The month of September is the ultimate paradox. Summer days fade unhappily into the early sunsets, and the beautiful changing leaves hint at the impending winter.
Happy parents relish in the respite of their kids returning to school, but they also dread the coming scheduling conflicts. Kids are both eager to see their friends after a summer of adventure and dread the rigors and stress of assignments and tests.
Our youth also dread the increasingly difficult-to-navigate maze of social circles and digital networks. Will last year’s embarrassing moment will still be a topic of peer jesting? Or has last year’s bully found a new target?
For some in our community, the September paradox may manifest in a much simpler conflict: the basic need for food. The less fortunate struggle to provide quality and diverse lunches to fuel their children’s growing and learning minds. For these children, their dread of inadequate and uninspiring meals will hopefully be offset by the kindnesses of understanding classmates and caring teachers.
Teachers have their own paradox. While teaching is their job, the vast majority chose their profession not just for the paycheque and the summers off but because of a true love for their work. But their anticipation of another rewarding year of shaping young minds is often shadowed by the challenges in their classrooms. What new school policies or moral pressures will they face? And will additional expectations come with additional resources to assist them?
Our new Minister of Education may, the Honourable Kelvin Goertzen, will struggle to face the perpetual government conundrum: how do you fill tons of requests and needs with mere pounds of funding?
Our expectations of the role our schools play in society have changed, and some could argue that these expectations are both unreasonable and unsustainable. We’ve taken a system designed to produce literate and skilled workers for the industrial age and inadvertently added to it the responsibility of filling the social gaps previously filled by families, churches, and the community at large.
Minister Goertzen will soon be wrestling with the relevance of our education system, working to evolve the system to meet tomorrow’s demands in a rapidly changing world.
But what of the decreased influence of traditional shapers in our children’s lives, shapers such as parents, church, and members of the community?
School is where our youth spend half their time, and the largest share of their person to person engagement may come from teachers and classmates. Partially this may be because schools have restrictions on the use of digital devices, and because those devices are difficult to monitor at home.
We must recognize that the pressures facing our students, teachers, and the education system are large in scope and beyond the resources they are provided. While the Minister will try to address the issue of resources, it’s up to us as the larger community to assist. Our efforts and examples outside the school can have a huge impact on our youth’s success.
In our own ways, we are all teachers in the greater system of education, as schools are only one part of the whole.
