This article was originally published in the Toronto Sun.
By Daniel Dorman, May 17, 2024
Ontario’s education minister recently announced that schools are going to limit cellphone use and vaping in classrooms.
I found the announcement confusing. It’s news to me that they allowed students to vape during class in the first place, and cellphone use was very restricted when I was in school (which wasn’t that long ago). Still, I think it’s a positive move — I don’t know anyone who needs a study to tell them cellphones are rotting our brains, distracting us constantly and destroying our capacity for social interaction. We all have phones, and we all know they are eating us alive. Vapes seem obviously counterproductive to a classroom.
Yet, something about the effort is off-putting — it feels a little bit like painting over a rusty car or finishing a basement with a cracked foundation. Public schools need a heck of a lot more than a ban on obviously unhelpful behaviours.
From my own experience, the worst thing about public education is its complete failure to educate.
A self-evident, barebones definition of an educated person is that an educated person should be able to participate in a conversation in the areas in which they have supposedly been educated. The educated person has at least a cursory knowledge of the general history of ideas which shape the world around them, the great conversation as some have called it, and is able to express opinions informed by that conversation.
My non-education in public school in Ontario did the opposite. When I was in Grade 10, I did an independent study on Plato’s “Metaphysics” by randomly selecting an old book in the library. (It seemed like a complicated enough subject that it could get me a good grade). I pronounced it ‘Plateau’s metaphysics’ because in the entire first decade of my ‘education’ I had never heard any reference to the founding thinker of Western philosophy and political thought. My teacher tentatively corrected me, “I think it is Play-toe.”
Mathematician and logician Alfred North Whitehead famously said, “All of Western Philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.” My public education introduced me to, at best, footnotes of footnotes of Plato.
In History class, I was sparsely introduced to the individuals whose visionary wisdom founded Canada. In English, we read Shakespeare because that’s-what-you-do-in-school, but I got the sense most of my teachers quietly agreed with our juvenile groans of boredom and had little idea of why Shakespeare deserves our attention.
I knew almost nothing of the great conversation. I got the strong impression that the humanities (philosophy, literature and history) were silly, subjective and trivial, reserved for eccentrics who couldn’t hack it in the hard sciences or for those obsessed with activist identity politics.
I graduated from public school ignorant to the ways that big ideas were working themselves out in the cultural debates of my day, ignorant to the philosophical presuppositions which ground the democratic society of which I was somehow supposed to become a productive part.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know. My public ‘education’ was the opposite of a liberal education. It enslaved me in ignorance by giving me the impression there wasn’t much out there.
A good friend of mine was recently a teaching assistant for a first year course at a major Canadian university. He tells the story of a student who didn’t understand a question because it mentioned two World Wars. The student, who graduated with a high enough average to get into university, thought there was only one World War.
I don’t generally blame my teachers for my non-education. I had some passionate teachers who desired the best for me and went the proverbial extra mile in many ways, but they taught from an absurdly vapid curriculum, and some of them may never have had the privilege to explore the ‘great conversation’ themselves.
We need a reset. We need a new or drastically revised curriculum. We need to reassert the value of the humanities, studied without the perversions of critical theory and identity politics, as the basis of civic education that leads to an informed and capable citizenry. We need standards, and we need to be okay with people failing if they don’t meet those standards.
We need a lot more than a cell phone and vape ban. We need a commitment to true education in education.
Daniel Dorman is a contributor to Young Voices and the director of communications at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
