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I’ve got some great news for everyone. According to the Canadian Council on Learning, Canada is near the top of the list in both Mathematics and Reading proficiency test scores. They also report that in recent years high school drop out rates have been declining in most of the provinces.

For most of us I'm sure this is very great and welcome news. For some reason though, I personally feel that Canada is slipping behind in the areas of both early childhood education and Kindergarten to Grade 12. I have spent the last three years of my life overseas teaching English to students in Asia. While I was in those schools, I experienced something that I never felt when I was a student here in Ontario. The students know that they have to learn and they are willing to do what ever it takes to complete school successfully.

As mentioned the proficiency test scores in reading and mathematics are high compared with the rest of the world. And the high school drop out rate has dropped from a nation wide 18% in 1991 to 12% in 1999. Federal Liberal party leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy recently said ''If you look at the equalization premise in the Constitution it is about comparable standards. We don't even know if we have comparable standards. What we have is comparable funding, but what we don't have is the result. And that is going to hold us back.'' I think what he is trying to say is that even though now we are ahead of the pack in these critical areas of education, but unless we continue to adjust and refine our standards and curriculums we will eventually find ourselves past by other countries.

Most of my unease comes from the following three sources; teachers, parents, and mostly, the students themselves. According to the responsibility guidelines legislated in the Education Act of 1990 provided by the Ministry of Education for the Government of Ontario we can find out what each of these three groups of people are responsible for.

First let’s look at the teachers. Teachers are responsible for planning and teaching classes, encouraging students in their studies, maintaining classroom discipline, demonstrating good citizenship, and acting as teacher-advisors for students in grades 7 – 11. This seems like a very full list of responsibilities and if teachers were living up to them I wouldn’t have any complaints about it, but even thought teachers are doing well in planning, teaching and maintaining classroom discipline, at least as good as teachers in earlier days, I believe that as teacher-advisors they are not doing as well to assist today’s Canadian students in understanding the global environment that they are in.

Second, again according to the Education Act from the Ministry of Education, the responsibility of the parent is; ensuring their children attend school. That’s it. I guess that the rest of the “responsibilities” of the parents are simply social expectations such as, helping with homework, mentoring, being a role model. But how can we tell if parents are measuring up to the standards that we would expect them too? Answer, we can’t really. All we can do is, expect parents to encourage their children to live up to their true potential. To many times when I was growing up did I think and hear “I’m an English student not a math student” or “she is strong in math, but her English is weak.” I really believe that this is a wrong approach to the whole thing. I think a true way to look at it is; she is lazy in English or he is lazy in math. After having been in schools in other countries and talking to students I really think that all students are capably to do well in all subjects but due to the way our education system and our minds are set, as long as our children do well in one discipline we think that is acceptable and good enough. With the changing of the global community this mind set may not do us any good in the future.

Lastly, I’d like to mention the responsibility of the students according the Ministry of Ontario. The students themselves are responsible for attending class, taking examinations, and exercising self-discipline. As we can see from the reports released by both the Canadian Council of Learning and the Canadian Education Statistics Council drop out rates are declining, so the students are attending the classes, and exam results are excellent, so they are taking the test. The real fault of the students is coming in the areas of self discipline. I think that students these days, myself included, don’t quite realize that they are no longer completing merely with their fellow class mates for the jobs of tomorrow, but they are now competing in the world market place for their careers. We as Canadians are not preparing ourselves to keep up with the students in other countries.

I think that Tim Hearn, CEO of Imperial Oil Limited conceptualized it well when he said “Today's and yesterday's accomplishments provide no guarantee of tomorrow's success.” Just because we are doing well today, doesn’t mean that we will continue to be at the fore-front in the future. The future of our children can be no more important to anyone than the children themselves. They have to understand that they are not privileged with guaranteed success in the future and will have to compete with an ever increasing pool of human resources.

What can we do to make sure of our continued prosperity? Well that is simple to understand but difficult to make a reality. We must all work together to make sure our students live up to their full potential, the responsibility falls on everyone. We can’t expect politicians and teachers to do everything. Parents and more importantly students have to want to learn. They have to want to do the best they can. And they have to be willing to do what ever they have to, to be successful.