The Canadian education system is deeply flawed and in desperate need of change. The creation of such a system was driven by the needs of a recently industrialized society in which the majority of students would be employed by factories. In the twenty first century, the job industry has changed so unrecognizably that using this same system does not make sense. The current version of the school system is hurting both students’ abilities to learn and teachers’ abilities to teach through the use of standardized testing, a fundamental failure that neither improves academic achievement nor allows Canada to better compete with the rest of the world. The school system would also benefit greatly from classes of twelve to seventeen students. Though the …show more content…
Use of standardized testing has increased greatly both in Canada and the United States over the last fifteen years, but student achievement has not. In fact, Canada has actually become less competitive with other developed countries as the use of standardized testing has increased. The most obvious marker of Canada’s failure to compete internationally is an worldwide triennial survey conducted by the OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation). The survey, called PISA, tests fifteen year olds from around in the world in their proficiency in mathematics, science, and reading. In 2000, Canada was second in reading, sixth in science, and seventh in mathematics out of the forty one countries tested (OECD, 2003). However, in the most recent survey, published in 2014, Canada fell to seventh, tenth, and thirteenth place (OECD, 2014). From this data, it is clear that standardized tests such as the EQAO are not helping Canadian students. In fact, they may even be harming them. Students report high levels of anxiety while taking tests, with many reporting physical symptoms of anxiety such as an accelerated heartbeat, nausea, shaking, and restlessness (Wren et al., 2004). If standardized tests both give students severe anxiety and fail to improve student achievement, there is no reason that they should continue to exist in …show more content…
The school system was originally meant to prepare students to be efficient workers in a newly industrialized society. However, several hundred years have passed since this goal has been realistic or relevant. The nature of the job industry has changed completely since the Industrial Revolution, and the continued use of an outdated system fails to achieve the ultimate goal of education: to help students to succeed in the outside world. The result of this system is so-called “teaching for the test”, in which the learning styles of the individual students are ignored and everyone is encouraged to think the same way. This kind of teaching is not entirely the fault of teachers. Teachers are encouraged to teach to the test by a system that assesses their teaching ability and a school’s overall level of education largely through the results of standardized test results (Volante et al., 2013). When a school’s reputation is at stake if its students do not perform well on standardized tests, this kind of teaching is understandable. However, this pressure to succeed on standardized tests is hurting students, especially those who learn or think differently. The potential of these students is squandered by a system that makes them so averse to failure that they become terrified of taking risks. To combat this system of teaching to the test, standardized