep bodies in seats. I just don’t think so.
Well, one might argue, can’t the dropout rates of certain communities be attributed to specific societal trends? Take, for example, ‘Community X’ with its high rates of teen pregnancy and poor high school completion statistics. Doesn’t it make sense to concentrate ‘Community X’ students under one school or board to create a catered learning environment, one which specifically addresses the causes of teen pregnancy to prevent dropouts?
Yes, that does make sense. I’m all for student-directed learning, a more holistic approach to education, classrooms that are about more than just facts and numbers. But while it may be “easier” to lump together students of like backgrounds, I don’t think it would ultimately be to their benefit. Each community, no matter how outwardly successful, has its failings. By isolating one group or another, aren’t we just “othering” them? Why not create a more holistic learning environment for everyone, where more than one community’s troubles are part of classroom discussion? Won’t it empower students to know that they’re not the only ones with statistics not on their side?
Even if a native school board is the answer to getting more First Nations students through high school (a premise of which I’m doubtful) what then? In university, it’s sink or swim. In the workplace, it’s ‘do your job.’ We’re all lumped together, and most of the time, success means cooperating with relative strangers. Hopefully, we’ll see each other as people. But if we keep incubating our kids in racial, cultural, or class bubbles, I’m not so optimistic.
