Dear Editor,
I wish to officially not congratulate any student, teacher or school for their success at the National Grade Six Assessment.
Yes, I said not congratulate.
1) The NGSA doesn’t further education. It is a ‘sorting hat’ to decide who should get to go to bad schools. Performing well in the exam is not some sign of merit. It’s a sign that you’ve mastered the skill of taking exams which is a pointless skill for an adult.
2) The reason we need to sort these children is that historically there have not been enough good high schools to send all our kids to. And we haven’t fixed that in over 100 years. The number of good schools has increased of course, and the goal is to get to a point where all high schools are good enough that children simply go to their local high school and there is no exam for a place. But every year that we still need the NGSA is a year where we haven’t reached the goal of basic secondary education. That’s not something to be proud of.
The NGSA isn’t about who gets to go to the best schools. It’s about seeing who we will leave out of the best schools. Today more than any day, we should be thinking of all those kids who at the blameless age of 11 can’t go to a good school because we as a society haven’t built enough good schools.
I’m not making a political point about any party. I’m not even saying that the development isn’t going fast enough. I’m just saying that even if the development were going lightning fast, we have nothing to boast about as long as we still need NGSA to designate losers among our innocent students.
3) NGSA is still necessary, but it is executed in a flawed way that warps students, teachers and schools away from truly beneficial education. Students are pounded by bookwork, abused by bookwork and enslaved by bookwork for the sake of passing these exams. These exams break the mind of most students away from the joy of learning and the practice of evaluating ideas. It trains them to think of education as a series of correct answers that they must supply or else lose everything.
Contrast that to a useful education, which steers students to experimentation and encourages them to use failure as a guide to future actions. NGSA gives us students who act like potatoes, sitting there and waiting for the teacher to hand them the right answers. Then these young potatoes vapidly memorize the answers so they can vomit up the right responses on their exam sheet later. That is not a skill to be proud of. So go ahead and hate me for being sour about all the successful students today.
I can’t fault the adults who feel joy at their daughter or nephew, etc, getting a ‘good’ result. Your child has gotten a place on one of the few lifeboats off a burning ship, so I understand your happiness. But I think it’s time we started feeling less proud about individual students getting a mark and started feeling shame about all the students still on the burning ship. Some of us are even thinking about maybe putting out the fire.
Yours faithfully,
Imam Baksh
