SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Promoting Failure

This National Post column refers to several recent studies suggesting that fewer and fewer Canadian high school graduates are adequately prepared for university. The column assigns primary blame to a policy in the early grades whereby students are automatically promoted to the next grade regardless of whether they have a prayer of being able to do the work there. As a result, high schools are receiving hordes of woefully-unprepared students, giving the high schools no choice but to water down their standards.

School for Thought agrees that automatic promotion is a large part of the problem, but we’d also like to make the point that the reason so many students need the policy is that they have been so poorly taught. If better teaching methods were being used in the early grades, there would be much less scope for automatic promotion in the elementary grades, much less watering down in high school, and many fewer unprepared high school graduates.