Please bear with me and read the preamble to our School Act as it forms the basis for my argument:
"WHEREAS it is the goal of a democratic society to ensure that all its members receive an education that enables them to become literate, personally fulfilled and publicly useful, thereby increasing the strength and contributions to the health and stability of that society;
"AND WHEREAS the purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable all learners to become literate, to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy, democratic and pluralistic society and a prosperous and sustainable economy;
"THEREFORE HER MAJESTY, by and with the advice and consent of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of British Columbia, enacts as follows:"
What follows in the Act, among other things, is the requirement, for parents choosing public school, that their children aged five to 16 attend school. So, we have a compulsory education system and most would agree that it is reasonable because we believe the benefit of education outweighs the loss to parental choice. (I am fully aware that parents can choose independent schools or to home school, but nevertheless, education is still compulsory, and most parents still choose the public education system to deliver an education that attempts to fulfill these goals. If you write a letter to the editor pointing out that private schools take money from the public system, you reveal yourself to be very poor at math at the very least and an ideologue at worst.)
So what happens when we don't fulfill those lofty goals set out above? What happens when our policies actually create a system which provides a superior education for students of means and actively disadvantages those of lesser means that must attend our public schools? How does this happen?
Two words: school fees.
Already working many hours to make ends meet, families can plan all year to save money for school supplies and fees but still be hit with a few unexpected expenses. The $5, $7, and $10 fees for anything from "optional" safety glasses to field trips, become insurmountable. The $130 deposit for a graphing calculator can as easily be paid for as a trip to the moon for these families. Oh, and how about the $100-130 fee to participate in the graduation ceremony that a student has spent 12 years working for?
They get the dogwood, but not the ceremony.
Let that sink in.
This problem is worse for those students who grow up in a second or third generation low-income families. For many of them, the only people they know are also low-income, so their social network consists of people in the same situation. We know that the social skills required to participate successfully in our economy are mostly gained while interacting in our community, outside the classroom. Denied the exposure and skills learned while out on field trips or participating in sports, these students do not gain needed skills.
We all lose out because some of the greatest minds of our time spend their working years working at minimum wage jobs because they lack the access to social networks in the field of their interest and talent. Through no fault of their own, these students get the message that they are other, that they are lower, that they are not really part of the society that they are forced to be part of for twelve years. Because of this uneven playing field that starts in school, we are giving them a life-long handicap that only the strongest can overcome.
We need to make a decision: either we find a way to include every student who wishes to participate in any and all co-curricular or extra-curricular school activities, we get rid of any activities our schools cannot fully fund, or we get rid of "feel-good" compulsory education and allow these students to contribute meaningfully to the family budget earlier and not subject them to 12 years in a system which doesn't prepare them for anything else other than minimum wage jobs.
This is a conversation that we need to have.
