What Is The Purpose Of Schools?

Social engineers have bastardized the concept of the 3Rs to fulfill their own agenda and you have to wonder how much each page of Falconer's 1000 pages cost us and whether that money wouldn't have been better spent in the schools, affordable housing, homelessness, etc.

The Post editorial board: A distorted portrait of Toronto's schools

Posted: January 12, 2008, 3:36 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Filed under: Editorial

How accurate an impression of Canada would a foreigner take away if his only experience here were on a remote aboriginal reserve or in an inner-city housing project? Needless to say:Not very.

Yet a high-profile school-safety panel is offering Canadians a similarly distorted impression of Toronto's public school system. In the name of examining violence, guns, gangs, drugs and sexual assault at Toronto's 102 high schools, the panel focused closely on two schools in neighbourhoods with sky-high levels of crime, gang activity and poverty --and extrapolated from those a very bleak picture of city schools in general.

Painting an accurate picture of the average school in a middle-class area doesn't fit with what appears to be the political agenda of the majority of panellists, including chairman Julian Falconer, a human rights lawyer by trade. Their twin objectives seem to be fighting old ideological fights (discrediting the school-violence policies of the Mike Harris government, which has been out of office for nearly six years) and extracting more tax dollars from Ontario's Liberal government.

The two schools examined most closely -- C.W. Jefferys and Westview Centennial -- are both in high-crime neighbourhoods awash with single-parent households, poverty, substance abuse and gangs.

It is not hard to imagine that among C.W. Jefferys students, "12% had a gun pointed at them (or were shot at) on school property over the past two years and 14% outside of school." We'd guess that students were just as likely to be shot at while on the grounds of the local public housing unit as at school. The violence at the school is a reflection of the pathologies in the surrounding neighbourhoods and homes.

Yet the report leaves readers with the impression that the high levels of violence at Jefferys and Westview is somehow representative of the school system as a whole. The authors seem to want it both ways: Arguing that discrimination and racism are part of the problem, while also glossing in politically correct fashion over the fact that schools in primarily black areas of the city are markedly more dangerous than those elsewhere.

If that is the Falconer panel's contradictory starting point, its recommendations are doomed from the start.

We have our own problems with the existing "zero tolerance" violence policies in Toronto schools, as well as similar ones in other cities. They prevent teachers and principals from exercising their discretion about which incidents deserve punishment, which students can be salvaged, and which ones are irredeemable. Yet Mr. Falconer goes way too far in the other direction when he says things such as, "We miss the point if we believe that the road to health involves punishing or using enforcement methods to try to reengage youth. It doesn't work. We suspend in droves; it fails."

The point of punishing violent students is not to "re-engage them" -- whatever that means. It is to get them to stop being violent.

In any case, violence in schools of the type that plagues Toronto's most dangerous schools isn't really an "education" problem. When students are sexually assaulting girls in the bathroom, and bringing guns to class, that is a criminal justice matter. The Falconer report's recommendation that violent students be left in their "home schools," misses the point. Offenders should be shipped off to special schools.

The vast majority of students are not thugs. They never point a gun at a classmate, peddle drugs in the hall, join a gang or assault girls. School safety needs to be designed with them in mind, not the offenders. Keep the good students safe from the frequent offenders. And "re-engage" the violent cohort only if and when they reform their violent tendencies.

Schools are places to learn, not to launch sentimental social experiments conceived by politically correct human rights luminaries.