Publisher's Synopsis
This is a study of the Canadian school system. Everyone talks about schools. Newspaper editorials worry about slipping educational standards, businesses complain about poor training for the work force, television reports of violence in school halls, educational reports study problems and parents attend parent-teacher interviews twice a year. Yet nobody, except the teachers and the students, know what really goes on there.;Ken Dryden, the former hockey player and lawyer, decided to find out for this study. As Ontario Youth Commissioner in the 1980s, he tried to convey to students the importance of education, yet he became increasingly aware that for many, his message came too late or made little sense. Spurred by the question of why the education system was not working for all students, Dryden decided to attend school himself. From September 1993 until June 1994, he attended a typical Canadian high school and moved from class to class. The book follows a number of students from a wide range of backgrounds, focusing on a dozen of them and half a dozen teachers, including the principal. The book shows the high and low points in the students' academic lives, and helps the reader understand the system and the students, as more information is given about their private histories.;The study helps to explain why the system punishes children who skip school by suspending them, and why schools cannot simply fire bad teachers. It enters the teachers' world, the sanctuary of the staff room, and shows teachers in preparation and in class. The book deals with teachers sympathetically, explaining why they lose their tempers with disruptive behaviour, and showing the frustrations they feel when they have to fail students who have tried hard.;The book's conclusion is that Canadian schools are very different to the ways in which they are perceived, and prone to suffer from the world's problems. Homework has little chance against the money of an evening job, for example. But it shows too that teachers will always do a good job with students who want to learn, and only a fair job with the average children. The book tackles what Dryden sees as the education debate's retreat to a safe, unthinking and ultimately useless, black and white ground of issues and policies at the expense of people.
