Response to an Educator-Friend about a Recent Ed Article

With the ‘brave new’ approach, there will be no sameness of relatively common curriculum throughout a province or, generally, across Canada. There will be no commonly agreed-upon subject matter; instead, a bunch of worksheets and multiple-choice tests with all the limitations that implies.

There is a real illusion in this new approach that kids are smart, really learning, and can teach themselves how to reflect, focus, think, organize, and crap-detect. I don’t imagine all the ads and corporation sponsorships will maintain neutrality of info and info delivery.

The worksheet approach is basically a lazy, money-influenced sellout to rigid, dumbed-down ‘learning’, not autonomous, critical-thinking, authentic learning. (Which fits the times in which the majority can’t/don’t think, or want to.

True, teachers are or will become mere techs, facilitators of machines working. I don’t imagine students will be interested in going beyond the ‘facts’ they learn online. Critical thinking is potentially dead-in-the-water for Social and ELA. Other humanities subjects need not be taught; same as at u these daze.

Already there has been a serious decline in educational/classroom conversation/s. Too many languages, cultures; each one basically ethno-centered. Great relativism has crept in and authority is, likewise, dead-in-the-water. Standards? An olde school big joke.

AB PCs are already cutting ed. budgets, letting schools rot or packin’ ’em in like Orwellian rats. This is precisely what they want. Less money spent on building, maintenance, and teacher salaries. Letting schools nickel-and-dime for more technology in order to survive. Schools shall finally/soon close and give way to a handful of regional tech centres with low-paid techs (who know zilch) waiting to ‘service’ any kids who want to see a live human adult.

Significant live, in-person-presence/informed subject-matter experts will go the way of the dinosaurs. Some kids will miss the olde-style teachers and characters (c.f., Isaac Asimov’s “The Fun They Had”), but it’ll be way too late.

Thus, we are down to the obvious small minority of significantly-informed, deeper adults who actually know something about learning, critical thinking, teaching-learning methods, and the actual world, in order to facilitate kids’ learning at home, be they parents (good luck finding more than 15% of available, interested parents) or some grandparents.

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