I think this not only a good question in and of itself, but when we examine from where it came and from whom it spewed, it tells us a volumes about our society’s attitudes toward education.

Now diehard Canadians will say Canadian society is different and in some ways we most diffidently are, but when it comes to most things, education included, Canadians mainly follow the American lead. I experienced this firsthand during my 13 years teaching in the County of Parkland. It always amazed me how our County and Province would try new methods and programs that had already been proved ineffective in California.

To answer the question “Is are children learnin’?”, one first has to answer the question what is the purpose education? My Webster dictionary says, “The action or process of educating or being educated.” That definition seems to be lacking. I am sure we can find many long-winded explanations containing solid quantifiable statistics proving a purpose but in the end the purpose of education is as it has always been. The purpose of education is to learn how to learn. My parents knew this as did theirs as did even as far back as the Greeks, this was known.

So if being educated is having the skill or ability to learn, how should one go about testing to see if indeed our children are learning to learn? Are our educators testing for this? I know they have lots of statistics proving which schools and teachers are most proficient at completing departmental tests. But from my experience as a teacher and parent, these tests just prove that some students can regurgitate facts and theorems better than others. These statistics give our educational administrations tons of solid proof that indeed we have succeeded in educating our children, but I then remember Mark Twain’s quote, “There are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies and statistics.”

So how does one go about teaching students how to learn? Well it’s something all educators know. Put more good dedicated teachers in front of smaller numbers of students and the quality of education goes up dramatically. Instead of the 36 grade three students we now have in one of our local classrooms we should have no more than 15. By reducing class sizes it allows the teachers to let their passion for learning to rub off on the students. If the teachers are allowed to show their passion for knowledge and learning students cannot help but absorb this and learn.

But our society does not do this. The attitude of today’s society toward the value of education is severely diminished. The title of this post is a quintessential example. We live in a society where education is valued so little that we have elected the man responsible for the title not once but twice to the most powerful political office in the world.

So if society’s actions can be the true judge as to whether we are educating our children rather than the statistics provided by test taking, I think it is possible that we need to seriously rethink how we go about educating our children.