QUALITY EDUCATION NETWORK HERE SOON  

Canadian parents of school-age children, usually extremely tolerant of even the unacceptable, are starting to wake up to what is happening, and not happening, to their kids. The picture isn't pretty. Unless you want children living at home until they are 35 and still unable to learn a living, read on. It's your school taxes that are paying for this authorized brain damage.

A general awareness has been developing during the past decade that the school system, which allowed most of us over 40 to make a decent living, hasn't been doing the same for the present and previous one or two generations. Like most revolutions this one has been started by one very unhappy person, in this case a young Ontario mother named Barbara Smith. She couldn't comprehend a report card that said her son was achieving straight A's, when he couldn't even spell "hole". Since its founding last January QEN (Quality Education Network) has grown into an effective organization of 1,000 angry parents and teachers who are, as the Globe & Mail says " ... hell-bent on school reform."

QEN has recently issued an explosive report making such diplomatic statements as Ontario "... it can safely be suggested that the educational system in Ontario may be the worst in the developed world." Another, I particularly like, as I have been saying the same thing for two decades, is "Schools have been running for thousands of years. Why don't we know what we are doing?"

QEN also hits hard at academic jargon that hides student and teacher ignorance from lay-taxpayers (and that's an oxymoron because taxpayers are the experts in paying taxes). QEN feels that coverups "deceived (the) parents and perhaps the educators themselves into believing that something worthwhile was going on. Consequence: this continual use of deceptive terminology has helped mask the dreadful deterioration of our educational system over the years."

One of the best things about this report, which proves it was not prepared by a government committee, is that it was completed in one month and didn't cost taxpayers a penny. QEN admits it was easy, because everyone agreed on what was wrong.

The QEN report covers meaningless report cards, failure of "integration", dilution of basic core curriculum, the curse of ineffective and weak administrators and the erosion of discipline. There has to be a respect for the learning environment and kids should not be allowed to destroy it.

QEN says "Listen to the people, not the experts". Experts have been running the schools system for at least the past 30 years and that's when the slide started. Bring back more homework and compress Ontario's 13 years of schooling into 12 and use the vast savings to help repair the system. After all Japan is doing twice the job at less than half of the cost per capita in Canada. No wonder kids here don't clean up their rooms, they are used to a janitor at the school doing it. Maybe we should get rid of the janitors and have the kids keep the schools clean, under teachers supervision. That's what's done in Japan.

"Some parents may have to be reintroduced to the concepts of parental responsibility", is another pertinent comment in the QEN report. Another: "The present system is such that some teachers can perform incompetently for their entire careers without any advice or reprimand from the school's administrators." Another touchy point is about it now being too late, even with remedial programs to help: "those students have been literally been cheated out of an education by the very system designed to educate them." Watch that comment being used in the some future legal test case when a student and/or his or her parents sue teachers and school boards for "brain damage" just as they are being sued today for physical and sexual abuse.

What should happen to poorly-behaved students is another section for controversy.

My comments? In Chicago's public education system, which I would suggest, certainly in urban core areas, is even worse than Ontario's, up to 70 percent of all the teachers who have children, send their own kids to a private school.

If you are really interested in your kids education get this report!

More Information: Barbara Smith, President, QEN, P.O. Box 64567, Unionville, Ontario L3R 0M9. Phone: 416/471-6491. Enclose $3 for copy of the report.

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