When a tornado recently struck Joplin. Missouri, it wiped out the entire elementary and secondary education schools.
Yet with a dedicated community, the children reported to school within a couple of weeks as alternative facilities and the donations of the most unexpected donors restored the continuity of progress for the children.
It is an example of people responding to a basic need: To continue the progression of our children to grow comfortably through education.
Let me start my saying that teachers are the honourable profession.
They are the handmaidens of the growth of knowledge that our children must profess to succeed in our society.
Unfortunately, teachers have become powerless to deal with basic behavioural problems in the classroom. This is because our litigious society has shut down the authority of the teacher in the classroom.
In Ontario, our teachers are protected by union agreements that virtuously protect the less proficient portion of the teacher cadre. There is little consequence once a teacher is confirmed in a permanent job.
Teachers are not able to touch a student – be they four years old or 18 – for purposes of discipline. It does not take long for students, particularly those in high school to recognize they can disrupt classroom instruction and diminish those students who want to learn and are prevented by this juvenile obstructionism.
The peer group pressure without interface with the teachers and parents creates a low-grade atmosphere of failure and lack of productive accomplishment.
The Ontario Ministry of Education, populated by education theorists, and influenced by the powerful teacher’s unions, perpetuates a system that has not provided universal education opportunities to those in urban centres. In areas where poverty, single families and children without fathers exist, the present system fails to match the same opportunities available in more affluent communities.
Teachers are the front line of education. It is too easy to for teachers to shuffle off their responsibilities to educate each child because of a lack of parental control or money.
Without discipline, there is no education in the classroom only on the streets.
Guelph Speaks 