COLUMN: ‘The Mason Line’: Not longer, better
By columnist Paul Mason
In the last few months, I’ve watched a fair number of documentaries about schooling in China, Korea, Japan and Singapore.
School days there are long, and they don’t end with the final bell. Students are expected to move on to private tutoring centres where they study into the night. A day that begins at 8 a.m. can end at 10 p.m. or even later. Seoul has had to impose a 10 p.m. curfew on its cram schools and inspectors patrol the streets to enforce it.
The results cut both ways. In the latest international tests, released in September, Singapore’s 15-year-olds outscored ours by 78 points in math, and students in China’s four tested provinces by 127. The OECD counts 20 points as roughly a year of learning: that puts us four years behind Singapore and six behind China. But the cost is real. In South Korea, suicide has been the leading cause of death among young people for more than a decade, and academic pressure is the reason most often cited.
Tellingly, the countries we envy are trying to ease up. In 2021, China banned for-profit tutoring in core subjects. Parents responded by hiring tutors underground.
It’s been 12 years since I last taught a class, but I still think about it. I brood over my mistakes and wonder how we, as a society, might do better.
Our own numbers give me reason to brood. Canada still ranks among the top 10, but our math score has fallen 47 points since 2003, equivalent to more than two years of learning. The slide began long before COVID and has accelerated since. We are perched near the top of a falling curve.
Former colleagues now teaching in Asia tell me that coming home feels like stepping back in time: Our technology dated, our trains late, our country, broadly speaking, monolingual. They exaggerate, but not by much.
I would never ask our children to study 14 hours a day. But our expectations are too low, and more of the same won’t raise them. In 32 years in the classroom, I never saw an Ontario ministry initiative that changed the game for the better – not computerized classrooms, not mandatory DEI curriculum, not KICA, the achievement chart that sorted every mark into four boxes. Each arrived with fanfare. Each left the school day no better, and often worse.
One approach strikes me as transformative, and good teachers are already doing it with minimal ministry support: project-based, cross-curricular learning. Picture a Grade 11 class studying the health of Cobourg Creek – testing the water in chemistry, modelling the data in math, researching the town’s history, and then writing and presenting a proposal to council. Subjects stop being boxes and become tools.
This isn’t wishful thinking. In a randomized American study of more than 3,600 students, those taught advanced placement courses through project-based learning were eight percentage points more likely to pass the exam, and low-income students gained as much as their wealthier peers.
It won’t come cheap. It needs common planning time, smaller classes and serious training. But done well, it could help close the gap, not by lengthening the school day, but by making the hours we already have count.
Excite students. Don’t exhaust them.
Paul Mason is a voice-, film- and television-actor, and the author of six novels, most recently To Our Graves and Sackville House.
Comments