Ignorance reigns, silence pays

About two years ago, Andrew Nikiforuk, an award-winning Canadian journalist who for years has written widely about education, took a look at the Yukon’s territorial school system.

He concluded that the Yukon government has saddled its residents with the “Enron of Canadian school systems,” and said so in an interview with CBC North television.

But then, Andrew Nikiforuk never came to Nunavut. Because when it comes to lying, denial and all-round institutional dysfunction, Nunavut’s department of education surely leads the nation.

Consider this:

* In September 2002, Nunatsiaq News reported on an Inuktitut literacy test that students in Arctic College’s Inuit Studies program conducted at Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School.

The results were predictably pathetic. More than 60 per cent of those tested couldn’t answer a set of simple questions aimed at testing how well they understood a short Inuktitut reading exercise.

Did school officials respond with a commitment to improve the quality of Inuktitut instruction in Nunavut schools? No. Did they respond with a commitment to produce better Inuktitut curricula? No.

This is Nunavut, where ignorance reigns and silence pays. Their response was to issue a ban on research at Inuksuk High School.

* More recently, Nunatsiaq News reported on the Let’s Visit Nunavut fiasco.

Let’s Visit Nunavut is the title of the horribly written and sloppily researched workbook that recently turned up within a Grade 3 classroom at Iqaluit’s Joamie School, much to the dismay of the Iqaluit District Education Authority.

The book contains gems like these:

“Most Inuit do not make a living from full-time jobs that pay money.”

There’s no reference, however, to the fact that 42 per cent of Government of Nunavut workers and about 50 per cent of Nunavut teachers are Inuit. There are various other ethnocentric assumptions and errors of omission that have no place in a book that’s intended to educate the young.

No one has explained how this ridiculous workbook – it’s been in print for seven years – ended up in Nunavut. The GN says only that it maintains a list of recommended texts, but that schools across Nunavut are allowed to purchase their own materials.

Don’t forget, this is Nunavut, where ignorance reigns and silence pays. But no one has explained why Nunavut’s schools are allowed to do this in the first place or why no one in the system, at any level, even bothered to read the offensive workbook.

In the end it was a parent who brought it to the attention of the Iqaluit District Education Authority. Thank goodness for parents. They’re the only effective education watchdogs we have in Nunavut.

* Nunavut residents caught a glimpse of another fiasco just last week: the lack of any functioning system of educational governance.

Pangnirtung’s District Education Authority, without stating why, has “recommended” that a local school principal’s contract not be renewed – even though no one in the community has complained about his work and 150 Pangnirtung residents have signed a petition in his favour.

Charles Banfield, the boss of the pretentiously entitled Qikiqtani School Operations, responded with the kind of idiocy that’s only possible in Nunavut.

“The DEA is the duly elected representative of the community and we are obliged to respect their recommendations,” Banfield said.

Wait a minute. A “recommendation,” by definition, is a piece of advice. A recommendation can be accepted, rejected, or changed. No government is bound by any recommendation.

Any government that says otherwise isn’t worthy of being called a government.

Now we know that our department of education is capable of dumping an employee without legal cause on the basis of an ill-informed recommendation. And they wonder why employee morale is at a rock-bottom level.

No one has explained why district education authorities – the fancy name for Nunavut’s local school advisory committees – are given the power to hire and fire, but are given no administrative or policy support, and no information about basic employment law. But then, this is Nunavut, where ignorance reigns and silence pays.

So what does all this mean?

It means that Nunavut’s “education” system is now nothing more than a high-cost daycare system with expensive gymnasiums, a warehousing scheme to keep children and adolescents amused and off the streets for a dozen years or so.

Meanwhile, the intellectual potential of the young just goes to waste, and no one cares. Just look at the reaction to the woeful results produced by Nunavut students in the last national mathematics achievement test. Just eight per cent of 13-year-olds in Nunavut met or exceeded the minimum acceptable level of difficulty.

Instead, the department continued to squander its energies on a poorly drafted education bill that nobody wanted, and MLAs ended up flushing it down the toilet after four years of futility.

In a just world, Nunavut’s senior education officials, along with a large section of the territory’s political establishment, would be brought to court and charged with criminal negligence for tolerating such an inexcusable betrayal.

The department of education’s sorry record over the past four years even raises the question of whether Nunavut is capable of running a school system. That’s an important question, because if the people of Nunavut aren’t capable of running their own school system, they aren’t capable of running their own territory. JB