One of the things that makes me so frustrated about all this education talk is that covid is giving us a perfect opportunity to re-imagine the whole construct of public education, to re-shape our public schools, and to create a system of schooling that works for all students.

Instead, the narrative amongst almost everyone — right, left, centre — is about finding ways to return to the status quo. The model of public school that exists in Canada today was created around the same time as the industrial revolution.

We were trying to train people to effectively run assembly lines, and we created our schools as assembly lines, where everyone was expected to learn the same thing, at the same time, on the same day, in the same way.

Now, those assembly line systems of education are being asked to educate students to be forward thinkers, to take risks, to be flexible in their learning and thinking, to teach learners who we are increasingly learning are not the same cookie cutter students.

And in trying to do all these things, teachers are being pushed to their breaking points because we know that every student is different, and every student will learn in different ways. So we break teachers backs with IPPs for all students, reports and assessments...

There has to be a better way to do things.

And covid came along and we said, “how do we get back to the thing that wasn’t working for a lot of kids?”

I really wished we’d asked “how can we build a new system that works for the future” instead.