Expert: schools need to teach “life lessons”

Conference coordinator, Patti Bligh of Cambridge Bay, at left, talks with a group of teachers Feb. 22 before the opening session of the three-day Sivuniksamut Ilinniarniq teachers’ conference in Cambridge Bay. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

CAMBRIDGE BAY — While students across Nunavut’s Kitikmeot region started a week without school, more than 100 of their teachers and school administrators gathered Feb. 21 in Cambridge Bay for their three-day Sivuniksamut Ilinniarniq teachers’ conference.

Schools should put more on fostering sound social skills was the message teachers took away from Hetty van Gurp, an author and former educator from Nova Scotia, who delivered the first keynote speech of the conference Feb. 22.

Van Gurp, a proponent of more “life lessons” in school and founder of a non-profit group, Peaceful Schools International, told the Kitikmeot teachers that speaking to them on Feb. 22 carried special meaning for her.

That’s because on Feb. 22, 1991, Hetty’s older son Ben, then 14, died due to injuries suffered when a student who had been bullying her son at school pushed him down on to a gym floor.

Ben’s violent death started van Gurp thinking about the kind of knowledge students learn in school— and today van Gurp says many students can learn “facts” from the Internet when they need to know these.

What they really need is more instruction on how to live well and peaceably.

“We need a new way for schools,” she told the gathering— one, which puts the focus on developing hearts, not just minds.

Problem solving and teamwork are more important, she said, than some learning random facts, “useless information,” like the names of the nine planets in the solar system, and reciting it back.

Citing an example from her own high school education, Van Gurp mentioned how she’d never been able to use the trigonometry she studied in Grade 12 and still doesn’t see its use.

Van Gurp wants to see more subjects like cooperation, listening with empathy, communicating effectively, expressing rather than exposing anger, appreciating differences, and resolving conflict peacefully put on the school curriculum.

Unless we teach peace, someone else will teach violence, she told the teachers.

It’s a message she’s already brought to other regions affected by social upheaval, like Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

Schools in 17 countries now fly the flag of her organization as a way of showing their support of its principles.

According to the Peaceful School’s web site, a peaceful school is one in which “students, staff and parents work together to ensure that everyone feels safe, valued, and respected” and where:

Schools use a collaborative approach to decision-making;

Schools provide peace education activities;

Teaching methods stress participation, cooperation, problem solving and respect for differences;

Conflict resolution strategies like peer mediation are available;

The school is involved in community service projects; and,

Opportunities for professional development on creating a positive school climate are available to all staff.

During their three-day conference, Kitikmeot teachers can learn more about the peaceful schools network, and attend other sessions on practical and educational topics, such as how to integrate art into the classrooms and learn or improve Inuinnaqtun skills.