Editorial

NWT students have finished dead last in the latest national test aimed at discovering how well Canadian students measure up to national academic standards.

Education Minister Charles Dent has responded to this woeful result by saying that the tests aren’t designed for Inuit and Dene children.

This is disingenuous nonsense. Mathematics is a universal language. Whether you speak Arabic, Hindi, Cantonese, Swahili or any other language the principles of mathematics are the same.

Aboriginal languages are no diffferent. That’s what makes Dent’s position so morally repugnant — because it contains the unspoken assumption that aboriginal cultures are intellectually inferior to others. Unfortunately, too many aboriginal parents, teachers and education bureaucrats accept this view.

Children will do as well as what is expected of them. In the territorial school system, little is expected of children, so little is achieved. The infliction upon children of fad theories like whole language and “holistic” education has done its share of damage too.

The prospects for change aren’t promising. At every level of the system — teachers, parents, board officials, territorial bureaucrats — a rigid conservatism prevails. No one wants to be responsible and no one wants to be accountable for the worst school system in Canada.

Until that changes, the majority of Nunavut’s children will continue to wallow in ignorance and a frustrated state of colonized helplessness. JB