Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I, too, rise in recognition of Education Week and I’ll gear my Member’s statement towards that.
The Education Minister has recently mentioned his plan to review and renew our education system. I support this review and, I believe, it should be extensive. The practice of social passing should be one aspect of the review. It has long been a concern in the communities that I represent. The department has always denied that social passing is our policy, but it is a practice that some schools use.
Students are passed to the next grade, even though they are not ready academically. They move along in their age group, and quite often many of the rest are not ready to advance, either.
Poor attendance is part of the problem, as the Minister knows. He has spoken of it often, especially with respect to the Aboriginal Student Achievement Strategy. Some students miss so many days of school that it adds up to two years lost by the time they get to the end of high school. It is a rare genius who can skip two years of school and still graduate knowing all they were supposed
to learn. It is no wonder that many students finish school without truly being qualified.
I hope the Minister’s review will get to the bottom of it, Mr. Speaker. Why do students miss so much school and what can we do about it? Every school should have an attendance strategy.
I cannot begin to list the damages done by promoting substandard students through our schools, students who fail when they go to secondary school or fail when they get to college or university. I know that a good education is the product of partnerships with parents, teachers, students and everyone in the community. I hope the Minister’s review will produce concrete ways to strengthen these partnerships.
The traditional way of learning in most of my communities is to watch and hear how something is done, then keep practicing until you get it right. We have high standards and we’d like to see it throughout the whole Northwest Territories. Mahsi cho.