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Public Schooling in Ontario in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
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13605 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
5,044 Words |
| Author
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Ian Dowbiggin
Ian Dowbiggin is professor of the faculty of education at the
University of Western Ontario. |
In years to come we shall probably look back at the 1980s as one of the most important and controversial decades in the history of public education in North America. With the publication in April 1983 of the National Commission on Excellence in Education's (NCEE) report titled A Nation at Risk, there began in the United States what some observers have dubbed the "Great School Debate." The NCEE report, commissioned by T.H. Bell, then secretary of education, warned Americans that their schools were threatened by "a rising tide of mediocrity." A Nation at Risk claimed that this situation would prove calamitous for America if the country did not reassert its commitment to learning. The stakes were high, according to the report: America stood to lose its "slim competitive edge... in world markets" if it did not train its citizens in the literacy and occupational skills necessary for survival in the anticipated "information age."
A Nation at Risk quickly generated additional reports and studies in the 1980s which sought to evaluate the NCEE's allegations and recommendations. Many Americans agreed with the report that public schools were not effective as learning institutions. Neoconservative journalists, disillusioned liberals, and spokesmen for conservative groups and fundamentalist churches concurred that the present state of public education was a result of the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. For them political irresponsibility had been matched by educational irresponsibility: Curricular expansion had produced a "smorgasbord" of course options for students. Schools had been turned into "cafeteria-style" institutions for learning. This greater program flexibility and wider freedom of choice for students, the thinking went, had led to a fall in pedagogical standards. It was charged that pupils increasingly avoided those courses that taught the "basics," leaving them unable to read, write, speak clearly, or identify the basic features of American history and civic experience. Not a document to mince words, A Nation at Risk claimed that America had been committing no less than "unilateral educational disarmament" in the 1970s by following these curricular policies. The challenge, according to the NCEE, was "to reverse the current declining trend--a trend that stems more from weakness of purpose, confusion of vision, and lack of leadership than from conditions beyond our control."
The rhetoric of A Nation at Risk, with its references to "the persistent and authentic American dream" of educational meritocracy and "the fear of losing a shared vision for America," might lead the reader to think that the report applied only to the United States. What many Americans may not realize is that the discussion of the
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