My son chose public school. I
worried
With what mixed emotions I hear about
other people's children, and their time at private schools -- the rowing
teams, the elaborate production of West Side Story, the inspired (and
well-paid) teacher who turned around a math-phobic daughter. Lucky them.
Part of me resents these families for deserting our public school system,
and another part, a quite sizeable one, still feels a pang. What did our
son, a public school boy all the way, miss out on?
Private school was never seriously on our
agenda (although it was always a little voice nagging away at the back of my
mind, about the Road Not Taken). The most important reason for our
non-decision was the fact our son did not ever want to go to a private
school. (Inner voice: "But you don't know what you're saying no
to.") His sense of indignation at social inequities and the gap between
rich and poor was running at its highest pitch around the age of 13, when
the choice of high schools came around. It just didn't make sense to him,
growing up in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in North America, to learn
about the world in an environment that would be mostly white, moneyed, and
possibly single-gender too. His father, a graduate of Upper Canada College,
agreed with him on this. ("But private schools are trying to be more
diverse now.") Money was also an issue, as it is with most people. With
two writer-parents, private school would have been a stretch -- doable, but
a stretch. As for me, I harboured fantasies of the sort of public school
experience I grew up with -- the smallish neighbourhood institution where
you lucked into one or two outstanding teachers, walked home with your
friends and never dreamed of changing schools. Call me pre-millennial, but I
still believe in public education.
Well, those days are gone. Four years of
pummelling by the Harris government, with budget bloodshed and curriculum
chaos, have left the public system in Ontario almost unrecognizable.
High-school students now migrate restlessly from big academic schools to
small alternative ones, and back again, looking for something that no longer
exists. Our son went through three high schools, and most of his friends
moved at least once, looking for the right fit. But he is 18 now, doing well
in his first year of arts and science at McGill -- not an easy school to get
into. It was the public system, even battered and on the ropes, with its
thinning ranks of teacher-warriors, that got him there. So it must be doing
something right.
When I asked him if he had any regrets
about the path he took, he recalled what Jarvis Collegiate was like in Grade
12, a year that coincided with the worst of the budget cuts and strikes.
"We barely had any sports or
extracurricular activities in my last year. You just had the impression that
things were on a steady path to hell. The teachers were worried and
overworked, and the support staff was on strike a lot. There was a time when
the school had to be closed down, as a health hazard." They were
turbulent times, and looking back, he wishes he could have had a
"simpler" high-school life. Nevertheless, he concluded, "I'm
glad I went to public schools."
Although McGill is full of privileged
students, he is still wary of the elitism of private schools. "Going to
private school also means that you've lost faith in whatever is left of the
public system. There's no reason why richer people should deserve a better
education." Well, yes, but as a parent, one's ideals are often in
conflict with the primal, apolitical urge to get your own child to the front
of the line, and damn the consequences. But whenever I would tentatively
raise the private-school issue, he was unwavering in his choice. "I
wanted to be exposed to the wider world," he said, "and exposed I
was."
Yes indeed. Fast-tracking through high
school in four years, he ran the gamut of the Toronto public spectrum,
beginning with Interact, a small school for students with extracurricular
demands (i.e. fledgling careers, not that he had one) housed in Oakwood
Collegiate, to SEED, a downtown alternative school, to Jarvis Collegiate,
where he spent the last two years of high school. Jarvis prepared him well
for college. There were wonderful, committed teachers in each of his schools
and those teachers were the stepping stones that carried him across the
tricky currents of adolescence and a system under siege. He did well in each
environment, but, in our search for a school that could never exist, given
the political environment, he missed out on the stability of staying in one
place. I sometimes wonder if maybe that one good place would have been
ivy-covered, and expensive.
And yet, and yet -- I will never forget
one of the student programs he participated in at Jarvis. It was the last of
a 25-year tradition, the famous "Mosaic" variety show, a showcase
of the astonishing range of cultures and talents that come together in a
school like this one. There were Tamil dances, a Cantonese choir, opera, hip
hop, Latin salsa, with the occasional WASP songwriter thrown in. It was one
of the most magical stage shows I've ever seen, high school or otherwise,
and it could only have happened in a world-mirroring school such as Jarvis.
Diversity is not simply a floaty
political ideal. It is an education in itself, shaping people in all sorts
of ways. This year our son took an ecology class, where the notion of
diversity has a different, but analogous meaning. "In ecology," he
explained, "biodiversity is a good thing, and that's what you get in
public school. It's healthy to have a big population with a wide range of
individuals, each grouped in their own niches. It's also good to have a wide
range of challenges and pressures (like the ones you get in public school),
because it creates a population that can adapt more easily to other
environments." The real world, for example.
Or, as one of his Jarvis teachers likes
to say to his students, "A flexible mind never gets bent out of
shape." - By
Marni Jackson National
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