Rescuing the Future | classroom size | will we ever learn?

This morning I watched a video off students in France rioting. About what? The core dispute seems to be the deterioration of education. In particular, they are objecting to increasing class sizes.

I couldn’t help remembering a day in 1957, when, sitting in a class of thirty, we listened to our teacher, dear Mr Waxman, one of the teachers I most liked, tell us how studies had shown that the fewer students there were in a class, the higher the average grade achieved was. Because of this, he said, a plan was now in the works to lower class sizes in Ontario, our province in Canada. He expected that as we advanced through the system, we were going to be among  the first students to benefit from this.

Well, it never happened. And here we are almost 70 years later, doing the same thing, year after year, big classes more or less everywhere, in spite of always knowing that smaller class sizes would be better.

It has long been known that a country’s economic development improves as the education level of its citizens improves. In John Kenneth Galbraith’s A Journey through Economic Time, which I’m currently reading, he talks of how the Depression of 1929-1939, by injuring education, helped keep the Depression going year after year.

I can’t help remembering something in the 1970s, at York University, Toronto,  when I studied the Anglo-Saxon language (also known as ‘Old English’) for two years. In the first year the class had about twenty students. Presumably because that language is difficult to learn (despite being a fascinating window into the past) in the second year there were only two students, me and one other young man who became a good friend of mine, and went on to become a successful lawyer.

Partly due of course to the professor, Cyril Smetana, who was also a Roman Catholic Priest, I have often said that more learning took place in that class than in any other class I was ever in.

Nevertheless, then, in the 1980s and ’90s, I  had to watch my two daughters go through our school system in the same class sizes I knew in the ’50s and ’60s.

In his book, Galbraith says that one of the things to be learned in the study of the twentieth century, or any other century, is the “primal role of stupidity in shaping the course of history.”