My name is Kerry Yang and I’m an IB student in Sudbury, Ontario. I’ve always been a straight-A student; the teacher’s pet; the overachiever; the know-it-all, the person who does the entire group project. With the influence of my parents as a young child, I learned habits and developed expectations that led to my academic success. Education is extremely important in my family, as it is what allowed my parents to break the cycle of poverty and start a new and better life. However, flaws in the current Ontario education system are like holes in a water pitcher, too much falls through the cracks and retention is limited. As a student who recognizes fundamental issues in our education system, I hope the path to finding a solution begins with educating people about the problems. In this post, I will be uncovering problems related to Ontario’s education system that impairs student success.
Lack of Funding and Financial Interests over Student Success
Throughout quarantine, many parents have realized teachers are not paid nearly as much as they should be. The lack of funding (such as for teachers) and financial interests are fundamental issues in Ontario’s education system. While an extensive amount of research has shown the negative effects of early school start times and lack of sleep in high school students, many school boards sacrifice student success to save money on bussing. Teens aged 13-18 are recommended to have 8-10 hours of sleep each night, but 50% of Canadian teens sleep only 6.5-7.5 hours a night. The lack of enough sleep is partially due to the delayed release of melatonin in teenage brains and also increased screen times that impact the ability to sleep. It’s proven that student success is more evident when a student sleeps long enough to be able to concentrate in class and retain the things they’ve learned. In the one Northwestern-Ontario school board who decided to push the school start-time back an hour, they observed decreased drop-out rates and increased attendance rates. With this research, other Ontarian school boards should be inclined to delay school start times to allow students enough time to get adequate sleep. However, in the interest of saving money in terms of bussing, many high schools will start classes as early as 8 am to be able to use the same busses for elementary school rounds. Whether it’s the lack of funding to afford two rounds of bussing or school board’s financial interests over student success, students’ lack of sleep is a costly price to pay.
Standardized Testing
All high school students understand the stress of exams or other forms of standardized testing. But are these assessments actually contributing to student learning? While this style of testing is effective in some cases, it is not always the best option to evaluate student learning. When students are preparing for standardized tests like exams, they use memorization techniques to retain information. This poses a disadvantage to students who struggle with memorization and doesn’t accurately reflect what certain students have learned. After testings, students no longer need to retain the memorized information and will naturally unlearn the content over time. In content-heavy courses like sciences, standardized testing causes lots of stress and can severely affect mental health. However, there are alternative testing methods that are more effective to evaluate student learnings. For example, in science classes, students would benefit more from conducting a research project over the semester than writing a lengthy exam. Research is also a better representative of real-world usage of science and students could choose what they want to learn about and explore something they are interested in. Students would learn the scientific process and could even take their project to science fairs to develop presentation skills. This method of learning would be much more effective than standardized testing and would promote student research and innovation.
Course Content
Many course curriculums in the Ontario education system are in desperate need of revision and change to adapt to modern classrooms. As students, we always ask “Why do we need to know this?”. When I was learning three different ways to farm or how to write a haiku, I was definitely asking when I would need to apply these skills in real life. And the reality is we don’t actually need many of the skills we are taught in school but many of them develop our critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Although some of the things we learn are important, the education system needs to better adapt to today’s world and scrap irrelevant course content. In the sex-ed curriculum, significant changes were made in 2019 for all grade levels. However, the government decided to allow parents to opt-out of certain topics in sex-ed, effectively taking one step forward and two steps back. Where students were previously learning some important parts of sex-ed, now some students would not learn any. Students should also be taught about taxes as many high school students work part-time jobs and are completely unaware of how to file income taxes. Other important topics include financial literacy, sustainable living, mental wellbeing, oppression, privilege, and racism.
An important neglected topic is racism and residential schools in Canada. Growing up in Thunder Bay, Ontario where we have the largest population of indigenous peoples in Ontario and was a past location of a residential school, racial oppression was hardly mentioned from JK to grade 7. As one of the only Asian students in my grade and the entire school, I never knew certain insults and aggressions from classmates were racist until I was in middle school. We were never taught what racism was and teachers neglected to acknowledge racist behaviours such as classmates mocking my eyes, nose, skin colour, and offensive name-calling. I grew up thinking these behaviours were acceptable and I was left with a lack of confidence and shattered self-esteem. For my entire childhood, I was afraid to do poorly at school and disappoint my parents and terrified to do well and be put in the know-it-all or teacher’s pet stereotype. Students should never have to think they need to sacrifice their education for respect or social status which is something I wish I knew growing up. While I’ve learned that my success is important and more powerful than those who use it against me, I still suffer from microaggressions at school. Classmates mock my skin colour, make jokes about eating certain animals, and call me corona-related names. Even teachers show racist behaviours by calling me the names of previous Asian students instead of putting in the effort to learning my name after teaching me for years. Additionally, in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement, I realized I never learnt anything about black history or black racism at school and the most educational thing I’ve seen was 13th on Netflix. Instead of the irrelevant course content put together decades ago, the Ontario curriculum could incorporate content on oppression and privilege for students to educate themselves on racism. While our education system is willing to teach us unimportant skills that serve us no purpose after school, they are unwilling to adapt to modern times and change curriculums to include important issues.
Rule Enforcement
While high school students don’t have to stand in single-file lines to go to lunch, they have different rules like dress codes, no smoking, and appropriate technology use. Rules are always important to regulate behaviour and ensure safe learning, but rule enforcement in the education system is flawed. At my school, one of the most enforced policies is the dress code which resembles the same code as most Ontario schools. Girls are expected to cover stomachs, shoulders, and thighs, and boys are expected to keep their shirts on. During the warmer months of school, many of my female classmates would be called out in the class or halls for showing too much skin and sent home to change. While schools defend dress codes by claiming they want to ensure modesty and optimal learning environments, the reality of dress codes is that they are inherently sexist. By shaming a female student’s body because she is “distracting and disrupting the optimal learning environment”, schools are treating women as sexual objects. Instead of teaching girls to be ashamed of their bodies and cover-up so the boys can concentrate, boys should be taught to treat girls with respect. The wearer should not be blamed for the onlooker’s perceptions.
With the recent rise of teen vaping, my school saw students as young as 12 years old using vapes. To combat the smoke-filled washrooms and lingering mango vape flavours in the halls, school administration reminded students of the Smoke-Free Ontario Act that would allow suspensions and fines for vaping. My school also removed doors from our washrooms to be able to better detect vaping which turned out to be ineffective and an invasion on students' privacy. Students continued using vapes in washrooms, outside, and even in class which actually affected other students’ education, but was not given disciplinary action. When the cellphone ban came into place, we were reminded of the consequences of inappropriate use of our phones, but once again saw no disciplinary action for not following those rules. In some of my classes, teachers would watch students play games and go on social media while teaching lessons. This would come back to harm students during exam season and they had to relearn the entire course on their own to compensate for being distracted in class. Schools should be enforcing rules that promote positive learning environments that make students feel safe instead of sexualizing and body-shaming girls.
While these are problems I’ve noticed at the schools I’ve attended, I recognize some of these fundamental issues wouldn’t apply to every school and school board in Ontario. Recognizing problems that affect our education is extremely important for improving the education system and there are many other problems I may not have mentioned. If you wanted to share a personal story or struggle with your education, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @kerryyyang or through the Youth Voices Ontario website.
Comments