The poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote that "-when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also." The decade-long violation of the teachers' charter rights is a vivid breakage in the cloth of our educational system, but have we taken a careful look at the loom?
Did teachers have any significant autonomy to begin with? They aren't allowed to talk about it, but as things stand, teachers are constrained in many fundamental ways - almost like cogs operating in an oppressive machine. Besides being reliant upon the caprice of ideological politicians, as we have seen, teachers are obliged to impose the arbitrary scholastic agenda of the ministry on their students. For example, teachers are reluctantly administering the sadistic and punishing rigmarole of compulsory memorization, assignments, testing and grading.
It is enough to read the articles in the BCTF magazine, or to speak with a member privately, in order to imagine how wonderful our schools would be if the relevant staff were self-managing its own affairs and workplace, as well as the educational resources of the government.
The youth of Vancouver would be one of the most enlightened and cultured in the world, their schools would be as free and non-coercive as Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana or Ferrer's Modern School, and generations to come wouldn't be conditioned to fear books and flowers!
Vinoba Bhave, a teacher and close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, once wrote that "(t)he work of education should be in the hands of men of wisdom, but governments have got it in their grasp-."
The civil liberties of our teachers are under attack, so why aren't we taking a look at the loom? The colour of its thread?
Elias Ishak, Burnaby
