Chomsky:
At the previous school where I taught high school I was allowed to exploit a loop-hole in the curriculum requirements of our Ministry of Education!s guidelines to resurrect three old part-year courses into one new full-year course offered as an option at the grade 11 level. The course was a combination of Quebec Civil Law, Quebec Business Law and Canadian Common Law. To this was added Constitutional Law and Civics. In this course skills like argument, public speaking, debating skills, questioning and non-coercive interrogation techniques, mock-trials and moot-courts were included. It was a great course which I was able to teach for 17 years on and off over the last thirty years of teaching but finally the government closed the loop-holes and shut down the administrive space in which the course could exist. That was heart-breaking and really angered the students who loved the course and flocked to it. There is a strong demand for such courses from my perspective but the state seems pre-occupied with STEM, computer and job-training courses and is suspicious/wary of courses which awaken effective critical thinking in students about the society in which they live.
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Truly well-educated students are, in the minds of some in power, viewed as loose-cannons and there seems to be a desire to control them with selective ignorance and education-based debt to prevent them from effectively challenging the political status quo. Compliant engineers, socially myopic computer programmers, inquisitive scientists lost in their disciplines, business-savvy graduates are all preferred to well prepared and capable political idealists armed with the skills needed to challenge and change their societies through peaceful argument, civil debate, public speaking and effective legal challenge. We want followers and not leaders it seems.
Cheers.
Evilroddy.
That's a beautiful story Roddy, and an even greater idea for a class. Well, it was a great story, until the end. What better to combine, than civics & debate?
And my comment to your the class being dropped, which I'm sorry to hear, is that this is the very reason why we've private schooled every generation in my family since coming here from Europe! My family was, well, fairly poor when they first emigrated to America. It was one of those "escape war-torn Europe" stories. But the large American city to which they migrated had terrible public schools. Also, my family was staunchly Catholic.
So the kids were all sent to private Catholic schools, and my grandfather, and later my father, would assist around the parish & school in return for tuition discounts. In fact, many parents did whatever they could around the parish or school, in order to keep their kids in a private school they could ill afford. It worked-out well, because our school was among the cleanest, nicely painted, and well maintained in the city. What was lacking in finance, was more than made up for in human labor and personal attention. And yes, the grammar school was indeed run by habited nuns, just like the old Blues Brothers movie! The vast majority of the kids that went to these grammar schools, ended-up going to one of the Catholic high-school prep-schools. All the Catholic high schools in the system were college-prep, and only offered college-prep programs (and classes). They provided a highly cohesive experience in preparing & transitioning the students to the universities.
I moved out of our old inner-city ethnic neighborhood as an adult, and eventually ended-up in a pretty nice suburb. The public schools are actually very good here - amongst the best in the nation, quite honestly. But I still sent my kids to Catholic grammar & Catholic prep schools. As good as the public schools are, the Catholic schools can operate completely autonomously. And that's a big deal. They stress the "three R's": Reading, wRiting, and 'Rithmetic. Nearly every class meeting, will require a writing assignment. They stress critical thinking and historical perspective, within a broad liberal curriculum with an abundance of history. They require great classes not required in the public schools. And yes, debate team is still a matter of prestige. The prep-schools are selective, requiring scoring well on standardized entrance exams. And the kids are told they've got to work their butt's off, otherwise they should give-up their seat to one of the less fortunate kids that wants to work, but couldn't get in. And perhaps best of all, the entire family-student-school triad is evaluated as a single functional unit. Parent-teachers conference attendance is mandatory. Weekly parental grade & activity reports online, require regular parental sign-offs.
Anyway, over the years I've become even more resolved in the value of private schools, and your post re-enforces that opinion.
