Right to Read

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) recently released the results of its inquiry into human rights issues affecting students with disabilities titled Right to Read. The report begins with a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Moore v. British Columbia, in which the Court held that Jeffrey Moore, a student with dyslexia, was entitled to supports that he required to learn to read.  

The Court’s decision in Moore held that the Province of British Columbia, in asserting that the purpose of education is to ensure that “all learners . . . develop their individual potential and . . . acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy, democratic and pluralistic society and a prosperous and sustainable economy,” acknowledged that children are entitled to an education necessary to make such a contribution, including the right to read.  

The focus of the OHRC report is upon the lack of attention to “word-level reading and the associated early reading skills that are a foundation for good reading comprehension.” It asserts that, in failing to heed the accumulated, multi-disciplinary evidence about effective reading instruction, Ontario is systematically failing the students for whom it is responsible. The failure has an especially profound impact on children from marginalized or human rights code protected groups.  

The OHRC report takes a comprehensive view of language arts instruction. It argues in favour of robust, evidence-based phonics programs but only as one essential part of a broader language arts program that includes “story telling, book reading, drama, and text analysis” as well as “evidence-based direct, explicit instruction for spelling and writing.”  

Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Minister of Education said the province will change its curriculum to align with “scientific, evidence-based approaches that emphasize direct, explicit and systematic instruction.” It is encouraging to see education policy and practice reflect the accumulated evidence. But I worry that, in the highly politicized environment in which we all seem to live, that there will be reflexive opposition to Lecce’s statement and resistance to the changes that will be introduced. I hope my worries are unfounded. It would be refreshing to find that, having considered the OHRC’s report and the underlying evidence, educators would see the merit in what is being recommended.  

I am hopeful that change comes without further resort to human rights inquiries, cases, and the litigation that often ensues. I am optimistic that people can place evidence above ideology.  

The report brings much needed attention to students affected by dyslexia. The kind of professional support teachers will need to help learn how to best assist these students' learning is not going to be a casual, one-day training session.  It's going to take a lot of on-going practice and constructive feedback from skilled teachers.  

I also hope that Minister Lecce realizes that significant resources will be required to support teachers who need assistance in making the changes necessary to bring their practice in line with the evidence. One of the resources at the Minister’s disposal are the many teachers who have used evidence-based phonics programs and direct, explicit instruction as part of their language arts programs.

Indigenously focused course requirement long overdue

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Among the stated purposes of public (state supported) school systems is the development of educated citizens who possess the disposition to active citizenship. It is worth contemplating what it means to be an educated citizen or to be disposed to active citizenship.  

You cannot exercise your obligations and rights as citizens if you do not know what those rights and obligations are. The behaviour and claims of members of the trucker convey clearly demonstrated that they failed to grasp both. The rights and responsibilities citizens enjoy are part of the social contract between citizens and their nation. However, knowing rights and responsibilities is not sufficient to being considered an educated citizen. It is important to know how the Canadian social contract came to be and how it has evolved.  

Educated citizens understand how and why the rights and responsibilities of their citizenship developed and evolved. I have lamented in several blogs the absence of the subject of Citizenship from British Columbia’s curriculum and the neglect of that subject generally.  

The Government of British Columbia announced that, beginning in 2023-2024, the education program of students in British Columbia must include coursework with an Indigenous focus. I hope that I am not being overly optimistic that this requirement is recognition that educated citizens cannot be ignorant of the factors that have shaped the development of one’s nation.   

Canadians who are ignorant of those factors would not know or understand why they enjoy language or mobility rights or the right to equality before the law and the equal protection and benefit of the law. They would not know that the rights and freedoms granted to Aboriginal people of Canada by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 cannot be revoked or diminished by the Charter of Rights. Nor would they know that the Charter requires that it be interpreted in a manner consistent with “the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”   

The Honourable Jennifer Whiteside, Minister of Education, acknowledged that the requirement that students’ education programs must include an Indigenously focused course beginning in 2023-2024 addressed one of the knowledge gaps in the British Columbia curriculum. In essence, the Minister understands that citizens who do not understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and knowledges of Indigenous people are less well educated than those who do because those experiences, cultures, histories, and knowledges are part of the history of all Canadians.  

I will be disappointed if the requirement for the inclusion of an Indigenously focused course is challenged in the way that efforts to give an honest account of the part that slavery played, and racism continues to play, in the United States is being challenged. That challenge will eventually fail because students in the United States seek the truth about their history.  

Canadian students also seek the truth about the history and development of Canada.  

I am optimistic that the BC requirement will be embraced as a first step in a much-needed social studies curriculum revision because citizens who are knowledgeable in values, histories, cultures, rights, and responsibilities that distinguish Canadians from the citizens of other countries are better equipped to participate in effective, active citizenship.

I hope your Spring break provides the rest and relaxation you deserve. This blog will resume on March 30th. 

Who needs school?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce is granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I’ve thought about this question often. A new year’s resolution prompted me to ask the question again. I had resolved to organize the zillions of photographs I’ve taken since I first acquired a digital camera. I needed a free, desk-top program with artificial intelligence capability. I did not want to use a cloud-based system where commercial providers use my photographs to train their algorithms and add to their repository of my personal information. I found what I was looking for. I found written and video material to learn how the software worked. There was a user group (they are called communities these days) where I could post questions and receive help in the form of crowd-sourced replies.

The experience reminded me of the many times I use the internet to access information and develop skills. I’ve had many successes and one monumental failure. My culinary abilities, such as they are, were honed with recipes from the internet. A couple of weeks ago, I learned how to replace a water filter. I cannot recall the last time I was unable to find something I wanted to know or be able to do. If information is freely available online, who needs school anyway?” 

There are some parents who are determined to eviscerate or at least control the substance of schooling and its important contribution to critical thought. In the US they are pursuing legislation to ban materials and teaching of topics that might cause psychological discomfort to students. The term “psychological discomfort” is code for anything with which the parents disagree.  

If passed, legislation such as the bill to which I referred above would make teaching about sexual orientation / gender-identity, racism, or any other contested topic perilous for teachers, schools, and school systems. If such legislation were to pass in British Columbia, the curriculum would require revisions to remove such competencies as “make reasoned ethical judgments about actions in the past and present, and assess appropriate ways to remember and respond.”  

Students cannot learn to make reasoned ethical judgments from the internet. It is too easy to find dogma and ideology -- the enemies of reasoned judgment – on the internet. If dogma and ideology replace reasoned judgment, school becomes unnecessary because one of the purposes of schooling is to acquire the values that make us human (empathy, compassion, etc.) and enable us to distinguish right from wrong.  

Schooling tries to cultivate the ideas that other people are no more or less important than we are and that our claims will be considered impartially along with the claims of others. This process often causes disequilibrium and discomfort when applied to non-trivial issues. For example:  

·        How could pious people who advocate for the rights of people enslave other human beings?

·        Are there justifiable reasons for permitting children to be taken from the parents and denied the opportunity to speak their own language?

·        Does my freedom allow me to behave in ways that cause harm to others?

·        Are there circumstances that justify taking the lives of others?

·        Was the trucker blockade in Ottawa an urgent, temporary, and critical situation that seriously endangered the health and safety of Canadians or that seriously threatened the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada?

·        How should a society balance the rights of individuals with the needs of the collective?

These are the kind of questions likely to cause discomfort. Ensuing discussion might include: “Would you change places with: the person who was enslaved? the child removed from her family? the person who was harmed? the person whose life was taken?” Other discomforting questions include: “How are you defining [freedom or some other key term]?”  “What is your evidence for that claim?” “Is what you just said consistent with what you said earlier?”  

If we do not want our children and grandchildren to learn what is required to make ethical judgments, we can leave their education to the internet. To put it another way, if we are content to live in a world governed by dogma and ideology, schooling as we know it is unnecessary. Discomfort is an inevitable by-product of the school’s effort to expose children and youth to an environment that is larger, more complex, less cohesive, and more diverse than their families.