My ninth grade art class was the class I most looked forward to. The room itself was a thing to look forward to – white walls covered with intricate drawings of ballerinas and sculptures of ambiguous meaning hanging from the ceiling. Even the crazy art teacher, always wandering back and forth from the art supply room with his paint-splattered shirt and tufts of white hair, added to the muse of the room.
It was also a room where there were three special needs students with only one caretaker.
When I see two or three of my peers who need assistance with only one person to help them, I realize something is wrong. B.C. is valued for its education and yet it seems the simplest rights are being denied to us students – students who are the future.
Education is something that I value. As a soon-to-be senior, I have seen how education is treated in Surrey. From teachers who cannot give time to each student to classes that are way too long, to outdated textbooks with more drawings than valuable text, to portables with rumours of black mold growing... B.C. schools have it all.
Amidst this mess, teachers are targeted as the reason thousands of kids aren’t in class this September and why the government will be spending $12 million dollars a day on temporary education support.
The government should rethink education in its entirety, not just at the provincial level.
Finland, for example, is famous for its superior education system with superior results. It has a 93-per-cent graduation rate compared to 78 per cent in Canada, higher test scores, and a 1:12 teacher to student ratio (compared to the one teacher to about 30 students in B.C.).
The icing on the cake? Finland spends 6.8 per cent of its GDP on education compared to Canada’s 5.4 per cent.
Perhaps this is just the opinion of a teenage high-schooler and her peers, but education and our right to it should be taken better care of.
In the end, we just want to go back to school.
Moneeza Badat