Parents have an important role to play in shaping public school curricula. This role should stop short of holding veto power over the individual books their children read.
But in some Ontario school boards parents still have control.
In a public education system, parents do not and should not have the last say on what goes on inside the school. Public school systems have public goals – goals made all the more important by the world today’s students will one day face as adults.
That world is already overflowing with the flood of outlets for news, comment and ideas on the Internet.
While the web promises ever more choice, as author Cass Sunstein argues, in that promise rests the threat of a fracturing society.
In his book Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein, who runs the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, notes the potential for people to use the internet to read only the opinions they already hold and listen only to the people they already agree with.
The risk is that the more people go to like-minded sources for their daily dose of miscellanea, the more they become contained in a bubble.
A world filled with people who agree with you is a warm, cozy place to be.
But the view sucks.
When we close ourselves in, we tend to stop seeing across the differences that divide us and the social glue thins a little.
But nothing says this has to happen. Sunstein reminds us that the technology is not going to dictate the future. How we use it will.
We need to remember why we have public education system in the first place.
“[T]he reason we have public money for public schools in the first place is that we understand… that public schools serve important public purposes,”
Kevin McDonough, who teaches at McGill’s Integrated Studies in Education department, said by e-mail.
Those purposes are two-fold, McDonough says.
First, to give kids the tools to choose a future suited to their skills and temperaments.
The second goal is to turn today’s tots into democratically minded citizens.
Together, these goals mean kids need both a degree of autonomy from their parents and exposure to diverse points of view.
He rightly points out that the fiction read in English class is a small part of the overall education project.
But this should not lessen how jealously we protect those books.
In many ways, fiction is an easy target for parental meddling.
The Ministry of Education leaves the choice of novels and plays open to boards, schools and teachers in a way it never would with a math or science text.
To some, English class might sound like a place learn little more than the five paragraph essay, but psychologists are now telling us that it might be doing much more.
“Very often, the arts are thought of as frills for the middle classes,” University of Toronto professor Keith Oatley says.
“There is something more substantial than that. It does have important social benefits and isn’t to be dismissed as frivolity.”
Last year, Oatley and a pair of colleagues published what he says is the first study to prove a psychological benefit to reading fiction.
If you’re turning the pages of Chekov, Shakespeare, or other classics of literature, he adds, you may find yourself open to new ideas of who you can be.
“Literary fiction allows people to loosen up their conceptions of themselves and change in small ways,” he says.
It’s so often parents that can get in the way.
Allow parents to start filtering what their kids read in school, and you’re closing down some of those avenues to the discovery of self and of others.
More than this, they teach their kids lessons about how to take in the world; lessons that start to look like Sunstein’s worst case scenario of news consumers who filter out views differing from their own.
Sit long enough in a classroom and you’ll see stark examples of the challenge our society faces.
Take my own encounter with one young woman.
Amid the bustle of students eagerly reading, wrestling over arguments, and jotting down ideas, she sat upright, motionless; her eyes fixed at something outside the window that wasn’t there.
She said she didn’t agree with the side of the debate she’d been assigned.
It didn’t matter that arguing the other side was the point. It didn’t matter that other students also disagreed.
“I don’t believe in it.”
The ‘it’ was homosexuality. The kicker was, it really shouldn’t have mattered.
You can argue to keep a refugee in Canada because of the threat of violence back home.
You can do it without everhaving to accept or even believe in the existence of his professed sexuality.
But she refused.
On some level, maybe she should be rewarded. Not many people could sit in a class full of do-gooders and flatly state that objection.
But I left the room troubled. If we can’t see past the things that divide us, if we look out the window instead of toward each other, we’re in trouble.