Oh… one more thing

By Nouman Ashraf

All signs point to the arrival of autumn: the CNE, the leaves changing their hues and the ubiquitous back-to-school buzz. It is that last clue that excites me the most about fall. Many people I know speak of spring as being the moment of rebirth. However, as someone who has been surrounded by post-secondary students professionally for the past decade, it is the advent of the new academic year that endows the season with this exciting vibe.

Now, no rational person can deny the benefits of education and its importance to society, particularly as our national economy continues to move away from its historical core of industrial manufacturing to a knowledge-based model. The question that is still unanswered for many is, how do we inspire our students, and not simply download information to them in a rote fashion?

To this end, I believe that we need to move away from mere statistical data analysis about attainment on standardized tests to understanding what lies at the very core of learning: the student experience.

Famed American historian W. E. B. Du Bois once described his post-secondary experience as follows: “I was in Harvard but not of it.” It is a particularly poignant observation for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Du Bois was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University and his dissertation, The Suppression of the Slave Trade to America, comprised the first volume of the now authoritative Harvard Historical Studies series. The other reason for the irony is that Harvard University’s world-famous Institute for African and African American Research bears the name of W. E. B. Du Bois.

A primary measure of the success of any endeavour is its meaningfulness to those who participate in it. By that metric, we need to pay attention to how it is that education remains, not simply a societal aspiration, but an enabler of complete and equal participation as citizens in this evolving nation. I am going to contend that, unless we pay attention to both the pedagogy (how we teach) and the curriculum (what we teach) pieces of the education equation, as a society we will be remiss in delivering on the promise of meaningful and relevant education in the broadest possible sense.

Let me be clear. I am not wading into the various debates that are still unresolved vis-a-vis education: should faith-based schools be funded? Should we endorse an Africentric curriculum in a pluralistic society? Are charter schools a better use of taxpayers’ dollars? Does home-schooling offer autonomy or deliver overprotection?

My core message is that we need to broaden how we view the outcomes linked with education as a determinant of very many linked phenomena: literacy, poverty, productivity, civic engagement, leadership development and national competitiveness, to name a few.

Getting there will neither be simple nor easy. It will require a coherent vision, some honest but tough conversations, moral courage coupled with a commensurate will and a lot of hard work from all segments of society: parents, teachers, policy-makers, students, employers and numerous others. But with the turning of the leaves, there should be a turning of our attention to this most important area of societal interaction.

In the words of Du Bois, “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”

Nouman Ashraf is a Research Fellow at the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College. He was previously the Director of the University of Toronto’s Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office, and is widely recognized for his leadership on community engagement initiatives.