So I got a tweet from a colleague this morning just as I was leaving my house. It said "Today is International Day of Pink. Wear pink and take a stand against bullying" Unfortunately, I was already dressed and ready for the day...no time to change so alas, I went into the day not visibly supporting this very worthy cause. But that's not the point of this post.
Now as much as I know that bullying is a very real and relevant issue in our culture today, I must admit I'm a bit weary of these "special days" to do things or pay attention to issues that we should be doing or paying attention to everyday like "tak[ing] a stand against bullying".
I get the fact that these special days are helpful in increasing the overall awareness of issues like bullying, and I'm willing to support that work. But in the world of education, in particular, I would prefer to see us moving more rapidly toward an attitude of inclusion and respect that doesn't require a special day to raise awareness because it's just what we do and how we operate. Surely this isn't that much of a stretch, is it?
In Alberta, we have programs of study that specifically deal with building relationship skills, Health & Life Skills for Kindergarten to grade 9 and Career & Life Management (a high school course required for graduation). And I know there's space in other areas like English Language Arts and Social Studies where relationship-related topics and issues can be addressed. I'm sure the situation in other provinces and states is the same. If we paid good attention and allowed these courses, the Health-related ones, to be viewed as being essential to student learning and development (right now they're certainly not given even close to this level of respect), I do think we'd see issues like bullying begin to be impacted.
I'm not naive enough to believe that just increasing our emphasis on learning in Health will be enough to change the world, but if we did this, and also took a comprehensive, whole school approach like Comprehensive School Health, such as is promoted by EverActive Schools Alberta, the Pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health and Physical & Health Education Canada, as well as many others, I can't help but think we'd really begin to see an impact in our schools and, eventually, our society.
The thing about all this is that these changes wouldn't cost that much. It's a bit of a shift in priorities, ease up a bit on the craze with "academics" (example: cutting out recess so there's more time for reading and math. I mean, really?!) and test scores and focus more intentionally on a holistic approach to education - valuing the complementary areas like Health, the Arts, and Physical Education and I believe we would see improvements not only on issues like bullying but also an overall improvement in academic achievement.
Then, maybe, we wouldn't need to have special days to raise awareness and take a stand against bullying. Just my (somewhat unpolished) thoughts...and I know I've only scraped the surface here... but feel free to comment and share your thoughts.
It's the word "holistic" that brings your message home... We're a "Circle of Courage School" where language of Belonging, Mastery, Independence, and Generosity aren't celebrated once a year, they're a day-in-day-out approach to focusing on teaching the "whole" of the kid, not just the academics.
ReplyDeleteWe've really been flying at our school this year, and I think it's largely because of this approach... Fights and bullying have decreased and kids are (for the most part) being respectful to each other.
We all wore pink shirts on Pink Shirt Day too, though! Excellent reflection, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for your comment Mike - very appreciated. No doubt we have schools doing great things to ensure students receive the quality education they deserve. I lament the fact that it's too easy to quantify "academic achievement" in the way of test scores that are then used to rank schools against each other - a number like that tells you nothing about the climate of a school which in my opinion, is as important, if not more important than how a school ranks against others. Doing this reduces education to something so much less than it should be and so much less than most of our society know it is.
DeleteIn my opinion we need to highlight and celebrate the great work being done by schools such as yours and do our best to drown the ridiculousness of something like a Fraser Institute report on school "achievement" with the stories of real, authentic learning that happen in so many schools regardless of how they do on standardized tests.
Thanks again for taking the time to read and comment!