“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

“School days, school days good old Golden Rule days. Reading, writing and rithmetic taught to the tune of a hickory stick . . .”Ah, yes. The kids are back in school again and if my tour last week delivering lunches to almost every school in town means anything, I’d say the kids look bright and eager for another school year learning in this exciting and oft dangerous world.

Dangerous?

Well for starters, Europe is at war again. Something in my long lifetime I thought I’d never see again. When I first enrolled in school in the early 1950s, the world was still trying to forget the horrors of the Second World War and in almost total agreement that war must never happen again.

We sure blew that one!

And the three “R’s. They were found in books and on blackboards. Computers were almost unknown then and “smart” phones were stuck on the wall, or if you were ahead of the pack, they sat in a plastic cradle on a desk and you certainly didn’t carry them around in your pocket. Nor did you take pictures with them or listen to music. Oh, how we suffered.

And if you did something wrong or flagrantly broke the rules, as some kids were prone to do, you got the “strap” as I did more than once. The strap was a three-foot strip of thick black leather usually wielded by the school principal who would tell you to stick out your hands and hold them steady while he wacked them three or four times each depending on the severity of the offence.

You’d then be given time for reflection or tears to dry before being sent back fully chastened to your classroom which was usually dead silent at the time as the rest of the students contemplated the gravity of the occasion.

Did the strap work? That was debatable. Some parents were dead set against it for obvious reasons while I think it’s accurate to say most parents supported the practice and some even piled on more punishment when little Johnny got home from school. Whatever the case, the strap was still used all the time I was in school and wasn’t retired until the education minister of the day banned it forever in B.C. in the early 1970s.

If you think that was shocking, consider this. There used to be curriculum guidebooks for teachers that advised teachers on all aspects of educational pedagogy and classroom management. As a teacher myself in the 1970s, I found the guidebooks a valuable resource to rely on in the classroom. But I was once shown a provincial guidebook of the early 1900s era that said one of the educational goals a teacher should inculcate in the classroom was “the superiority of the white race.” It was a guidebook for another province but that’s what it said and it appalled me.

The issues are different now but no less momentous just the same. How do you deal with kids coming to school hungry? Would single gender classrooms be better for learning? How to deal with diversity in the classroom? New math vs old math? Sex ed in the classroom?  Should it be there at all and at what age? Smart phones; are they a blessing or a curse and to what extent do you allow them to be used?

And this school year may bear the brunt of what could become the biggest educational issue of them all, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom.  Will students “learn” anything if all they must do is press a button and Chat-GPT gives them the answer on their smart phone? The controversial application is already widely used on university campuses. Does that mean it will soon be in high schools down the street?

School “daze” indeed. Today’s beleaguered teachers are being challenged like never before. They deserve all the help they can get. Are parents listening?

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who was once a teacher himself.

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