The Globe And Mail
And now for a lesson on civil disobedience. Kathryn Sihota, a Grade 3 teacher (and teachers union president) in British Columbia, refused to give her pupils the reading test required by her school board, after a pupil cried while waiting for the test to begin. Ms. Sihota decided to stand up against the system. Now she is being lionized.
Here is Paul Shaker, the dean of education at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., in his convocation address last month: "Essential to the professional identity is the obligation to protect our students, not only from bullets or brutality, as we have seen teachers regularly do, but also from psychological and educational vandalism against their spirits. And this is what Kathryn Sihota has sought to do."
The moral of this lesson? A childish act can be dressed up as something grand if done on principle. Disobedience can be made to sound exalted if the word "civil" is put in front of it. Thwarting the will of a democratic process involving parents, voters and an elected school board can be spun as refusing to take orders to abuse a child.
The test Ms. Sihota objects to has two elements. The first is reading aloud. The second is a set of questions designed to ascertain whether the pupils understood what they read. This is hardly "psychological vandalism." It would be irresponsible for a school to refrain from asking its children to read aloud or explain what they had read.
The Sooke School District Number 62 says the test has two main purposes: to increase the number of children meeting or exceeding expectations, and to identify the children who are falling through the cracks and need extra help. Ms. Sihota may think she can accomplish those purposes on her own, without a test, and perhaps she could. Would all teachers be so diligent? Even if they are diligent, isn't it helpful to have a system-wide benchmark?
And can Ms. Sihota deny that the board has learned something of value from administering the tests? "We've learned our kids are quite fluent" in reading, but "we need to spend more time on comprehension," said Jim Cambridge, an assistant superintendent. Also, "we assumed that because they read fiction well they read non-fiction well. That wasn't the case. We adapted our teaching. It made a big difference over the past three years, particularly for the male population. A lot of boys are interested in non-fiction materials; they weren't really interested in fiction."
Policy should not be set by a child's tears - or by a teacher's decision that she knows better than a duly constituted board of education. (Another teacher gave the test to Ms. Sihota's pupils; a note was put in Ms. Sihota's personnel file.) Imagine if a child did that: No, Ms. Sihota, I won't do the list of spelling words because I believe in unconventional spellings. No, Ms. Sihota, I won't stop talking when you ask me to because I oppose all hierarchies and believe in the primacy of self-expression. Policy should not be set by individual teacher preferences or beliefs. Sometimes, civil disobedience is just plain old disobedience.
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| Last Updated November 13, 2007 |  |