Category Archives: Education

Sep 20 2015
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Economy, Education

Daycare is child’s play

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For Ted Melhuish, authenticity is tantamount to, well, the genuine plate of Caribbean cuisine he was evidently relishing at a restaurant in downtown Fredericton.

It was early April 2013, and the tempests of a hard Canadian winter had abated just long enough to allow the sun to shine and the mercury to rise above 25 degrees.

He smiled like a kid in a candy store as he stuffed a bit of Jamaican jerk into his mouth. “Oh yeah,” he says. “It’s good. . .It’s very good. . .very original.”

Dr. Edward Melhuish is all about originality, reality, genuineness and authenticity. In a way, one might say, these qualities of mind have been his stocks in trade for more than 30 years. As his University of London (U.K.) biography stipulates, he “is Professor of Human Development at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London.”

He is also an “internationally recognized expert in the study of child development and childcare (who) has extensive experience with longitudinal studies. He was a Principal Investigator of studies of day care and family life in the 1980s, which had considerable influence on sections of the 1989 Children Act (U.K). He has also conducted research on child development, parenting and childcare in several European countries, on behalf of the European Commission.”

What’s more, “For several years Professor Melhuish has been a Principal Investigator on the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) in England and Effective Provision in Northern Ireland (EPPNI), which are following 4,000 children.”

Finally, “Professor Melhuish has acted as a consultant for the design of children’s organizations (e.g. UNESCO), government departments and film, television and radio companies. In addition he has frequently contributed to the media on children’s issues, including newspaper, radio and television programmes.”

In this context – that of a visiting scholar, educated in all matters related to early childhood education (ECE) – it’s worth noting just how far apart academia and actual practice has become in this province. After all, how many Professor Melhuishes has New Brunswick produced over the past three decades?

Instead, we face a risible crisis in ECE produced by broad ignorance about its benefits, suspicion fanned by federal and provincial governments, which seem to think that wedge-issue politics trumps the welfare of our children, and a calculable lack of expertise in the field.

In fact, a recent investigation by reporters of this newspaper group has found evidence of downright despicable conditions in New Brunswick’s regulated daycare operations: “In one year of visiting (these facilities) inspectors found guns, mouse droppings, lighters left out within children’s reach, and fighting on the playground with no one around to intervene.”

Worse, the report stipulates, you, dear reader, will not “find any details about these problems on the government’s online daycare inspection registry. Until now, violations in publicly licensed daycares have been kept largely secret from the public.”

Whether this secrecy was generated by fiat or general bureaucratic neglect hardly matters.

Nothing in our society should concern us more than the early childhood education of our offspring. After all, our kids will someday rule the planet, and how they govern in the future depends entirely on how we help them think and work and play today.

We have it, within our power, to create builders or destroyers, peacemakers or warmongers, physicians or psychopaths.

It is, as Professor Melhuish says, entirely up to us.

Shall we order in educational take-out tonight?

Or shall we make a good meal from a delicious pairing of ingredients in our own authentic land?

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Sep 20 2015
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Culture, Economy, Education, Society

How to enter the “thought-market”

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The vaunted academy is, let’s face it, not what it used to be – if it ever was.

I still remember college barkers gathering at my high school’s gymnasium in mid-1970s Halifax, pushing their various institutions’ alleged merits like so many army recruiters.

“If you want to be all you can be, then Saint Mary’s is the place for you, son. We’ll set you up for a real career in commerce, or applied basket weaving – whichever you prefer.”

Not so fast boyo, enthused the clean-faced man from Dalhousie’s development department (read: public relations):

“Have we got a deal for you. Take a full course load in business administration and you can be out and making money within 26 months – earlier if you opt for the co-op placement program.”

Row after row of pot-bellied, middle-aged men wearing bad suits and worse ties – refugees, I always imagined, from the advertising departments of local radio stations – would make the same pitch: A university education is only as valuable as the degree to which it advances your chances for material comfort later in life.

Do you want a good house, a fine car, a reliable job with a fat pension? Go to college.

Do you desire a thick retirement package, a gold watch at the end of your socially useful professional career, a rewarding set of hobbies you can afford to pursue? Well, then, by all means, sign on the dotted line, fork over a few hundred bucks, and you’re on your way.

I always likened these salesmen for academe to boatmen on the River Styxx, reaping young minds and sending them into their own, private Hades long before their time on this mortal coil was up.

The names of the barkers have changed, along with the body shapes and sartorial styles, but the message, alas, has remained largely the same: Higher education in this country, region, province is an economic imperative; not an intellectual one, certainly not a spiritual one.

In fact, it could be all three if governments, public and private school boards, and university administrators would agree to convene regularly to remind themselves that their true purpose is toproduce citizens who think critically, empathically and imaginatively about the world they inhabit and will, someday, lead.

Making kids “job-ready” in a marketplace where jobs change daily is a chump’s game. Making them “thought-ready”, on the other hand, is simply wise public policy. The fearless, innovative, cheerful and indefatigable will always change society ­– mostly, history demonstrates, for the better.

That means we must begin to remove the crypto-vocational aspects from the university system and return to courses and programs that build the intellectual muscle this planet needs to solve its direst problems – problems that a classical education in math, science, history, literature, and language directly address.

According to the recruiters at my high school, before the Internet made wiseacres of us all, I was a true disappointment. I chose a university course of study that mixed physical sciences with social ones (geology, biology, politics, philosophy, classics). I labored at it for years, failing, succeeding, failing again, and succeeding again.

When I was finally done, finally “job-ready”, I found that I was utterly unequipped to make the big salary, buy the big car, and live in the big house.

I was, however, “thought-ready”.

And the rewards have arrived apace, without force, as they have for my own children who cherish, above all, the notion that the critical knowing of things is the road to wisdom, even as the world does not always recognize the importance of either.

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Apr 03 2015
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Education, Politics, Society

No teen left behind

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Out of the goodness of its vote-conscious heart, the federal Conservative government has made child care a sturdy plank in its election platform this year. Noting that mum and dad are the “real experts” in raising a rug rat, the Tories have enhanced the Universal Child Care Benefit and Child Care Expense Deduction in 2015.

But what, in fact, does this mean?

In a report, released on Wednesday, Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Frechette, explains that “the value of child care benefits grew from $0.6 billion in 2004-2005 to approximately $3.3 billion in 2013- 2014. This amounted to three-fifths (59 per cent) of what Canadian families were spending on child care in 2013-2014.”

What’s more, he added, “Families with young children (less than 13 years of age) spending money on child care received two-thirds (66 per cent) of these benefits. The remaining 34 per cent was distributed to families with no child care expenses and families with older children. As a share of households’ aggregate child care expenses, federal benefits represented roughly 42 per cent and 247 per cent, respectively.”

Now, Mr. Frechette finds, following the government’s so-called improvements to the programs, “if Parliament approves. . .PBO estimates the fiscal impact of federal child care policies will increase to roughly $7.7 billion from the 2013-2014 value of $3.3 billion. By 2017-2018, it will grow to roughly $7.9 billion.”

Fair enough, perhaps. But here’s the kicker, says the PBO:

“These proposals would also change the allocation of benefits. In 2015, 49 per cent of these benefits would go to families with child care expenses and young children, and the remaining 51 per cent to families with no child care expenses and families with older children. Since families with young children spend more on child care, their share will only cover 67 per cent of the amount they will spend on child care. Conversely, benefits that families with older children will receive from the government in 2015-2016 will represent nearly eight times the amount they will spend on child care.”

So, while millions of Canadian families that might legitimately need some federal help to defray the costs of raising their pre-adolescents, millions more that don’t are getting a free ride on the taxpayers’ dime.

This, of course, makes perfect sense – but only in an election year. Under any other circumstance it’s a travesty of sound, sensitive and useful public policy.

None of which actually addresses the larger issue, which is: In what sober version of reality do the benefit and expense deduction, which transfer, at most, a couple of thousand dollars a year, per kid, to families’ household budgets, constitute rational social policy when the annual cost of effective, professionally delivered child care can, and does, runs 14 or 15 times the current federal contribution?

Seven or eight billion dollars would go a long way towards inaugurating a universal system of affordable (to families) early childhood education and pre-school programs. It’s certainly not brain surgery. No one is asking the feds to reinvent the wheel. Apart from the United States, effective models of this sort of thinking exist productively and happily across the developed world – even here in Canada, where Quebec’s $9-dollar-a-day child-care system has both enhanced educational outcomes and reduced systemic rates of poverty in that province. The more kids enrolled in such programs, the more mums and dads provide for their families’ material needs.

Of course, that’s a hard sell, especially as political campaigners begin to beat the drums loudly.

After all, 14-year-old junior needs his Xbox.

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Mar 03 2015
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Education, Government

Wherefore art thou higher education

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When the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission stipulates that university enrolment in this region is down, the proper response is not: Oh, how dreadful!

The proper response is: Really, who cares?

It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming for years, if not decades. In fact, according to its own spin the MPHEC cobbled itself together in 1974 as “an arm’s-length  organization accountable to the ministers responsible for post-secondary education in the Maritime provinces.”

At that time (and presumably since then), it assisted “institutions and government in enhancing the post-secondary learning environment. . .The commission’s primary orientation in carrying out it duties is to give first consideration to improving and maintaining the best possible service as lifelong learners.”

So, then, how has that worked out for everyone?

The MPHEC is clear on the question. Its press release last week was as declarative as it was morose:

“Overall. . .the number of people from the Maritimes enrolled in the region’s universities has dropped by 16 per cent (down 8,904 students) since 2003-04. Over the same period, Maritime universities have recruited more students from elsewhere in Canada (up 11 per cent since 2003-04; 1,429 students) and more international students (up 77 per cent since 2003-04; 4,500 students).

What’s more, “Program choice has shifted. . .Enrolment in the Arts and Humanities has decreased by 31 per cent since 2003-04. Students from the Maritimes and international students are more often choosing programs that have a clear connection to the labour market such as health, business or engineering.”

Indeed, “The greatest impact of increasing international student numbers has been on business programs. International students now represent nearly one in three students enrolled in business.”

All of which leads some reviewers of the MPHEC data to conclude that universities in this region are, at some fundamental level, failing local students, communities and, by extension, the economy, by not making our young and earnest “job-ready”.

But, again, when did we ever really care about that?

Was it when successive provincial governments failed to make good on their promises to fund the coordinated development of early childhood development?

Was it when those same governments succumbed to political pressure and voided their attempts to redesign secondary and post-secondary institutions into a more productive, educationally engaged, socially relevant system of practical colleges, polytechnical schools and institutes of advanced education (each serving different, various and crucial needs of diversely talented and interested students)?

Or was it when we – policy makers, politicians, pundits – failed to notice how and why other jurisdictions in the world do so much better educating their children as they prepare them for economically productive careers?

In Finland, for example, “The principle underlying pre-primary, basic and upper secondary education is to guarantee basic educational security for all, irrespective of their place of residence, language and economic standing. Finnish early childhood education and care includes various systems and possibilities to arrange family affairs.”

That comment comes from Liisa Heinämäki of the Finland’s National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health STAKES, Jyväskylä Satellite Office.

And here’s the happy result for her country: The highest post-secondary placement in the developed world; the finest academic attainment scores on international tests anywhere; and a culture that does not consider education a chore to endure but a joy to embrace.

If we truly care about changing the dynamics of higher education in the Maritimes, we’d best start at the beginning.

After all, shouldn’t we know our own minds before we complain about how universities train those of our children?

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Jan 29 2015
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Economy, Education, Government, Politics, Society

Let’s get serious about early childhood education

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If the federal government is truly concerned about the welfare of women and children, then it should rethink its social policies before it pours good money after bad.

The current thinking in Harpertown posits a minefield of ideological presuppositions that is as breathtaking in its scope as it is in its peril: That young children benefit only when mum is chained to a doorknob in her kitchen; that women find their best, truest selves only when raising a brood with Captain Canada’s monthly cheques (about enough to cover the cost of novice hockey-league membership); that dad should, but should not necessarily be forced to, engage in raising the children he sired in the first place.

Did I say “Harpertown”? Let’s properly call it “Pleasantville”.

Pleasantville is now spending tax dollars to hike the children’s fitness tax credit; arrange for income-splitting among worthy, affluent families; and double down on the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) for children under age six, to wit:

“As of January 1, 2015, parents will receive a benefit of $160 per month for each child under the age of six – up from $100 per month. In a year, parents will receive up to $1,920 per child.”

That notice comes directly from the Canada Revenue Agency, by way of the Prime Minister’s Office. What it doesn’t bother to mention is that these election goodies will cost, all tallied, upwards of $7 billion a year – just about as much as a truly scientific, comprehensive, empirically designed program of national, government-subsidized early childhood education.

In a 2013 syllabus on the broad effects of early-years instruction, TD Bank Group’s senior vice president and chief economist Craig Alexander had this to say: “There is a great deal of evidence showing overwhelming benefits of high quality, early childhood education. For parents, access to quality and affordable programs can help to foster greater labour force participation. But more importantly, for children, greater essential skills development makes it more likely that children will complete high school, go on to post‐secondary education and succeed at that education. This raises employment prospects and reduces duration of unemployment if it occurs.”

In fact, according to his research, “for every public dollar invested in early childhood development, the return ranges from roughly $1.5 to almost $3, with the benefit ratio for disadvantaged children being in the double digits.”

Indeed, around the world, the happiest results correlate with the earliest starts.

A recent OECD report states that in Sweden “The system of pre-school education is outstanding: (a) in its fidelity to societal values and in its attendant commitment to and respect for children; (b) in its systemic approach while respecting programmatic integrity and diversity; and (c) in its respect for teachers, parents, and the public. In each of these categories, the word ‘respect’ appears. There was trust in children and in their abilities, trust in the adults who work with them, trust in decentralised governmental processes, and trust in the state’s commitment to respect the rights of children and to do right by them.”

In Finland, the OECD concludes, “The early childhood education workforce has several strengths, such as a high qualification level of staff with teaching responsibilities, advanced professional development opportunities and favourable working environments. Staff with teaching responsibilities are well educated and trained with high initial qualification requirements. Professional development is mandatory for all staff; and training costs are shared between individual staff members, the government and employers. Working conditions in terms of staff-child ratio are among the best of OECD countries.”

All of which confirms that early childhood education is not the expensive experiment that cynics decry. On the contrary, it is a plausible, workable application for meeting some of our hoariest, long-term social challenges.

The sooner this federal government understands that this nation is not, as its political operatives like to assume, a blank canvas for partisan portraiture, the sooner we can get on with investing good money where it belongs: In the future of our kids, who will return dividends that Pleasantville can’t begin to imagine.

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Jan 08 2015
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Economy, Education

The A-B-Cs of solving poverty in our time

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New Brunswick’s Common Front for Social Justice is consistently well-meaning, invariably courageous and occasionally relevant.

So, why, then, in its recently released, roundly critical review of the David Alward and Brian Gallant governments (though, the latter’s has held the reins of office for all of four months), does the anti-poverty organization skirt any meaningful discussion of publicly subsidized, coordinated and integrated early childhood education as a crucial salve for the issues that concern it most?

The group states it wants minimum wage laws, employment insurance structures and pay-equity frameworks improved, enhanced and expanded. Fair enough.

It also demands that social assistance benefits rise; housing costs for the poor drop; the stock of public accommodations available to the economically disenfranchised enlarge; and that the controversial New Brunswick drug plan be reviewed for broad fairness and equitability. Again, well said.

As for “professional artists”, the Front states in its year-end report card, “The Alward government increased the budget for arts, culture and heritage. The Gallant government said it will put more money in its 2015 budget. The Alward government adopted a new cultural policy, put in place the Premier’s Task Force on the Status of the Artist and adopted a Linguistic and Cultural Development Policy for the French Schools.”

In fact, recognizing official support for professional artists is about the only cap this organization is willing to doff to either the former Tory or current Grit governments of New Brunswick. As to the rest, circumstances are, indeed, desperate:

“There is certainly a real deep financial cost to poverty,” the Front’s report writers acknowledge. “More importantly, there is a human cost that even if it is sometime(s) difficult to measure in dollars and cents is not less real.”

There is, for example, “the worry of parents who are not able to properly feed themselves and their children and have to rely on food banks in order not to go to bed hungry.” There is “the anguish of living in inadequate housing. . .the desperation of knowing that you are sick because you are poor. . .the hopelessness of teenagers knowing they have a lot less (sic) chance(s) of having a better life than their neighbour(s). . .the look of others because you are poor.”

Still, if any of this is true – and most of it is – why is there no concomitant mention, in this finely intentioned diatribe, of the exorbitant day-care costs most working Canadians face as they struggle to avoid poverty even as they slide inexorably into it?

A report, published late last year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, makes a compelling point. To wit:

“While Canada spends less on early childhood education and care than most OECD countries, Canadian parents are among the most likely to be employed. As Canadian parents are working parents, child care fees can play a major role in decision-making and labour force participation, particularly for women.

“Torontonians pay the most for infant child care at $1,676 a month. Parents in St. Johns pay the second most at $1,394 a month. The lowest feesare found in the Quebec cities of Gatineau, Laval, Montreal, Longueuil and Quebec City, where infant care costs $152 a month thanks to Quebec’s $7-a-day child care policy (increased to $7.30-a-day in October 2014). The second-lowest infant fees are found in Winnipeg ($651 a month) where a provincial fee cap is also in place.

“There are roughly twice as many toddler spaces (1.5–3 years) as infant spaces and fees are lower. Toronto has the highest toddler fees at $1,324 a month. Vancouver, Burnaby, London, Brampton and Mississauga all have median toddler fees over $1,000 a month.”

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the systemic inequity that two-income families with children endure every day. Those who do not qualify for subsidized spots in the sketchy day-care system across this country can pay anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 per kid, per month.

The circumstance is not only bizarrely unfair; it’s a recipe for economic perfidy; a calculus for ruining national prospects in an increasingly competitive, technologically treacherous world.

Give all kids an early start on the state’s dime and they will return that investment a thousand times over – in critical thinking, empathy, intellectual courage and great, learned humour.

Watch the evils of poverty dissolve before them.

That’s a common front we should all get behind.

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Dec 11 2014
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Education

When it come to our kids, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

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In the introduction to his 1979 translation of the Swiss-French, post-Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s classic, Emile, or on Education, the late American classicist, Allan Bloom, observed that his subject, a proud member of continental Europe’s 18th-century middle class (which, in those days, meant educated, not ‘monied’), despised the ‘bourgeois’ in his midst. Today, of course, we make no such fine distinctions between the well-educated and the economically successful.

In Emile, however, Rousseau was, in Bloom’s opinion, determined “defend man against a threat which bids fair to cause a permanent debasement of the species, the almost inevitable universal dominance of a certain low human type which (he) was the first to isolate and name.” As Bloom explained, Rousseau’s enemy was not society’s ‘less-than-one-one per cent’ of the age – not the “ancien regime, its throne, its altar, or its nobility.” The philosopher was convinced that surging egalitarianism in his own and other neighbouring societies would effectively crush the old order under a wave of revolutionary zeal.

Rather, he worried about what would surely replace it. “The real struggle would. . .concern the kind of man who was going to inhabit the (new) world,” Bloom wrote.

Parsing Rousseau’s term, the American scholar explained that “the bourgeois. . .is the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is self-preservation or. . .comfortable self-preservation. . .To describe the inner workings of his soul, he is the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others. He is a role-player. . .The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good. His good requires society, hence he exploits others while depending on them. He must define himself in relation to them. The bourgeois comes into being when men no longer believe there is a common good.”

As for Rousseau, himself, writing in 1760 (Emile was first published two years later), he began his 500-page masterwork thusly:

“This collection of reflections and observations, disordered and almost incoherent (this brand of self-effacement was common among writers of political tracts and treatises at the time) was begun to gratify a good mother who knows how to think. I had first planned only a monograph of a few pages. My subject drew me on in spite of myself, and this monograph imperceptibly became a sort of opus, too big, doubtless, for what it contains, but too small for the matter it treats.”

He continued: “I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one.”

At this point, a reader familiar with both Rousseau’s and modern thinkers’ rumination on early childhood education might be tempted to assume a direct evolutionary descent (or ascent) from the former to the latter.

Indeed, strategic considerations about how best to present, or “make proposals”, to those empowered to accept, or reject, them appears not to have changed much in 250 years. As to the substance of cutting-edge thinking on best practices in early education, the alignment between the 18th and 21st centuries is, in this instance, even more provocative.

“Childhood is unknown,” Rousseau wrote. “Starting from the false idea one has of it, the farther one goes, the more one loses his way. The wisest men concentrate on what is important for men to know without considering what children are in a condition to learn. They are always seeking the man in the child without thinking of what he his before being a man.”

As for the clerics, masters, mothers, fathers and all other educators of his era, he enjoined them to “begin. . .by studying” their “pupils better. . .for most assuredly, you do not know them at all.”

How much has actually changed in two-and-a-half centuries? The wheels of social progress grind far more slowly than those of technological innovation. Our access to the Internet appears to make each and every one of us geniuses, if only in our own callow opinions.

But the finest lessons of the past, if we choose to heed them, are immutable.

Citizens of decent, intelligent, sympathetic societies are made, not born; and they are made when people collaborate on the tough, often fractious, project of educating and nurturing an empathetic, thoughtful child.

Read your history, dear reader, to appreciate the possibilities of a far finer future.

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Nov 28 2014
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Economy, Education

Why Quebec must hold the line on childcare programs

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When, in 1997, the Quebec government introduced publicly subsidized, universally accessible childcare for just $5 a day, regardless of the socio-economic conditions of its subscribers, a great hosannah arose from the province’s hoi polloi and advantaged, alike.

And for good reason.

One of the early thought-runners of this grand experiment was University of Montreal  psychology professor Camil Bouchard who concluded, in the early 1990s, that anything governments can do to produce an atmosphere in which children feel loved, wanted and cherished can only benefit society’s clear-eyed goals for longterm economic development.

To be sure, this was, by no means an original observation. After four decades, beginning in the 1950s, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany were only just beginning to see, in the 1990s, durable results from their respective early childhood education programs.

But, by 2008, nine years after it launched its provincial childcare agenda, Quebec had become the envy of, and the model for, the developed world.

“Based on earlier studies, we estimate that in 2008 universal access to low-fee childcare in Quebec induced nearly 70,000 more mothers to hold jobs than if no such program had existed – an increase of 3.8 per cent in women employment. By our calculation, Quebec’s domestic income was higher by about 1.7 per cent, or $5 billion, as a result.”

That came from Montreal economist Pierre Fortin, who was commissioned by provincial bureaucrats to dispassionately conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the Quebec program.

He continued: “We ran a simulation of the impact of the childcare program on government own-source revenues and family transfers and found that the tax-transfer return the federal and Quebec governments got from the program significantly exceeded its cost.”

Or, indeed, as Clement Gignac – a senior vice-president and the chief economist at Quebec-based Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services stated in the Globe and Mail earlier this year, “It may seem counterintuitive to talk about a social program as a means of wealth creation. . .but it can also raise the standard of living.”

And how.

Consider the oft-repeated observations of T-D Bank’s chief economist Craig Alexander last fall: “Raising investment in early childhood education would bring long-term benefits. Most studies show that a one-dollar investment reaps a long-term reward return of 1.5-to-3 dollars. . .It is true that raising Canada to the average level of investment in other advanced economies would cost $3- to $4-billion, but that is evidence of the magnitude of underinvestment at the moment.”

All of which makes the Government of Quebec’s recent decision to cut back (or raise fees on) its demonstrably successful, universal childcare program downright bizarre. That province’s budgeting process is, unfortunately, falling prey to bureaucratic thinkers who perceive that all line items on an expenditure sheet can support equal measures of tolerance and  intolerance. For these factotums, a spread sheet is just a spread sheet.

The truth is, or should be, patently obvious: The social and economic advantages of a universally accessible system of early childhood education are far more compelling than the outright waste, patronage and bizarrely partisan schemes of most sitting governments.

Millions go to roads that are never built. Millions more go to favoured constituencies for special “ceremonial” events that produce nothing but short-term jobs and, when strategically juxtaposed with political ambitions, votes for favoured sons and daughters of a fundamentally skewed political system.

Billions of dollars are cavalierly dedicated to industries whose bottom lines, without public injections of capital, most developing countries would envy.

And all the while, provinces like Quebec poor-mouth their circumstances; they say with straight faces and crocodile tears that they can no longer afford the few social programs that they actually do right, ones which actually generate the human capital that is, in fact, necessary to lifting themselves from the doldrums they, and only they, have engineered.

As Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard rose solemnly in the National Assembly to express his deep disappointment in the state of his province’s finances this week, his staff was taking note of the vast sums the publicly owned hydro utility generates each and every day through exports to the northeastern seaboard of the United States.

Yes, indeed, in this country, we make sure to look after our money.

We’d be richer, in the long run, if we learned how to look after our kids.

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Nov 27 2014
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Education, Poverty, Society

No higher duty

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That we, as Canadians, have become vassals of our own stupidity is not nearly as shameful as the ritual sacrifices we make to maintain this status before the gods of politics who guarantee to keep it that way.

Now, we learn (not for the first time) that we are more than willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of standard public policy, for a few dollars here and there, rather than risk beginning the world again with national educational programs that would, in all likelihood, re-invent our communities, our economy – indeed, our entire society – for the better.

For the second time in as many weeks, the news about the condition of Canada’s kids is out, and it’s far from encouraging.

“Since the House of Commons adopted the unanimous resolution to seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000, child poverty rates have increased.”

This comes from the Human Development Council, based in Saint John. Its 2014 New Brunswick Child Poverty Report Card, released this week also observed: “In 1989, when the resolution was passed, 1,066,150 children (15.8 per cent) in Canada lived in poverty. In 2012, both the number and percentage of children living in poverty had increased to 1,340,530 (19.2 per cent).”

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, 28 per cent of kids in this province are fat; 40 per cent get practically no daily exercise at all. Seven to 13 per cent of those in middle and high school smoke cigarettes either occasionally or regularly. Nearly five per cent admit to taking methamphetamines, at least once in their tender lives.

The injury and hospitalization rate for children in New Brunswick is almost twice the national average (41.4 cases per 10,000 inhabitants, compared with of 25.8 for the country as a whole). And, as if these facts weren’t bad enough, there are the morbid metrics about ritual abuse to consider.

As the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris reported last Wednesday about the seventh, annual “State of the Child Report” from the province’s Child and Youth Advocate Norman Bosse, “Two in three girls in New Brunswick say they have been bullied. The rate of children and youth who are victims of family violence in New Brunswick is much higher than the national average (365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the national average of 267).”

Then, there’s this appalling finding: “The rate of New Brunswickers charged with sexual offences involving children is much higher than the national average (seven per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 4.3 per 100,000 inhabitants for Canada as a whole).”

It’s a truly chilling comfort to know that these are not just New Brunswick or Canadian phenomena; they are endemic around the world. According to some estimates, more than 600 million children on this planet live in abject poverty, subject to all the predations that civilization proscribes (I’d bet the number is, in fact, much higher).

Still, as the income gap between the working poor and the occasionally industrious rich widens everywhere, so does our empathy for those whose circumstances we can barely recognize. We steadily become a society of them against us – our team opposed to the dreaded others.

Our communities become gated, our moats around our compounds grow, our appreciation of democracy and the communal importance of our public institutions withers, and those who manage to ford our fortifications to knock on our doors, looking for a charitable contribution or, more likely, gainful employment, risk a taser shot to the head, or worse.

There is something we can do about this, of course.

We can stop building walls around ourselves by refusing to buy what our mainstream political parties are selling in return for our votes.

We can start engaging in the political process at the provincial and national levels to secure not our narrow self-interests, but our common good.

And what, for the future of our economy, our society, our very souls, is more commonly good than the welfare of our children?

After all, they are us, and in their tearful, hungry, terrified eyes, we become them.

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Nov 17 2014
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Education, Politics

And now for something completely different: Good news from New Brunswick

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A reader writes, and I paraphrase: “While I agree with you about New Brunswick’s economic troubles and fiscal morass, why don’t you write something inspirational that offers some solutions? Why do you have to be such a jerk?”

I get love notes along those lines from time to time. I’m used to them, like this one from a few years back: “You disgusting, pompous prig! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”

Which only serves notice that you should never forget your bartender’s birthday.

Still, I am not such an unreconstructed curmudgeon that I can’t recognize good news in this province when it becomes evident.

Consider, for example, a new report out of the Atkinson Centre, a research pod at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. It says that this fine province has managed to improve its grade for the environment and services it provides to early childhood educators by a factor of two since 2011.

Specifically, it says: “In New Brunswick, the mandate for early childhood services merged under a new Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in April 2011. A new action plan, Putting Children First, details initiatives through to 2015 and builds on Be Ready for Success: A 10 year Early Childhood Strategy for New Brunswick (2008).”

At that time, “commitments included strengthening the capacity of communities to support families and young children through the integration of early childhood and family support services. In partnership with the Margaret and Wallace McCain Foundation, the Government of New Brunswick piloted Early Childhood Development Centres to inform program practice and help guide policy-makers in the building of an inclusive and accessible, family-centred child care and education system.”

Then, earlier this year, “the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development released The Linguistic and Cultural Development Policy: A Societal Project for the French Education System. This report was the result of a broad consultation to support the Acadian and Francophone community in meeting the challenges of the linguistic minority context.”

Fundamentally, though, “considerable attention is paid to the early years (birth to age 8) when the foundations for language and learning are established. The plan commits to ensuring equal access to services in French, including a single entry point in both urban and rural areas; the creation of a single file for each child, whatever the number and type of services received; and enhanced linguistic support to the professionals working in the francophone community.”

Overall, the 2014 survey gives New Brunswick a score of 8, compared with 4.5 three years ago, for its performance on the early childhood education front. That puts this least fiscally promising province in Canada, if not at the head of pack, at least in the crowd of first finishers. Or, as Atkinson Centre spokesperson Emis Akbari told the Telegraph-Journal last week, “It is not just about how much money is invested. It is about governance, funding, access, the learning environment that kids are exposed to and accountability. New Brunswick has moved ahead in quite a few areas.”

And that’s just great. I’m seriously happy about this happenstance, so don’t get me wrong when I say: Now what?

It seems to almost everyone in this business that the provinces are doing all the heavy lifting – all the weight-training the federal government decided to reject in 2006.

How long, then, can “have-not” jurisdictions, such as New Brunswick, be expected to cover the cost of providing, in its own region, what should be a national, publicly subsidized, universally accessible system of early childhood education?

Instead, this country’s parents are, just now, promised enriched monthly child benefits without the infrastructure, care, expertise and consistency that such investments would otherwise lever in a more sensibly arranged society.

The longterm social and economic advantages of a structured, comprehensive system of early childhood education, integrated into every public school system in Canada are so patently obvious, the fact that we’re not rushing to introduce one is just one of many patent absurdities that lace our evidence-hating proclivities in this erstwhile great nation.

On the other hand, I don’t want to be a jerk about this.

After all, too many federal, public officials already evince this personality trait far better than I ever could.

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