Give us a year

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:55 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Dewar offers a tuition break for a year of community service.

Dewar’s ‘Your Canada Year’ will provide 10,000 youth with a grant for training or post secondary education in exchange for one year of service with a non-profit organization … Under the program Canadians between ages 17 and 25 will be eligible to volunteer in Canada or overseas. In exchange they’ll receive a maximum of $1,500/month to help cover expenses during their service and a grant of up to $6,000 for one year of post-secondary education or training afterwards.

Commandant Camila’s uprising

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters

If one were to rank the legacies of the Pinochet era in Chile, education reform wouldn’t likely make most lists. The former dictator devastated his country in many ways. Thousands of his opponents were murdered or simply disappeared. Countless more were tortured or forced into exile. But Augusto Pinochet also radically deregulated the education market, pulling funds from the public sector in the early 1980s and spreading them into a parallel private system. Remarkably, it is that decision that has his country roiling today.

For more than six months, tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of students have filled the streets in Chile’s cities. Their explicit goal: to overturn the education system Pinochet imposed. Under the Pinochet system, private education flourished while the costs for public education, at the university level, soared. Chilean university students today pay upwards of 80 per cent of the costs of their own education in public and private universities, the highest rate in the OECD. To pay that, many take out crippling student loans. Many lower-income students, products of the poorly funded public secondary system, meanwhile, are shut out of the better universities by dint of poor test scores.

Beginning last Chilean fall, the students began to revolt. They shut down classes, stormed ministries and, depending on who you believe, either provoked or suffered through violent clashes with police. The protests, which featured massive street marches as recently as mid-November, are the largest and most sustained since Pinochet’s rule ended more than 20 years ago. Many have been organized by the country’s most prominent student group, whose leader, Camila Vallejo, has become a minor folk hero in the country.

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Why your teenager can’t use a hammer

By Cynthia Reynolds - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 145 Comments

Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

It’s hard not to laugh when Barry Smith starts telling stories about the hapless young workers he has to deal with. Smith, who runs Toronto-area roofing company RoofSmith Canada, tells of one who didn’t come to work because his cat had fleas, and another who jumped off a shed roof, even though he’d just tossed bags of nails into the garbage bin below. But the laughing tapers off when Smith, 46, talks about skills.

“They don’t know how to handle a tool properly,” he says quietly. “They’re bright kids, but they hold a hammer at the top instead of the bottom, so it takes four swings instead of one to get a nail in. They don’t know how to read the short lines on a tape measure and they’ve never used power tools, which makes you really cautious.” He says they can’t seem to detect the patterns of the work—you rip up part of the roof, that gets thrown down, that goes into the garbage—so they just stand around. “It can get really frustrating.”

There’s much talk about a coming crisis in the trades—that we simply don’t have enough new recruits to replace an aging workforce. By some estimates, Canada could face a shortfall of up to one million skilled tradespeople by 2020. To address this shortage, the government is funding a variety of incentives to attract young talent and it’s beefing up our apprenticeship training programs—registrations are at an all-time high. But a stumbling block has emerged that’s getting harder to ignore: by all accounts, we have the least handy, most mechanically deficient generation of young people. Ever.

It’s easy to see why.

Shop classes are all but a memory in most schools—a result of liability fears, budget cuts and an obsession with academics. Still, even in vocational high schools where shop classes endure, a skills decline is evident. One auto shop teacher says he’s teaching his Grade 12 students what, 10 years ago, he taught Grade Nines. “We would take apart a transmission, now I teach what it is.” Remarkably, most of his Grade 11 students arrive not knowing which way to turn a screwdriver to tighten a screw. If he introduces a nut threaded counterclockwise, they have trouble conceptualizing the need to turn the screwdriver the opposite way. That’s because, he says, “They are texting non-stop; they don’t care about anything else. It’s like they’re possessed.”

At home, spare time is no longer spent doing things like dismantling gadgets, building model airplanes or taking apart old appliances with dad; there’s no tinkering with cars, which are so computerized now you couldn’t tinker if you wanted to. A 2009 poll showed one-third of teens spend zero time per week doing anything hands-on at all; the same as their parents. Instead, by one count, entertainment media eats up 53 hours a week for kids aged eight to 18. As for those new apprentices? They’re signing up and then they quit. Depending on the province and trade, some 40 to 75 per cent drop out before completing their program.

In Nisku, Alta., John Wright, the technical supervisor at manufacturing company Argus Machines, oversees 12 apprentices in the welding, machinist and millwright trades. Three years ago, he started noticing two tiers of applicants, those with basic mechanical skills and a new crop who, as he says, had no clue what they were doing. He speculated the disparity stemmed from their upbringing.

“The ones from the farm community weren’t afraid to get in there and get dirty. They could figure out basic repairs. And when you have to feed the chickens and milk the cows every day, you learn how to show up to work on time.” Those who didn’t have hands-on experiences couldn’t grasp basic nuts-and-bolts mechanics, they couldn’t solve simple problems. Worse, they lacked the same work ethic, which made them too difficult to train. The implications reach well beyond the trades.

Occupational therapist Stacy Kramer, clinical director at Toronto’s Hand Skills for Children, offers one explanation for what’s happening. It begins with babies who don’t get put on the ground as much, which means less crawling, less hand development. Then comes the litany of push-button toy gadgets, which don’t exercise the whole hand. That leads to difficulty developing skills that require a more intricate coordination between the hand and brain, like holding a pencil or using scissors, which kindergarten teachers complain more students can’t do. “We see 13-year-olds who can’t do up buttons or tie laces,” she says. “Parents just avoid it by buying Velcro and T-shirts.” Items that—not incidentally—chimpanzees could put on.

When the first apes climbed down from the trees to explore life on the ground some three million years ago, it was their hands, no longer used for branch swinging, that helped trigger our evolution. Hand structure changed, enabling us to perform increasingly complex grips. The conversation between hand and brain grew more complex, too. We advanced to the unique ability to visualize an idea, then create that vision with our hands. That’s meant everything from developing tools to imagining airplanes to performing open-heart surgery. So what happens if that all-important hand-brain conversation gets shortchanged at a young age? Can it be reintroduced later, or does that aptitude dissipate?

“We don’t really know,” says neurologist Dr. Frank Wilson, author of The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture. “That research wouldn’t get through an ethics committee, even though it’s happening on a massive scale in our homes every day.” We only have these uncomfortable clues, such as young people who can’t visualize how to best wield a hammer. Or teens who, despite years of unscrewing bottle tops and jars, can’t intuitively apply the righty-tighty, lefty-loosey rule of thumb.

Predictably, this is affecting other industries that depend on a mechanically inclined workforce. After NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab noticed its new engineers couldn’t do practical problem solving the way its retirees could, it stopped hiring those who didn’t have mechanical hobbies in their youth. When MIT realized its engineering students could no longer estimate solutions to problems on their own, that they needed their computers, it began adding remedial building classes to better prepare these soon-to-be professionals for real-world jobs, like designing airplanes and bridges. Architecture schools are also adding back-to-basics courses. As for the trades? Veterans like Barry Smith have little choice but to attempt to nurse a hands-on ability among new recruits one hammer faux pas at a time, teaching the next generation of tradespeople just how to hit a nail on the head.

Cashing in on foreign students

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Simon Hayter

Last year, Patricia Gartland, who works for a suburban Vancouver school district, brought in $16 million selling 1,700 B.C. classroom spots to foreign students, largely from China and South Korea. Gartland, who started her job as director of international education with the Coquitlam School District in suburban Vancouver over 10 years ago, has made the program in Vancouver one of the most extensive in Canada and the envy of the scores of districts across the country looking to cash in on the growing market for international students.

With international students paying $10,000 to $14,000 to attend Canadian schools, public school administrators across the country are setting up for-profit international student programs to compete for their dollars. One 2009 study estimated some 35,000 foreign students in the K-12 system contribute almost $700 million annually to the Canadian economy—a win-win for students, who get an invaluable leg-up when applying to North American post-secondary schools, as well as district administrators, who make up to 50 per cent profit on the tuition.

International student programs aren’t new to Canada, but at the K-12 level they’re rarely talked about, although most provinces have had programs for at least a decade. No province has been more successful at bringing in international students than B.C., with some 9,000. Capitalizing on the demand for a Western diploma and an English-language education, B.C. schools compete with Britain, the U.S. and Australia to recruit students overseas. School districts send staff abroad to meet foreign school officials and to attend trade shows. Domestically, the districts liaise with the Lower Mainland’s tight-knit Chinese and Korean communities, looking for overseas relatives. Once in Canada, the students live with extended family or billets. The students are offered supplementary language classes in tandem with regular studies, though eventually most opt for the standard curriculum.

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Is subsidized daycare bad for kids?

By John Geddes - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 5 Comments

CP

In public policy, few subjects are as sure to spark fierce debate as child care. Prime Minister Stephen Harper portrays a stark divide when he talks about his Conservative policy of giving parents $100 a month for every child under six, and how he scrapped the previous Liberal government’s plan to pour billions into deals with the provinces to expand subsidized daycare. “We took money from bureaucrats and lobbyists,” he says, “and gave it to the real experts on child care, and their names are Mom and Dad!”

If daycare advocates have lost the battle in Ottawa, at least for as long as Harper is in power, they’ll always have Quebec as a beacon of hope. Starting in 1997, the province implemented a low-cost universal child care policy along the lines of the European model. The number of subsidized daycare spaces in the province soared to 210,000 last year, from just 77,000 in 1997. Nothing like it has been tried anywhere else in North America.

But now three Montreal researchers have studied the Quebec experiment, focusing on how the rapid expansion of $7-a-day daycare seems to be reflected in Quebec kids’ scores on a school-readiness test. Their findings are potentially explosive. “In summary,” they write, “the effects of the program are found to be negative for five-year-olds and less convincingly negative for four-year-olds.”

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Sisters with a vision

By Sally Armstrong - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Photographs by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, and an increasingly skeptical international community looks to the future of Afghanistan with one eye on the exit, the women of this war-weary country have something to say to those who answered their clarion call for help a decade ago. They claim that finding the finish line requires a rebooting of the original plan that focuses on human rights and education. That plan requires security. The Afghan army and police force are not yet ready to provide it. And so, as far as the women are concerned, the coming adieu to Canada’s military, which will withdraw from its combat role in July, is bittersweet.

While news from Afghanistan has focused mostly on the insurgency taking place in the four southern provinces, the other 30 provinces are marginally better off. Much has changed. Almost three million girls are back in school, women are back at work, 40 per cent of the media are women and 25 per cent of regional councillors are female. What’s more, the fundamentalist mentality is changing. Only a few women in urban centres still wear a burka. Religious doctrines are slightly less oppressive. The constitution demands that 25 per cent of seats in the parliament are reserved for women. Says Shinkai Karokhail, 49, a long-time women’s activist and member of parliament for Kabul: “It’s the presence of countries like Canada that have made that happen. It has given me the right to speak out and to claim my space. The international community is like a thousand eyes on the government. Even the warlords are more gentle, knowing they’re being watched.”

Her concern, which is shared by most of the women in this country, is that if the international community pulls out, the gains women have made will be wrenched away. Karokhail’s colleague Fawzia Koofi, 35, a sassy, media-savvy MP from Badakhshan province who has ambitions to run in the next presidential election, puts it more bluntly. “You’re leaving before putting an end to the war,” she says. “We can’t function yet as a government. Do you think Afghanistan won’t change back after you leave? Terrorism doesn’t know borders. Your border could be next. You need to wait until we have an effective government and a qualified army and police force.”

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Where it's God's way or the highway

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 21 Comments

The town of Morinville, Alta., population 6,775, cannot offer Donna Hunter’s children the secular, non-denominational education most Canadian parents expect as a matter of course. She is leaving for nearby north Edmonton and taking her three young children. And her sister. And her sister’s two kids. And her retired parents. Mrs. Hunter led the family’s march to Morinville in 1999; not yet a mother, she didn’t realize that all of the town’s public schools are, because of an anomaly in Alberta’s constitutional development, formally Catholic. The school board’s stated mission: “ensuring that Catholic values permeate all school activities.”

Morinville belongs to the Greater St. Albert “Catholic Public” school district—a historically French-Canadian area that declared itself Catholic for education purposes under territorial law in 1884. For generations, non-Catholic parents accepted the status quo, but Morinville schools have grown more strident about their identity even as the town becomes more diverse. Hunter leads a group of Morinville parents demanding a non-religious option, but the Catholic board will not provide one, and apparently can’t be forced to despite its officially public status. The province’s education minister acknowledges the problem but, say critics, has been slow to address it.

As Hunter leaves Morinville, her group is enjoying some progress. The Catholic board is surveying town residents to test the appetite for secular education, perhaps provided within Morinville under the auspices of a neighbouring district. “But the survey won’t count people who already left because of the Catholic monopoly, or those who never move here,” notes Hunter. “Every year that passes while we await a solution, more Morinville parents will face my choice. Stay? Leave? Wait? How long?”

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And today's lesson is…

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:29 AM - 2 Comments

Jeff Gross/Getty Images

In the town of Ratekau, what started as a fifth-grade demonstration of where meat comes from—and how it was prepared in the days before refrigeration—ended with outraged parents, upset kids, and a denouncement from state officials. As part of a curriculum unit on how people lived in the Stone Age, one parent (a farmer) volunteered to slaughter a rabbit for the class. Teachers voted in favour, but apparently didn’t inform parents or the principal. Some fifth-graders launched a petition to save the rabbit, but teachers seem to have ignored them. “One can’t collect signatures against a math test either,” one told the newspaper Lübecker Nachrichten.

In the end, 50 students voluntarily gathered in the school courtyard. They said goodbye to the rabbit; the farmer then hit it with a hammer, slit its throat, gutted and skinned it, and hung it to drain. It was later grilled and consumed. Parents complained, leading the state’s Education Ministry to denounce the slaughter as “educationally problematic.” “My point wasn’t to show children death,” the farmer told Der Spiegel. “We wanted to demonstrate that killing animals involves taking on responsibility.”

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 12:08 PM - 58 Comments

Michael Ignatieff promises a Canada Service Corps.

Ignatieff also announced that a Liberal government would provide employment insurance rebates for businesses that hired workers aged 18-25 and introduce the Canada Service Corps, a program that would reduce student debt by $1,500 for students who participate in 150 hours of community service.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 3:07 PM - 54 Comments

Stephen Harper promises loans for new immigrants.

On Wednesday, that was a promise of bridge loans for new immigrants to help cover the cost of having their foreign credentials recognized in Canada. Harper said the plan is aimed at helping foreign-trained workers get the education and training they need to integrate into the workforce. The loan program, which was hinted at in the ill-fated federal budget, would cost $6 million a year and cover expenses associated with training, exams and schools fees.

'This isn't about Stephen Harper'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 5:42 PM - 77 Comments

The latest Liberal spot.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 2:18 PM - 13 Comments

Michael Ignatieff promises education for veterans.

Canadian soldiers can expect four years of government-paid education or technical training after they leave the military under a Liberal government, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Monday … The program would cost about $60 million a year going forward, with retroactivity for soldiers who served in Afghanistan.

Canada's League: Maclean's 2011 Guide to Canadian Universities

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 4, 2011 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s thanks Canada’s universities for collaborating on the 2011 university guidebook video and acknowledges all footage used was submitted and provided by them. The universities are: Bishop’s, Carleton, Dalhousie, Kwantlen, Lakehead, Laval, McGill, Memorial, Mt. Allison, NSCAD, OCAD, Queen’s, Quest, Royal Roads, Ryerson, Simon Fraser, St. Thomas, Thompson Rivers, Trent, UBC, UNBC, UOttawa, PEI, USask, UVic, and UWO.

Music by Simon Gadke; Voiceover by Philippe Gohier; Directed and produced by Stephanie Findlay and Kerrin McNamara

'The Canada you deserve'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 5:33 PM - 81 Comments

The latest spot from the Liberal side.

A French ad is here.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 2:35 PM - 20 Comments

Michael Ignatieff promises funding for child care and early learning.

The Liberal leader announced a plan to give the provinces $500 million a year for early childhood learning, ramping up to $1 billion a year by its fourth year … He says there wouldn’t be any delay in starting the money because the party worked with the provinces to develop it.

“These programs very consciously and deliberately have been constructed with pre-consultation with provincial authorities and provincial experts because the key thing here is to act. To get it done for Canadian families,” Ignatieff said. We’ll have a flexible fund and we can get this thing moving. We don’t need to have another three or four years of argument and negotiation.” Provincial governments could apply to the fund to pay for extra spaces in daycare and early childhood learning programs or train daycare workers.

Never mind the facts of life, talk to your children about money

By the editors - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 10:21 AM - 1 Comment

Patrick Baz/Afp/Getty Images

Many Canadians seem to be feeling lucky. But are they smart enough to know that feeling lucky isn’t enough?

As Senior Writer Anne Kingston reports, lotteries have become an integral part of Canadian life. So much so that almost a third of Canadians facing retirement recently told an Environics/TD Waterhouse poll they expect lottery winnings to support them once they quit working. Another poll by another bank showed more people were relying on lottery winnings for their golden years than on support from their children.

Whether all this is simply wishful thinking, or reflects the absence of coherent plans, it seems clear a substantial portion of Canadians have not put very much thought into their financial future.

In fact, there’s ample evidence many Canadians are making financial plans based largely on self-delusion and blissful ignorance. A recent report from Statistics Canada revealed that over half of Canadians planning to buy a house figure the only expense they face is a down payment. Anyone who has ever bought a house knows these folks are in for a big surprise. And while 70 per cent of Canadians say they are confident they will save enough for a comfortable retirement, only 40 per cent have a reasonable idea of how much money that requires.

With personal debt at worrisome levels and mounting evidence that governments will be less able to fund retirement in the future, Canadians need to reverse course and take greater control of their own finances. With this in mind, recent interest in teaching financial literacy in schools seems well-timed.

This week, Ontario announced a new set of student resources, developed in partnership with the Ontario Securities Commission and the Investor Education Fund, to promote financial literacy in Grades 4 to 12 for the coming school year. Alberta and Manitoba are making similar changes to their curricula. This provincial activity reinforces recommendations made last month by the federally commissioned Task Force on Financial Literacy that said “financial education needs to be provided in the school system” and called on Ottawa to help make this happen.

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Students want jobs, and universities are listening

By the editors - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 1:33 PM - 2 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP

When John Mortimer was a young man in the late 1930s in England, he told his father he wanted to study to be an actor. Or—even better!—a writer. His father was not impressed. “My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife,” Mortimer senior said. “You’ll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You’ll be far better off in the Law. That’s the great thing about the Law, it gets you out of the house.”

The arm-wrestle over the purpose of a university education is hardly new. Is it to follow your passion, young Mortimer, to wherever that may lead? Or is it to train for a brilliant and lucrative career? What is new, 70 years after the famous son and his father bandied over the breakfast table, is that the debate has become a whole lot more urgent.

Consider the numbers: more than a quarter of a million Canadian university students are about to graduate into the workforce this spring. Yet studies show that 50 per cent of Canadian arts and science grads are working jobs that don’t require a university credential two years after graduation. The average B.A. or a B.Sc. is not trained in any particular skill. And even if they were, potential students and potential employers don’t have any way of knowing which skills a particular degree program teaches. Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of Alberta, says it’s “absolutely critical” that universities track where their grads are working—but very few do. Which schools are turning out the most employable grads? No one really knows.

That’s why we’ve made this, our sixth annual student edition, into our first “Get Hired” issue. Along with our usual student satisfaction surveys (congratulations, Quest U), the 16-page section looks at whether universities can or should tailor themselves to suit the workplace; at the rocket-to-the-top world of retail careers; and at the explosion of applications to post-grad college programs, which shows how huge the mismatch between work and education has become.

Canadian universities can do better. Europe provides one model: its standardization agency, called Tuning, asks employers to identify skills graduates will need to work in their field. Employers can be confident that an applicant with a B.A. in history from the University of Manchester possesses a similar skill set to an applicant with a B.A. in history from the University of Munich. Schools in the U.S., like Utah State University, are experimenting with Tuning’s system. Soon, employers in some of our greatest competitor nations will know what it means to hire the university graduate sitting in front of them. Students will know which skills they can expect to acquire at any given school.

And today’s students expect university to transform them into employable adults. Last year, when 12,500 students were asked “What was the single most important reason in your decision to attend university?” by the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC), nine per cent were after “a good general education.” Nearly 70 per cent had enrolled to “get a good job” or “train for a specific career.” Their schools are listening. “It’s not the old, green college on the hill anymore,” says Lloyd Axworthy, president of the University of Winnipeg, in our feature article, “Get me a job—or give me my money back” (page 52). Jack Lightstone, president of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., says it wasn’t that long ago when very few people went to university. “It’s a good thing that more people go,” he adds. “But there’s a whole different attitude as a result.”

No kidding. In 1998, Ontario’s then-premier Mike Harris said post-secondary funding should be tied to whether graduates find jobs—schools would get more money if their graduates get more jobs. The backlash was immediate, and furious. Educators, parents and students said that the proposal would dumb down teaching and prevent schools from nurturing great thinkers. Harris retorted that Ontario needed fewer “great thinkers” and more people with jobs. The University of Toronto responded with a billboard campaign that featured titans of industry thanking their B.A.s in English for getting them where they were today. It was quite the spat.

It’s hard to imagine that happening today. These students are a practical lot. When Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff attended the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, it was a place to debate great ideas like the meaning of Canada in the face of separatism and the morality of the Vietnam War. “Now,” he says with a sigh, “it’s all about jobs and stuff.” It’s not that we don’t value a traditional liberal arts education, for those who want it.  And the heart does soar to hear Daniel Brandes, who directs the foundation year at the University of King’s College in Halifax: “The object of a liberal education is to teach students how to think.” Robert Campbell, president of Mount Allison in Sackville, N.B., says many of the jobs our kids are going to get don’t exist at the moment. “They’ll be produced by the economy over the next five or 10 years.”

As for John Mortimer, he became a lawyer at his father’s behest and a writer by his own preference; and, said his obituary, “through rare gifts of energy, confidence, intelligence and wit he succeeded brilliantly in both.”

Teach me

By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Teaching often comes second at universities—quite literally. Professors are expected to spend only 40 per cent of their time in the classroom, consulting with students, and marking their work. The rest is spent on research and other duties. The research-intensive university produces world-class discoveries to be sure, but it also produces grumbling undergraduates. The results of this year’s student satisfaction surveys couldn’t show this more clearly. The research-intensive universities for the most part do not perform as well on these student surveys.

Schools that dare to focus on teaching have risen to the top of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Professors at teaching-focused universities like Quest, Trinity Western and King’s at Western are free to spend a majority of their time engaging with students in the classroom, the office or beyond. Considering the fact that a recent study from the University of Alberta found that the average professor is already working 56 hours per week, it’s difficult to expect them to do more. The only way they can spend more time with students is to de-emphasize research. And not all researchers make good teachers. Teaching-focused schools focus on pedagogy in the job interview, says David Sylvester, principal of King’s at Western. It’s certainly paying off for his school. Six in 10 senior-year students say they would definitely go back to King’s if they were allowed to start over, the NSSE survey found. That’s compared to only 45 per cent of students overall, and only 21 per cent of senior-year students from the University of Ottawa.

But there’s another factor affecting student satisfaction that this year’s results reveal. Small campus size matters greatly—even at research-focused schools. Students from Nipissing (pop. 4,600) and St. Francis Xavier (pop. 4,800), which both fight valiantly for research dollars, come out close to the top of the heap when students are asked by the Cana­dian University Survey Consortium if they are satisfied with their choice of university. Most schools with fewer than 5,000 students could rally more than half of their students to strongly agree that they were pleased with their decision to attend. Comparatively, only two large research-heavy schools, McGill and Waterloo, can say the same.

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Why you should let your teenager sleep in

By the editors - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 4 Comments

“The difference is like night and day.” So, perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, says retired principal Wayne Erdman of Eastern Commerce Collegiate Institute’s experiment in late high school start times. Eastern Commerce C.I., located just off Danforth Avenue east of Toronto’s Greektown, is in the middle of its second year of starting classes at 10 a.m. That’s a shockingly late hour by contemporary North American standards, and some traditionalists will never learn to like the idea. The working world that Eastern’s students are about to enter, they say, doesn’t compromise with late sleepers; it fires them. The sooner the kids learn the harsh truth, the better.

But Erdman tells the Toronto Star that the late-start concept, though not yet subject to its first full scientific analysis, looks like a hit when it comes to educational outcomes—and parents and students seem to agree. Local trustee Cathy Dandy is an aggressive advocate of research showing that there are good reasons to give adolescents a break that neither children nor adults may need; if she had gotten her way, Eastern classes would be starting as late as 11:30 a.m.

That sounds crazy, but it might be less crazy than the old way of doing things. It is starting to look as though a forward shift in sleep patterns is a natural accompaniment to sexual maturation—not just in humans, but in mammals generally; rats and monkeys, it seems, engage in their own version of what parents witness in their recalcitrant 16-year-olds. Teenagers have an ability to stay up late and sleep in that a 2004 Dutch-German study characterized as “unsaturable,” and even proposed it as a defining feature of adolescence. You’re officially an adult when you can’t stay up all night anymore.

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The sinister plot that is daycare

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 4, 2011 at 12:49 PM - 238 Comments

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, rebutting a Liberal attack yesterday.

Mr. Speaker, it is the Liberals who wanted to ensure that parents were forced to have other people raise their children. We do not believe in that.

The Liberals once pursued—and still seek—a national daycare and early learning program

The next generation

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 26 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office presently includes at least three former members of the student council at the University of Western Ontario and the student newspaper at Western has groomed some of the finest writers in Ottawa (Wells, Feschuk, Delacourt), so not only because student politics are fascinating experiments in democracy is it worth following the Gazette’s exhaustive election blogging. To wit.

The current social science president is the front runner going into the campaign because of his largest faculty on campus base and the lack of another widely-known candidate. His platform will likely be fairly safe — think Mike Tithecott’s last year — which is good for him because it gives us media types less fodder to grill him on. It’s bad for constituents (that’s you!) because they may not see much innovation or challenging ideas put forth, but no one ever remembers the platform anyway, so outside council chambers and the Gazette office the point is moot. Forgione is personable, clean-cut and prepared — at this stage he’s easily the favourite.

The hollowed halls

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 4 Comments

Eddie Keogh/Reuters

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh famously depicted Oxford in his classic novel Brideshead Revisited as a place where young people spend their days “twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches.” Six-and-a-half decades later, things in the whimsical college town are far less civilized. Oxford University students spent much of the fall term staging angry protests, gathering in town by the hundreds to demonstrate against the government. Meanwhile, at its historic rival Cambridge, a 2½-hour train ride away, students are equally fired up. After a number of boisterous marches in November, about 1,000 students staged an 11-day occupation of a university building. At issue is Britain’s massive new austerity package, which includes an 80 per cent cut to higher education teaching grants by 2012, and a potential tripling of tuition fees. The protests were “a wake-up call,” says Tom, a Cambridge Ph.D. student and one of the occupation organizers, who spoke with Maclean’s on the condition of anonymity. “The things the government are calling for seem extreme,” he says. “And extremely dangerous to education.”

Protests have taken place across Britain. But students at Oxford and Cambridge are motivated by a more pressing fear: that the new cuts will end the centuries-old reign of the institutions collectively called Oxbridge. Some are afraid the famed Oxbridge “tutorial system” is in jeopardy. Since their conception, Oxford and Cambridge have dismissed the traditional lecture system. Instead, undergrads are taught largely through one-on-one “tutorials” with professors. In between the weekly or fortnightly meetings, students work through massive reading lists, and write papers to later discuss with their tutors. “It makes the best use of bright students,” says David Palfreyman, an Oxford tutor and editor of The Oxford Tutorial. Students at the two schools work harder—10 to 15 hours a week more than average students, he says—“because [they] can’t escape in the tutorial system.” And it teaches them to think more creatively; many papers aren’t formally assessed, so students “can be a bit adventurous.”

It certainly attracts some keeners. David Barclay, an Oxford undergrad and president of the student union, says the tutorial system was one of the things that drew him to Oxford from Scotland, where he grew up. “It’s the best way of teaching,” he says. “One-on-one interaction with the best minds in the world.” At a coffee shop near the history department, Barclay recounts some particularly memorable classes, including one on 20th-century political history taught by a sitting member of Parliament. “Tutorials can be pretty scary,” he grinned. “But I love them.”

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The more things change

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, January 21, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 17 Comments

Jacob Serebrin looks at how the discussion of education policy has and hasn’t changed since Lester B. Pearson addressed the University of British Columbia in 1965. He also digs up a Canadian Press clip from the time that recounts the heckles Mr. Pearson was treated to at that speech and one earlier in the day.

Shouts of “Yankee parrot” and “go back to the U.S., Mike” greeted the prime minister as he spoke for 35 minutes almost without pause before 2,900 in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

He seemed to be replying to the hecklers when he said: “Whining anti-Americanism is not the same as vigorous Canadianism.”

Earlier, he faced good-natured needling as he spoke to about 4,000 students at the University of British Columbia.

“What’s new, pussycat?” one student shouted as Mr. Pearson was quoting statistics on university financial problems from the recent Bladen report. “Mike for the Senate,” another interjected as the 68-year-old Liberal leader finished his speech.

Good news about Canada’s education system

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 13 Comments

Canadian students have come a long way | Tannis Toohey/Toronto Star

The end of the year is a hopeful and generous time for Canadians, a time when we indulge our better instincts and tend to look on the bright side of things. How strange then, that recent good news about Canada’s education system has prompted a sudden bout of pessimism.

Last week saw the release of a massive comparison of school systems around the world. The Programme for International School Assessment (PISA) is run every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and tests 470,000 15-year-old students across 65 countries and regions in reading, math and science. Canada, once again, found itself among the world’s leaders in educational performance.

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