I once drafted a letter for Stephen Harper on the quality of education in Canada. It came out pretty bad, but it did make me reflect on the state of our high schools and universities. Public high schools – yes, where most children go, except for in Montreal – is lacking. While I went to a tiny institution, the Gulf Islands Secondary School, and had mostly excellent and attentive teachers along with small class sizes, the subject matter was ancient and not very stimulating. This History 12 course (so, the highest history course taught at the school) took on a solely factual approach. We weren’t ever asked to engage or challenge the material – two mindsets I think should be prerequisites for university. Now, I am not saying that most students thought like this, but I was getting full marks for doing work on-time, spell checking in Word, and attending classes. Nothing more. I was not being graded for my ability to tackle and challenge authority.

It’s a bit of an intractable issue. After all, we all want Canadian youth to be university educated. Not only does this boost our own country’s economy, but it generally leads towards a much healthier environment for future generations. Going to university (or a technical school) is an important part in the formation of adulthood. It gives you self-confidence and the ability to reflect and critically analyze all aspects of life. Basically, it gives people a chance to see the world through a different light and become more tolerant of each other. On the flip side, though, as this article argues, the quality of our education and the demands of our studies are eroded. We now sit in university classrooms – with huge class sizes – and simply absorb what the professor spouts off. His or her questions are usually left unanswered, debates are rarely opened. While I believe it is my responsibility to engage with my professor and students, I also think I came ill-prepared. By the time I arrived at university I was still hesitant to talk in class, approach my professor after class or even open a strong debate with a fellow-student over coffee. I saw university as something you just get through and over with. Moreover, a majority of my peers brought the same attitude, fostering anything but engagement.

I know this is not a universal approach to the schooling system. But I must agree that because our high school educations have often been slack, we tend to view university in a lazy light. It’s an obstacle on the way to so-called ‘adulthood’ and not so much about opening doors and learning to think differently. Recently, I told my little sister it really did not matter where she went to school in Canada. After all, most class sizes are the same, teachers have similar credentials, and few programs have a great reputation. While this is good (since it leads to less intellectual polarization than in the US and the UK), it also reflects on how I saw university: get through it and be self-motivated by yourself, if at all.

Anyways, this short rant is basically a highlight to this article. When I started In Their Shoes a few years ago, I was constantly thinking about what we could have learned in school should our teachers have asked us to research on the war in Northern Uganda and fundraise for HIV/AIDS. Or, should we have engaged with the fundamental economic principles of our country or scrutinized our succession of uncharismatic and ill-fated Prime Ministers. Once again, this is my perspective, however, considering myself a fairly average high school student, I fear this was the majority’s experience.

Most families say they want to send their kids to university. The high schools are under tremendous pressure to deliver the marks that will get them in. Meantime, universities need bodies. Bodies bring in tuition, and tuition covers nearly half of a university’s operating costs. And once the bodies are in the door, there’s a big incentive to retain them. “If the English department, for example, failed all students who should be failed, it would be cutting itself off at the knees,” says sociology professor James Côté, co-author of the eye-opening book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis.

Like I said, an intractable situation. I was recently talking to a history student who was livid that her professors were such hard markers. Against other students in different faculties she was really struggling to keep her GPA up. The chance of her getting into graduate schools – when competing against sociology and anthropology majors for example – was severely diminished. Her shot at funding was equally restricted. At the same time, her professors were undoubtedly being fair markers, ensuring that she was equally challenged by the material and the need to keep improving. On a side-note, I think our marking system has also spurred higher usage of drugs like Ritalin. I know many-a university students who have used this type of adrenaline kick to get through their five final exams and ten papers. Not having been prepared for this type of workload back in the day, faced with the need to get As to have a so-called ‘future’, pushed them over the edge.

And, lastly, I am fairly confident this can be blamed on the government (as well as our own apathetic selves):

Universities typically point the finger at high schools for turning out lousy graduates. But they’re pointing in the wrong direction. As one assistant high-school principal explained on Cross-Country Checkup, the CBC’s national phone-in show, last Sunday, “We get our marching orders and our mandate from the provincial government. We are judged by our completion and graduation rates. That’s what governs us, not what universities want.”

In order to boost their high-school graduation rates, many provinces have mandated a no-fail approach. Nowhere is this policy more entrenched than Ontario, where schools are under intense pressure to get their numbers up. “Our hands are tied,” said another caller, an Ottawa high-school teacher. “The government does not allow you now to give zeroes for work not done. If you give a kid 10 assignments and he does three, you can’t give him a zero for the other ones. The government stance is that this is a behavioural problem, and you need to give them another chance to hand it in. If a student cheats on a major exam, you can’t give them zero. The government doesn’t tell you what to do the second time he cheats.”

Once again, many people would argue that many students have a hard time learning in a certain classroom set-up. Some kids find passion in hands on, creative work. While I don’t want to see our graduation rates drop – I would rather have a crappy school system than a doubling in teenage pregnancies – could we work within a system that offers different types of schooling that focus on different types of learning? Students would still be permitted to get good grades and attend university, provided they engaged the work material, developed a certain passion and were shown alternatives to the university-graduate school structure. I am not sure how this would work, but I do recall that most schooling systems are standardized around one-type of learning that fails to, once again, engage the average student. For a kid with attention deficit disorder or a low-self esteem, sitting in a class and being ragged on my a teacher for eight hours a day is a sure failure for the child and for our ‘elite university institutions.’

Lastly, I also think we should start including practical work into the Grade Point Average (GPA). A student who sits in class and listens to lecture after lecture on the sociology of poverty should not be competing against a student who attends lectures and volunteers at the local food bank. Hands-on learning forces students to both consider the fabricated ivory tower world with the applied factors. It can only make us better people.