Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
A few readers of my previous blog have wondered if I have overstated the importance of public schools to Canadian social cohesion. I do not think I have. Here is why.
People learn who they are, to whom they are related, and the power they have from the institutions, symbols, and myths they are told. Families, of course, are the first and influential context for such learning. Peers are influential, increasingly so as youngsters grow older.
Families interpret the world for the young, communicating the possibilities open to them and the limits on those possibilities. Families tell the young what they can and cannot do based upon their experience. Most parents encourage their children to aspire beyond the limits the parents faced and want their children to have the advantages the parents did not have. “You can be anything you set your mind on” is a common message to our children.
Families are tribal. They also draw the lines between family members and those outside the family. Tribalism, defence of the extended family, is a genetically programmed response designed for its protection. For most of human history, the tribal mechanism ensured survival in socially hostile environments. But tribalism has its downside, too. In a socially diverse society, the admonishment “Don’t play with kids like that” and the injunction to “Stick with your own kind” establish the basis for discrimination and racism.
Religion, media, and politics are essential parts of society, but they too are tribal. They divide us along philosophical lines. The optimist in me would like to believe that although we may differ philosophically, those differences are equivalent pathways in the pursuit of common human needs and in accordance with similar ethical principles. Increasingly hostile expressions of difference in recent years has made me more pessimistic.
I would like to think that most of us want Canada to be a more socially cohesive and egalitarian society. We want our children to have a sense of who they are as Canadians based upon shared values and want them to live in a society where the similarities among us outweigh the differences, but one in which the differences are respected.
Those aspirations cannot be realized without an institution dedicated to helping us to transcend our tribalism to work together. The only institution I know that has the promise of doing that is the public school. You will no doubt have noticed that I used the word promise. While I think public schools do help us transcend our tribalism, they are imperfect – so the promise is unfulfilled.
When I think about the history of Canadian public schooling, I see improvement. The overt appeals to xenophobia that were once common (“our Anglo-Saxon heritage”) and the open denigration of Indigenous peoples – are diminished. Diminished, but not extinguished. Vestiges of privilege and discrimination are baked into the institution. Canada and its institutions are still settler-dominated.
I am cautiously optimistic that the vestiges of privilege and discrimination can be eliminated. I am not naïve, however. Eliminating them will require significant, conscious, and persistent effort. Because most of our children are congregated in schools at a time in their lives that tribalism is not so firmly ‘baked in’, I think that public schooling is the only institution capable of communicating the values I hope that we share.
Schools address the same tension between individual rights and the needs of the collective that are present in the larger society. The tension is evident in the relationship between ‘personalized learning’ that tries to ensure common outcomes, between competitive and cooperative learning models, and in the attempt to ensure excellence and equity. We cannot and should not sidestep these tensions but work to prevent one set of values from eclipsing the other.
If public schools cannot help to create a socially cohesive society, who or what can?