Mireille Falardeau et Michel Loranger Le choix de stratégies ... - CSSE

DISCUSSION NOTES / DÉBAT 453
and often mandatory progressivism in Canada is a harmful influence on academic
success (as well as on character development). Yes, Slavin and others have
shown in small-scale research that highly structured collaborative learning can
be academically effective. I have no quarrel with such practice. It is the
unstructured, non-sequential core ideas of Canadian elementary schools that have
been shown to be ineffective — whole language instead of structured, phonetically
based approaches to reading; learning centres; individualization; absence of clear
objectives and standards; abolition of external testing; and individualized, nonsequential,
and spiral approaches to mathematics, reading, and writing. Manipulable
factors require close attention by educators.
Levin, Riffel, and Young confuse two important concepts — the public school
(which in Canada generally refers to a publicly run school under the authority
of the province, sometimes including Roman Catholic schools) and the common
school (which is the school which all or nearly all students in a given neighbourhood
attend). The common school is generally foreign to the English and the
Canadian tradition. The idea of the common school (children from all walks of
life being educated together) is used generally (and specifically by Levin, Riffel,
and Young) to attack those who want something different. But note how rarely
defenders of the common school idea analyze the choices they themselves support.
French immersion, in which more students are enrolled than in all the
private schools together, is the most notable example. Surely French immersion,
dividing children by language and social class, is more divisive than permitting
small religious minorities their own schools, if they want them.
This is not an independent school issue; it is a question of which schools
deserve public support — the mechanism for financial provision is secondary.
Differentiation between schools based on wealth and materialism (in terms of acceptable
— to the peer group — brands of clothing, headgear, popular music, and
footwear) is potentially divisive, as we see in the nominally common school
situation prevalent in the U.S.A. I prefer that parents be encouraged and enabled
to make positive, substantive choices for their children.
The crux of the difference between Levin, Riffel, and Young and me is
reached only near the end of their response, when they ask how “cordoning off”
separate communities will help maintain “common bonds” (p. 449). They forget,
at this point, their argument that schools have minimal effect compared with the
home background. They go on to assert that I, believing in the development of
virtue, must therefore value “its public pursuit as a common good” (p. 4). And
so I do. But their own top-down authoritarianism is explicit in the choice of the
word “cordoning,” as if I were suggesting that a central authority should
determine who should attend which school, and in their assumption that I should
attempt to impose my preferred education on everybody else. The idea that one
can have strong ideas about morality and spirituality without wishing to have the
authority to impose them on all the nation’s young escapes them. But then they