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Opening
Today we’re exploring the partnership between parents and schools in a child’s education. What is a parent’s responsibility in academic formation, and have we shifted from being primary educators to consumers? With feedback from real teachers to shape the conversation, we’re joined by John Wynia, a seasoned teacher and parent who brings perspective from both sides. We’ll talk about expectations, trust, communication, and how parents and teachers can work well together when challenges arise. At the center is two simple questions: What do teachers wish parents knew, and what is the real responsibility of parents in the education of their children? A big thanks to Neeralta for making this conversation possible. Go check them out at nearalta.com.
Intro
The world’s changing fast, but what questions should we really be asking? You’re listening to Real Talk, a podcast presented by Reformed Perspective, where we take God’s word and apply it to the nitty-gritty of life. Buckle up for real questions, real answers, and real direction. This is Real Talk.
Tyler Vanderwoude
John Wynia here to talk about education again. I think we’ve done this. We did this way back when.
John Wynia
Yeah, it’s been a while.
TV
I don’t know. I don’t even really remember what we talked about. All we talked about is our schools and education.
JW
Yeah, I think you called it the future of reformed education. That was big title!
TV
You remember better than me! So, but I remember there was wisdom in it. So, everyone, go check out that wisdom before you listen to this. But John was the, you were the coordinator of the league of Canadian Reformed Schools, which I never know the acronym for.
JW
Yeah, so actually we changed it.
TV
Oh yeah, that’s right!
JW
So we’ve become Compass League of Reformed Schools. So that was a change that we made just at the beginning of this year. But yeah, onto new things now.
TV
You’re onto greener pastures or browner pastors, so you’re now going to be the newest principal of the teachers’ college.
JW
That’s right. Yeah. So I will be starting…
TV
Which also has a acronym I can’t remember.
JW
Yeah, CCRTC. Yeah, there you go. We love acronyms in education. Yeah. So CCRTC, Covenant Canadian Reformed Teachers College. I’ll be principal and CEO there starting August 1.
TV
Nice. That’s exciting, a challenging place to be.
JW
Yeah, I’m excited.
TV
But yeah, that’ll be that’ll be good.
JW
Yeah, looking forward to it. It’s an important way to serve the schools and sort of this in a similar community of schools that the league serves. So yeah, totally different kind of.
TV
You don’t even need to update your rolodex. It’s just the same
JW
Yeah, all the same contacts, that’s kind of nice.
TV
Yeah, following behind Christine, we should get Christine on. Actually, she would be a great be a great guest as well. But yeah, big shoes to fill.
JW
Yeah, that’s a little intimidating.
TV
And then I guess they’re advertising for your old position.
JW
That’s right. Actually, they hired somebody. Yeah. So Steve Dewar is current principal of Maran- or of Emmanuel Christian High School in Fergus.
TV
Okay. I’m sure they appreciate the poaching of their principal.
JW
Yeah. No, he’s really looking forward to it. But he’s not actually starting this year. He’s going to do one more year at his school, and the league will be without a coordinator for a year, and then…
TV
See how that goes.
JW
Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.
TV
Yeah.
JW
Yeah, yeah. I might have to kind of wear two hats for a little bit, but
TV
Nice, cool. Well, that’s great. So yeah, I mean, you’re obviously the expert in all things education, so that’s why we drag you back on here. But today we wanted to kind of do something, I guess more specific to what we’ve talked about before with education. So, I guess education is kind of a common theme on this podcast. With like talked about homeschooling, we’ve talked about classical Christian education, we’ve talked about our reform school model. But yeah, I mean, it comes from a heart of like learning how to teach your kids and basically making sure that we all understand the importance of like what we’re doing with educating our kids. So I kind of want to start with let’s just touch on the parents’ responsibility side because that’s kind of where we want to go today. We’ve talked about homeschooling before, and the parents’ responsibility there is obviously like you know do this do the stuff, but from a parent who sends their kids to one of our schools, like if we strip away the whole you know school and teachers and all that dynamic for a minute, like what at the core of it is the parents’ responsibility in in education of their children?
JW
Yeah, so I think if we look at this from the perspective of a school, like why does a school exist? With my work in the league and you know future work at the Teachers College, our perspective is based on this idea that the school exists to assist parents, and specifically to assist parents to fill their baptismal vows. So at baptism they vow to educate their children the fear of the Lord, and so yeah, the… I won’t say parents outsource that because that’s not the right word, but parents have asked schools, and schools have been established to assist parents to fulfill that baptismal vow, but I think the question that you’re asking about you know what is the parents’ foundational responsibility is that foundational responsibility is to educate their children in the fear of the Lord. So part of that happens at when we do it at schools, we do it we do the academic training, we teach the subjects in the fear of the Lord’s name, but there’s a bigger responsibility there that rests with parents than just academic training.
TV
Right.
JW
So that that’s like in all of life, in all of their walk, in their walk with the Lord, that they fear the Lord and that they desire to serve Him. That’s what parents have promised, and the school is just a tool that has been created that we assist with that.
TV
So can we separate that, like the spiritual side of that, from like the academic side of it? I mean, we put them together, and I understand why. Like, even the even in the world, they put like that our government understands the best way to indoctrinate a kid is to put them in a public school and then teach him what you want to teach him. But like, if I go, I have a I had a verse here written. Oh, Proverbs two verse six says, “Train up, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old, he will not depart from it.” Like that is, in like in my mind, it’s geared toward the spiritual health of your child. But how much of that is geared to like academics, like in and create like if you think about an academic benchmark of where our school should be in terms of education is that also part of that responsibility for parents like literacy and like mathematics or whatever.
JW
Yeah so I think yeah so if we go back to kind of the start of the question: Can we separate academics and spirituality? There’s been a lot of debate about this in reformed education, and you know, and I remember my first school. There was a, the principal there was kind of like, we don’t touch the souls of the children. That’s kind of the that was a line that was repeated from a minister talking about you know the role that the school should play in the spiritual formation of children, and it was given as a warning against the school taking on too much responsibility for spiritual formation and responsibility that should be left to the parents and to the church, but that being said, I think it’d be dangerous for us to think that you can like draw a hard and fast line between academics and spirituality. Also, to think that a school doesn’t touch the souls of the children, right? Like it’s going to happen inevitably. As you talk about, you know, if you talk about let’s say geography, and you want to teach children about creation and the landforms, and you know all just even the different terminology about shapes of lands and water, bodies of water and all these kinds of things. You’re doing it from a perspective of the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.
TV
Right.
JW
And so, you know, you’re talking about it through a spiritual lens or from a spiritual foundation, and so that is that’s a spiritual thing that you’re doing. And the schools are very, like the reformed schools that that I serve and I interact with, they’re very transparent about that, and that’s sort of the raison d’être is to do the academic training from that foundation and from that lens, like through that lens. So, yeah, on the one hand, I would say there is a danger in the school trying to take on too much responsibility with spiritual formation of a child, but on the other hand, there’s also a danger in school trying to say we’re not really doing anything spiritual. We’re just doing academic training, right? Because we do confess that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. And so, you know, it’s all, and we talk about you know creation as a general revelation of God. So you know, we’re talking about that. We’re unpacking that with students, and it’s there’s definitely spiritual formation that’s going on through that.
TV
Yeah, so it’s not you can’t really strip the spiritual out of it because you’re going to be teaching it from a worldview either way.
JW
Yeah, but I think also that’s helpful because you know the end of your question was talking about where does the parent’s responsibility lie in that, and talking about setting an academic bar, ultimately the spiritual formation of the child is the responsibility of the parents. So if we think about what the school has been asked to do, it’s that academic training of children, and you know. In terms of like academic excellence, that’s the bar that that a school sets because it views the child as a child of God, with gifts and talents given by God that they’re called to develop to the fullest of their abilities. So it’s maximizing that capability that God has given the child through training in the academic area, but in terms of, you know, we can we can spiritualize that. We can say, well, you know, as a child of God, you use your gifts and talents for His glory. But yeah, like that’s I would say subsidiarity, or it’s below the responsibility of parents. Like it’s under the responsibility of parents under that umbrella. So the school does these things because that’s what parents have asked the school to do, and I think schools and parents need to both be really clear about what they’ve asked each other to do. Right. Like not that the school is really asking parents to do anything. I mean, it will…this conversation will get there, I think. But like, what parents have come to the school to say, “This is what we want your help with.”
TV
So, yes, like in terms of setting, I understand that like teachers in the school is best equipped to set educational expectations, like academic benchmarks for you know this is how good someone should be at reading and this is how good… like but I think about it like what if I stripped the school out of it what if I what if there was no school what would the parents do while I mean we would say homeschool but what if you had, what if there was no system whatsoever? You would say well, the parents would teach their kids what they think that they would need to know in order to be useful members of society, or get by, or however you’d want to frame it. Yeah, but since we’ve, I guess we’re affluent enough that we have this school, and we can set the bar high. Like, what are we doing with that educational or academic bar? Like, do we all agree where that should be, or do we lay that at the feet of the school, or is that actually a parent’s responsibility on a, I guess like in general, like as like maybe an edcom or something, or on even a child to child basis, like based on their age or whatever, or even their personality to set, like is it up to a parent to set that bar, and is that okay?
JW
Yeah. So I think it’s so one of the things that we’ve developed in my work at the league, with the help of lots of people who have more experience and wisdom than I do, is…
TV
No. We brought you here.
JW
Yeah, I’ll just say what they said. No, so we have this diagram that we use. Actually, we use it in like our school review program, and it talks about levels of authority. And at the top of this chart is parents, right? In terms of who has the ultimate authority over everything that happens in schools, parents. Now they delegate some of that authority to the board to run the school, and to operate things. And then you know, as you go down, the board appoints committees. The board appoints a principal. The board appoints staff. So the teaching staff have been trained to educate children, and so they have the professional authority. And so, some of what you’re saying, like some of this this question that you’re asking, is like it is the responsibility or the task that parents have asked teachers to do is to help set the academic standard for their child. But going back again to the beginning of your question, it’s kind of like, well, what if there is no school, and there isn’t really homeschooling? Well, we can look back in history, and you have that, like in the Middle Ages, you have parents and families. So it was only the really wealthy that got to send their kids to school, but by and large, it was parents that just taught their kids what they needed to know to succeed in and around the home or in and around the village and the fields, right? Like so, they learned the craft from their parents, and yeah, the standards were set by the parents. So if the dad was a good goldsmith or if the dad was a good farmer or whatever, then he expected the child to be a good farmer and to follow in his footsteps, and there would be some innovation, right? Maybe the child is seeing, oh, you know, my neighbor so and so does this. But yeah, we’ve invented this thing called the school, and we’ve created systems where teachers are trained to teach kids. They learn about educational psychology. They learn about the stages of development. They learn about curriculum theory, how courses should be designed and maximized for learning. They learn to recognize gifts and abilities and students, and then set standards for them and teach those standards according to curriculum set by the government or by our education committees. So, really, what happens in our schools is, like, foundationally, parents have that responsibility to set an academic bar for their children, but they’ve asked the school for assistance with that and so the within that, within the structure that we have, the teacher has the expertise, and so then it’s then it becomes a negotiation between teacher and parent.
TV
Right.
JW
Like, I have a student, you know, Johnny, and I think Johnny’s not applying himself very well. So then I go to the parent and say, you know, I think Johnny could be reading more complex texts, or I think, you know, we need to help Johnny with his math or whatever it might be, and the parents may support that, or they may not support that. They may see things the way I do, and they may not. But it’s a negotiation of those responsibilities – a parental responsibility for the rearing of the child, the spiritual formation of the child, and the task they’ve asked me as a teacher to help with, in the structure of the school, to educate him well.
TV
Interesting, yeah. So, I guess there’s two ends of that to me on the, you know, how well is a student doing, and then can do parents have the, do they really have the freedom to disagree with a school, like do they have to agree on what academics looks like from like a because like you have to set a standard for what we expect out of a student. Otherwise, how does a teacher know what like they can’t hold you know 25 rubrics in their hand and go, “Wow, that kid’s actually his parents don’t really care too too much, right?” Like yeah, so but in reality, they also see strengths and weaknesses in students. So, are we actually good at that piece of it? And then, like, there’s the academic side, but then I’m also thinking there’s a spiritual side, which no one’s putting on a rubric per se.
JW
Well, hopefully, like hopefully, almost hopefully not, right? Like, in a sense, I don’t really want to, as a teacher, go and say, well, Susie’s faith has really grown. Not that we wouldn’t talk about it, but it’s like she used to have a B plus in spirituality or faith, and now she’s an A plus faith person, right? Like it’s…
TV
But are we? Is that a bad thing to track? I mean, not really. But I mean, there’s..if I was a parent, and you’re like your teacher seeing something, wouldn’t you want to know that?
JW
Yeah, I think you would, but we talk about that. So I think parents and teachers talk about that all the time in parent teacher interviews, in report card comments, right? Like if I say that Susie is a really hardworking student and she applies herself well, or she pays attention in Bible class. She always knows her memory work, or she’s ready to answer the questions and have deep discussions. Like those are the kind of comments I see in report cards from my kids’ teachers, and like so that conversation is happening, but it’s not necessarily triangulated. That’s an Ontario government word. They like to say you triangulate a mark into a mark on a report card, right? It’s not saying….
TV
Oh, it’s not like the school’s asking the church and then they’re asking the house and then they’re going, “Hey, hey, we have the three-legged stool sorted.” Yeah, that’s right.
JW
Yeah, that’s right. But I think to go back to again to go back to that beginning of the question about like is that something we’re doing well, or can parents and teachers disagree? I think, you know, if you’re talking academically, you do have disagreement between teachers and parents all the time about what students are capable of and what the standard should be, and so it’s always a negotiation of those things, right, and how much, and sometimes teachers get it wrong, right? They push students harder than they should because they don’t know maybe everything that’s going on at home and that kind of stuff. Or you have the opposite where teachers are having what’s a fair standard, but the home is not really supporting that standard and pushing their child enough. They’re giving their child too much leeway or freedom or whatever it might be. So there is that disagreement that happens all the time, and it’s always a negotiation. And both sides have to sort of acknowledge their responsibility and their position in that, and try to negotiate that that that standard well, so that they set the child up for long term success.
TV
So, like, if you think about the structure you laid out, where like parents are the boss, it’s like can they come to a teacher and say, you know what, I don’t really care what you think. I think we should just do it like this. Like, my kid is going to do mostly sports today.
JW
So that happens. Like you get parents that prioritize things that you know. As a teacher, I would say, “Oh, that’s awful. Like I can’t believe you would say that sports are so much important to learning history.” Like I’m a history guy. How can you say history’s boring and that your little you know? Kid wants to go play hockey every evening and whatever, like, and you’re going to invest in that as parents. So, yeah, like I think the idea that we have in our schools, the structure that we have, it allows parents to come to a teacher and say that, or to make a decision and say that, you know, we feel that schooling or that academics are not that important, but the teacher does what they do with the support of an education committee, with the support of a board, with the support of a principal, right? So, a parent, let’s say a parent comes to me and says, “You are teaching them too much stuff. It’s too difficult. You’re asking the kids to do too much.” What I will then do is say, “We’ll talk about that.” Why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made. Why I think it’s fair. If they still have an issue, then they have to take that up with the edcom, or the edcom can take it up with me and say we’ve been hearing from parents that you know your course is too difficult. Your whatever you’re trying to teach too much. It’s too heavy. And then you know the principal will be involved in that. The principal is there to sort of represent the staff to the board, but also the board to the staff, and be the intermediary there. So we lots of times have discussions about you know we like to say our schools are parent run. When we say our schools are parent run, we’re really emphasizing that parental responsibility where it where it ultimately all falls, is on the parents. But in reality, their board runs schools because parents have decided they’ve chosen people from the membership of the school society to be the board, and the board supervises the whole operation of the business, and so then there’s this agreement that this is how we’re going to function together. You’re going to respect the position of the teacher. You’re going to respect the rules of the school, the policies that we have. You know, whatever that might be. That’s kind of the agreement that we have as a society about how we operate our schools.
TV
Right. Yeah, yeah.
JW
So it happens within a framework. It happens within a structure. So yeah, parents are welcome to come to me and say we disagree, and we’ll talk about that. But ultimately, my position as a teacher is it’s kind of low down on that totem pole. What that means is there’s all those other people that are sort of backing me up and supporting me and on my team about this is how we’ve agreed that things are going to run.
TV
Or all going to smack you on….
JW
Hopefully not. Hopefully that’s not what happens. I mean, I think sometimes it does, and yeah, things whatever. There’s lots of like, schools are never perfect places, right? So there’s lots of stuff that goes on. You know, teachers get frustrated with parents. Teachers can get frustrated with the board. Boards can make mistakes. Teachers can make mistakes. Parents make mistakes. Right? We’re all human. So there’s going to be lots of stuff that goes on in schools that people won’t be happy with.
TV
Yeah. I’m curious. Do you find that the bigger or smaller schools do this better or not as well? Like the parental involvement. Like more…if you’re smaller, is that more direct? I mean, you probably still have those levels, but maybe not as many.
JW
Yeah. So it’s there’s a difference between bigger and smaller schools. Bigger schools, um, they tend to have, uh, I won’t say less parental involvement, but they’re able to have parental involvement more efficiently, let’s say, like you can you can find more people to fill the right roles. Like, so you’re looking for a classroom volunteer to help with a specific student or a specific learning need. You might have five or six options in the community that you can pick from and say, well, actually, this person is going to be the best suited in this situation, or you know, looking for somebody on the promotions committee. This person is the person that you want. Whereas in a smaller school, you just got a way smaller pool of people to pick from.
TV
Yeah, right.
JW
So you’re drawing on, and I think you do have, probably because of that, like that does mean in both of the scenarios that I described, you might have people that aren’t getting picked, so they’re not as actively involved in the school. They’re there. They care about the school. They love the school, but they’re sort of in the background.
TV
If there’s finger painting they’re not getting picked.
JW
That’s right. Yeah, right, right. So in a in a smaller school, you’re going to have a larger percentage of the membership that’s doing things. Like in the league, we have schools, we have 30 to 50 students, and it’s like everybody in our community is engaged in this school in some way.
TV
Right.
JW
You also have a difference between elementary and high school, where in elementary school, parents are more involved in the lives of their children, and they’re more involved in the life of the school, and at the high school. Level students are more independent, and parents are less involved generally in the life of school. I think there’s, I I’m a little bit hesitant to talk about parental involvement and engagement and parental support because even if a parent is not a member of a committee or not volunteering regularly in the school, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t support the school, or they’re not even engaged in the school. Like they, their engagement might not be as visible, right? But they still might be supporters of the school and engaged in school without that act of service.
TV
Yeah, right. That makes sense. So for our listeners, we got to this topic. Jon Dykstra did a bunch of work for us on the background of this this episode, and solicited a bunch of feedback from teachers actually about what they would want parents to know, or what they wish they could tell parents. I imagine some of these conversations happen in parent teacher interviews. I hope so, and they’re not just outsourcing at all to Real Talk to just start firing at the community. Yeah, but the intention is to give parents an idea of what teachers are thinking and how that they could be more integrated, I guess, in the education. But kind of to your point, like one of the things that was mentioned was like parents being involved, and like I guess there’s kind of yeah the kind of the two pieces like they could be coaches, they could be volunteering, they could be like on a committee, like visibly being there where their names on some documents or whatever. But then also like there’s the piece of like are you actually paying attention to your child at home, and like, does that have impact on like how your child learns when they actually show up in school? So, yeah, give me, give me, like, talk about that a little bit. I, I want to understand like, what is the actual responsibility of a parent, and are we with our schools like how they’ve grown these long, you know, I don’t know how long these schools have been around, but like, are we unintentionally like encouraging our parents to like outsource that to school and then just like be hands off? And what could we do to, you know, not just make them coaches because that’s like an email, you know, campaign or whatever to the community, but like get involved with the kid.
JW
Yeah, so I think there’s a number of things that I think are going on, kind of all at the same time, just in terms of like historical context. So a lot of the schools have been around for a while, and when they started, it was a so parents are making a conscious choice to start a school, and that choice came with sacrifices and commitment and change of the way things had been done. Right, so like my parents were involved with starting a school in the London area high school, and my dad was on the board. You know, six years, I think he was the board chair and minister of a congregation, and like, so you know, there was a huge amount of commitment. And as a child, you pick up on the fact that oh, schooling is important. My parents care about this. They’re putting a lot of effort and time into school. Not that I was a great student or a you know super well behaved or anything like that. But it just it it’s sort of like one of those messages that that gets sent, or you get pulled out of a school and you go to a new school and your parents explain that to you. Like we made a choice. This is a commitment we’ve made. And so when you have schools for generations, and people just send year after year, and it’s like I’m teaching, or you know, I have teachers that are teaching the children of parents that have gone to school that they’ve taught before, and right, that’s a beautiful thing, but it just sort of creates this automaticity, and not necessarily intentional, but the reality is that you can sort of begin to take it for granted, and you’re not necessarily having those kinds of deliberate conversations with your children about the choices that you’ve made or why you value this school. Or you know, I’m not saying parents don’t value schools. I think they, by and large, they do, but the practical reality, the practical experience of the children is not the same as where those choices had to be made in the past.
TV
Right, yeah.
JW
Our society has become more affluent. Parents are involved in more things. Like even even churches are doing more different things than they do now. Like there’s missional focus in churches. There’s more committees, more activities for churches for parents to be involved in in churches. So parents are busy. You know, I think economically cost of living is increasing. So more parents are, you know, two income households. Both parents are busy outside the home, and that has implications for the, the what’s going on in schools because, you know, how much time can mom and dad both dedicate to, to their children, when they’re both occupied with all these other not necessarily bad things right good things, so that’s in terms of historical context, I think we have to be aware of that, but all that being said, yeah, parents need to be involved in the education of their children, and they need to they need to communicate to their children that that education is valuable, especially reformed education, right, where it’s done in the fear and admonition of the Lord, right, where it’s seeking to train them in godliness as they learn the various subject areas. So, in terms of how do you do that? Yeah, that’s sort of like the $64,000 question, right? There’s how is always way more difficult to answer than just why, right? It’s easy to say why this this should happen, but how? Yeah, I think like an episode of a podcast like this can help, like just to remind parents of the engagement that they should have. But one of the things that I have found in my experience, so my parents helped start a school. I went to a school that was new. After for my first three years teaching in a school, I came here to Ontario to help sort of establish Hope Reformed Christian School, and you had a lot of parental involvement, parental support, but not a really not a great deal of experience about how schools should function or what’s the role of a committee and that kind of thing, and how do we respond to like let’s say so I had it that I had a parent complain about a book that I had chosen for a Bible course that I was teaching. They didn’t like the author of the book and so they wrote a letter to the education committee and said, “We shouldn’t be teaching this. This author believes such and such.” And so they came to me and said, “Well, why’d you choose this book if this author believes such and such?” I said, “Well, I don’t think it’s really there in this book that I that particular idea. I like the book because of these reasons.” So then they studied it. They agreed with me that it wasn’t a problem in the book, but said, “Well, we don’t think you should be teaching it because it’s too difficult for grade 10 students.” I was like, “Well, that’s kind of like my decision as an educator to decide what I think is too difficult for grade 10 students.” But the whole experience was like okay, how do parents interact with schools, and what’s my job as a teacher? What’s my job as a leader in the school community? I was, you know, kind of taking on leadership roles in different committees and that kind of thing. And I really thought, okay, I think it’s actually to help parents understand how schools work and how they can fulfill their responsibility as parents in a school.
TV
Right.
JW
Right? So, how can I give parents an effective voice in curriculum choices? How can we effectively engage parents in parent-teacher interviews? How do we, right? Like, if we say we’re there to assist parents, we better make sure that we’re there to assist parents. Right, and that’s kind of the and that there was a lot of like learning experiences through that work at Hope in a community that was just starting a school.
TV
Yeah, that’s a lot different than like our, I guess the whole cultural ethos around schooling too, like it’s like a public school systems. It’s it pretty much just educational consumerism. Like it’s, I think very detached, and I wonder if that’s kind of bleeding in a bit too, like that feel of like, well, you’re just supposed to send your kid, and then that side, like the government sort of has it. They’re taking care of it. It’s almost like the educational benchmarks are almost coming top down from the government. Yeah, in a sense, not the spiritual ones, which is always a point that we have to be watching, but then like if we just view it like that, well, then we’re losing something of like the that interaction that like a parent can have on an education committee, and like how are they actually supposed to be involved in that?
JW
Yeah. Yeah, and that’s kind of really also like translating that through the work of the league is like how do we run schools well for parental involvement in schools? How do we support parents that want to be you know, running school’s well, but I think that idea of educational consumerism or outsourcing education, I think that’s definitely a problem that we face in our schools. I don’t know how much of a problem it even is with like, you know, I just send little Johnny and Susie out the door, and they go and educate, as much as it’s a problem with how parents are starting to view education…
TV
I think we talked about this last time we had you here, John. It was like, is that deteriorating? Has it deteriorated even since we talked last?
JW
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just interesting because it’s. I think the idea of education as formation of a person. I think that’s something that we want to have, you know, cognitively as part of our foundational understanding of a school. So you know, you’re not just sending your son or daughter off to school so that they can, you know, finish the OSSD, get into a university, and then get a career, right? Like that. That’s sort of when I think of educational consumerism. That’s what I think. Like, I’m just here to make sure I get the credits I need. It’s almost being like,
TV
It’s almost like get your OSSD, go to university, become the professor at the…
JW
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it’s like you’re viewing education as just sort of a box to check off right like I’ve done it so I’ve I finished all the assignments for this course…
TV
That’s how I looked at my university education, it was like it came out of high school it was like just go do that but I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I just went and did that and like I think it wasn’t as bad when I went through it, but now I don’t know if I would recommend that. And I think that even in me, like I’ve done it, why would I not tell my kid to do it? It’s like, well, we all make mistakes, you know. But I mean, I think the ethos has changed a little bit.
JW
Yeah, no, and it would be wrong to. I think it would be wrong to say, well, education isn’t a means to an end. Like the idea with an education, like going to university, you want to get a degree, you want to get into a good program, a good profession, a good right. Like that’s part of it. But it just it’s problematic when we let that be all of it, right? And that goes back, I think, to where we started the conversation with like the spiritual formation, and so you know if we if we now come back to like this idea of like how do we get parents involved in the education of their children, and caring about this like if I communicate to my kids the value of education, so they bring home a test, I review that test with them and say, you know, what happened here? You lost a couple marks. Why did that happen? You know, or oh, you had a really good answer here, or whatever. Right? Like we’re having a conversation about it, and it’s not so much, you know, I really need my son or my daughter to make sure they know all the kings of England from 1800 to 2021 or whatever it is.
TV
That’s probably up your alley, though.
JW
It would be! It would be a temptation for sure. But it’s more like you’ve been given the time. You’ve been given the gifts, the ability, right? A teacher has invested, and now what are you doing with that? Like, how are you applying yourself? So, it might look like a conversation that’s sort of like means to an end. Like you didn’t get an A, and if you don’t get an A, you’re not going to be able to get into a good university. If you don’t get into a good university, you’re not going to be have a good career. But it’s actually, it’s actually a really different conversation. It’s a conversation about what are you doing with the gifts and talents God has given you now. How are you applying them? And if teachers, teachers are caring about that, teachers investing in that with the kids, parents should also invest in that with their kids, and that’s really what I think. If you ask teachers what they want, I think that’s what they would say. Like we want, you know, it’s not it’s not so much that we want, you know, academic mastery, but we want them to apply themselves and to work hard and to do well because that’s what really matters in life, right? Like we had a little conversation about who you’d hire before we started the recording. It’s like those people that can talk on the phone, or those people that are going to work hard and apply themselves. And right, when parents and teachers have conversations about what’s going on at school, it’s communicating that kind of stuff, or it should be communicating that that kind of stuff between parent and child, and between teacher and child, and between parent and teacher.
TV
Yeah, and that’s where I think like we definitely saw that in our feedback from teachers is like that that’s falling apart where they don’t they’re not asking parents to be in the classroom and assist they’re not asking parents to like do half a lesson at home because I don’t really feel like teaching the whole thing, they’re asking parents to like be involved enough that they’re almost like the attitude of the student who’s coming to school is like I want to learn and I know why I want to be here like and that’s something that a teacher can’t tell them because they’re at school already. But have we like just when you were you’re explaining the like. That how you go through a test with your kid, like we has the way we educated our or is the way we’re educating our kids starting to become like antiquated? Are we feeling like it’s starting to like miss the mark in terms of like the meaningfulness of what they are doing every day, that like I don’t know like I don’t know if it’s like a younger generation is starting to see like oh I could just get do this on YouTube or like I AI is just gonna do this now so like is the actual what I’m learning at school as a kid and then how I interact with that as a parent, like the parent, the kid comes home, and I say, “Well, okay, well, how did you do that?” Or and I go, “Well, that’s not how the world works.” Like, does that feeling? That’s all that that that feeling has to transfer to the kid. Like, if I say, if I kind of go, “Oh, that’s useless” or like, “That’s a weird way to do math. Like, grab a calculator. If that’s my attitude to their education, then that’s going to be their attitude through education. At least maybe they get grow out of that a little bit, like as they decide what they want to do, and they can see their way through it.
JW
Yeah, so I think, um, I think a couple of things. Like, I have a hard time as a parent. So in my role as lead coordinator, it’s been a privilege for me to work with, you know, 20 member schools here in Ontario, and the kind of people that I generally work with, they’re board members, so they’re, or education committee members, or HR committee, or whatever, like all the different people that are fully bought in and they’re helping their schools and they care about schools, so and there’s lots of them, right? So, I have a hard time with this idea of like, are we losing it? Well, maybe it’s a growing minority in our schools that are starting of parents in our schools that are starting to disengage or to have these kinds of questions. So, I’m going to come to the bigger picture questions, but I think I want to emphasize that I think there’s a lot of parents that are out there and supporting kids and engaging also for teachers right to hear right they might not see that and they might be operating on assumptions that the teachers that they, or the parents that they have frustrations with are really the whole, right? And I would say it’s probably more like an 80-20 kind of a thing, right? 80% of your parents are probably pretty supportive in each other. Are those ones the quiet ones who
TV
Are those ones the quiet ones who are like maybe behind the scenes?
JW
Yeah, maybe they’re just quietly engaged and quietly supporting the school. Where you know maybe there’s 20% of parents that are frustrated with what school’s doing, or maybe even actively undermining some of what’s going on at school, or you know whatever. There’s different things that happen. So I don’t want to paint with a with broad brushstrokes, but I think I do think we’re at a really important time for education. We’re at an important time for our schools. Like AI raises serious questions about education, YouTube and Google and whatever they’ve raised serious questions about our schools. But I think what’s interesting is that in a lot of ways they’ve affirmed the value of our schools. Rather than like maybe parents will say, “Well, you can just Google that, or you know, you can get AI to do that, but you can’t really evaluate how good or bad an AI answer is without some kind of foundation of knowledge and some critical thinking skills. And I think our schools are still doing a good job of giving that foundational knowledge and teaching those critical thinking skills, schools teaching students to evaluate what they’re reading. Does it make sense? How does this add up? And it’s tricky because you may not necessarily always see the connection between A and B, right? Like the foundation that’s being built and the training that’s being built, you know. I don’t know that teachers are always 100% aware of it. I don’t know that parents are 100% aware of it. Kids aren’t always aware of it, but there is a there is a program that’s at work, and I don’t think we often think about in the big picture how this system is actually set up to work.
TV
I feel like it’s like as a business guy, like I, I look at. I mean, my oldest just finished grade one, so it’s like I’m really at the bottom level of this yet. But he’s not engaging with AI, and I’m not just discerning how he’s like, you know, learning history. He’s like, you know, let me figure it if I can write all my letters. So at that point, I’m like, okay, like do your thing, whatever. But then, as it goes, I feel like there might be a dissonance between that the education system and the teachers and how they teach, and then what the kids will be expected to do when they come out. Now, I think they’re it’s closing, and we’re doing it like professional development, they’re doing great work to like understand how is AI being used in the workplace or… How like, where is that going to go? Even with research, like it used to be, the way you would do research in academia would be completely different than now, right? Yeah. So like you would gear your education toward those types of things, but then I see the real world in my job, and they don’t they see the old education system and marrying those two things to be like, hey, this is this is what I need. This is what kids should be learning and how they should be equipped coming out. I make my own picture of that based on what I see, and then they make their picture based on what they the way they know to educate, and then the I guess the more limited view of what they see on the ground outside or whatever. It’s I always tell like, we had a we had a I actually sat in on this the year end presentations for my grade 9/10 class okay for their entrepreneurship class and it was actually awesome experience I loved it was I got the email like hey we want people to come and you know, basically not grade the presentations, but pretty much do like a little like Dragon’s Den thing. I was like, oh, this is this is cool. See what the kids come up with. It was it was so fun, but I think like entrepreneurship class is kind of an oxymoron. Like in my head, it’s like you’re gonna go into a classroom and learn entrepreneurship. Now I see there’s like some things you could teach kids, but entrepreneurship is basically go out and do a thing you didn’t know you were gonna have to do.
JW
Yeah.
TV
So that’s like to me a perfect picture of this. It’s like how well can we actually expect to like match those two things up? And like the pace the world’s changing is the thing that I’m… They’re still learning cursive, and I’m like, well, like we have to learn how to talk to different things. That like we got to learn how to talk to your glasses now, yeah, right. Like we don’t know, like what’s this going to look like?
JW
Yeah. And so that becomes like there are people in education that are like perennialists, so it’s like or essentialists, so that like we have to just teach the same things over and over again. It’s like passing on an inheritance. And then you have really like on the other end of the spectrum, you have pragmatists who are like, we’re only going to learn what’s useful.
TV
Yep.
JW
And I think what reformed schools try to do is like balance, take the good from those different positions and balance it. And I think we do get caught a little bit trying to be all things to all people, but I, I, I think parents like you kind of just described this as like I view the world through what I’m doing now, and it’s like in my world, in my world as an entrepreneur, like this course doesn’t seem very useful. This course doesn’t seem very useful. So, you know, why is my kid having to spend time doing that? It’s like, well, your kid might not be an entrepreneur, you know.
TV
He better!
JW
Yeah, get the whip out. Yeah, we had a really interesting presentation from Randy and Karen Lodder from Adoration many years ago at Hope when I was you know in my early years there and they talked about learning French for example so you know in high school they’re like well I don’t need French is kind of useless I’m not going to live in Quebec or be a government employee or any of those kinds of things but then the Lord called them into mission work in Haiti where you know French would have been a really big asset for them to have, and so as reformed schools, we try to have that perspective of like, you know, education is not really meant so that you can be all that you want to be, but so that you’re equipped for the ways that God would like to use you, and that God will use you, and you don’t know what that will be, right? You don’t know, like you’re an entrepreneur, but you’re doing a podcast, right?
TV
They didn’t have a podcast course. Otherwise I’d be way better at this.
JW
Yeah, you’re doing great, but like, I what I mean to say is, like you, you don’t know all the ways that God is going to use you, and how the different gifts and talents that He’s given, and schools have to be cautious and careful and humble about how much they can prepare students for life, right? Like I read through some of these comments from the teachers, some of the questions they were asking, and it was kind of like, yeah, okay, like it’s good to want parents to be engaged and involved, but at the same time, you have to be realistic that the school cannot be all and end all for everything. That there are kids, like you know, I’ve had high school students, I’ve had both ends of the spectrum. Where I had a kid who, you know, hated school, did not love it. But they have their passion and their passion is to be a goat farmer or to be a, a framer or whatever it is. And as a teacher, it’s kind of frustrating and disappointing that a kid doesn’t love school. And sometimes, like teachers love school. Okay, like that’s what we do. Like we love school, so it’s disappointing when people don’t love it. But at the same time, it’s super exciting, and you give a lot of thanks when a kid like finds their thing, and they’re good at it, and they’re using their gifts.
TV
Yeah.
JW
And maybe I didn’t prepare them super well to be a goat farmer by teaching them the kings of England from 1800 to 2021, but you know they found their thing, and they’ve you know they’ve been shaped in the way that they’ve been shaped by the school, and God will use that shaping in the way that He’s given them in the area that He’s called them to, and you know I’ve had on the other end of the spectrum, I had a student who loved school, and was super academically gifted, and became a florist. And it was like, oh, that’s not really using your gifts. But when you see them applying their gifts and doing this thing, and they love it, and it’s like, okay, well, that’s what God has called you to, and you love it, and it’s going well. Like it, it’s just neat to see that on both ends of the spectrum. Like school, school is not necessarily so… School is what school is. It’s not necessarily going to be able to train people for everything they’re going to be doing in the rest of their life.
TV
And if you ultimately take like the pragmatic approach, if it’s everything to everyone, it’s going to be completely different for everyone. So then you have no standards and no way to. You couldn’t even put two kids in the same classroom. Yeah, there’s like
JW
there’s a guy in our church that runs a tool rental business, and he is like, actually, I’d love it if the school would just teach the kids history and Bible and English and whatever, and I’d rather have them not teach any shop classes because they learn from a shop teacher who’s not really like he’s a shop teacher. He’s a teacher who’s doing shop a lot of times.
TV
It’s the entrepreneurship class.
JW
Yeah. When they come to my when they come to my business, is like I got to reteach them everything. And sometimes it’s harder than just teaching somebody who has never done a shop class, right? Like, and I’m not trying to put our shop classes down. I think there are really great shop classes doing lots of good things, and same with an entrepreneur class can be a good thing, but I do think we have to be careful as schools to realize that we can’t be the be all and end all and that we have to fit what we’re doing into this purpose that what parents have asked us to do. Parents need to respect that and understand that, and teachers need to respect that and understand that and work together.
TV
I guess that argument just comes from like the entrepreneurship class thing is like, well, you can’t do entrepreneurship in a classroom, but like it does give a kid a taste of like I saw kids there who didn’t really want to be there, yeah, and even though they had a good idea because they’re just gifted like that, you could tell they had no heart for it. Yeah, but then there were kids who like maybe didn’t even have the best idea. But I’m like, you’re gonna make it, man. Like you’re probably a C student. I have no idea who you are but like you’re probably a C student, and you’re going to be an entrepreneur. Like you could feel it. Which is like something that I guess you just kind of do all the things like you’re doing courses throughout the course of your education, and kids get exposed to different things. And if I look back on my education, there’s nothing one thing I can point to that be like, oh, that that’s why I’m here. Others like that’s not the case for everybody, but it’s also just like a, I guess a, it’s not a thing to do while you’re while you’re young, but it’s like you know, it’s also what you are working to achieve while you’re maturing. You need you know to put your brain under some stress and you’re and socially and spiritually and like
JW
And school can be good for all of those things, you know. You mentioned that a student is probably a C student. I do feel for kids that we put through our school systems that are like they struggle academically, and then it’s like, well, you got to take this Bible class or this. Like, I want them to take the classes. I think it’s good for them, and I’m not trying to say they shouldn’t. They should, but they’re going to get a D, or they’re going to get a C, and it’s going to be a kind of a fight the whole way through and in the end, they’re going to be like, you know, I’m going to milk cows, or I’m going to, you know, sell doors, or whatever it’s going to be, right?
TV
That’s right. And they’re like, that’s a C student achievement.
JW
No, like that’s. I’m not trying to put that down either, but like there, it’s like, why am I pulling out my hair trying to do this stuff when it doesn’t seem to serve? But yeah, I think there’s a value in going through that stress and learning what you don’t like and learning where your limits are and all that kind of stuff that you know as a 14-year-old or as a 16-year-old as a 17-year-old, you know you don’t know the next 40-50, years.
TV
I guess the struggle as parents is I guess we don’t either. Yeah, and that’s where like it’s hard to you think like oh my kid’s going to be a doctor, oh my kid’s going to be a whatever, or my kid’s going to be a carpenter, or my kid’s going to be a farmer, and stop trying to teach my kids how to. Learn Shakespeare because they’re just going to be a farmer, like so. It goes both ways, like this is a useful activity. We’re all, you know, we should be glad to have it.
JW
Yeah, so but and that’s where schools need to keep examining what they’re teaching and questioning what they’re teaching and saying is this actually, and like questioning what they’re requiring kids to do? And parents at the same time also need to question what their expectations are for their child and how they view, you know, their responsibility. You know, if parents can view, like, so let’s say that situation where my kid’s going to be a carpenter, he doesn’t need to learn Shakespeare. Well, if you can view it as, it’s not really about being able to name all the characters in Shakespeare, but it’s more about understanding humanity, or even like not everything in life is easy to understand, or whatever. Like there are things that you have to work at, and whatever. That’s forming you as a person. It’s not necessarily, you know, giving you tools that you’re going to apply on a daily basis. You know, when you’re spinning wrenches.
TV
It’s even understanding you’re how what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. Like as a business owner now, I know what I should pass off to someone else, and I can see other things in people that are like, “Oh, you’re way better at that than I am. Like, you’re way more detail oriented. You’re more whatever.” Like, and then I’ll be like, “You take that task. I just like because it’s going to get done better.” Like, yeah, it’s uh, so okay. So to our schools being all things to all people, like we wanted to touch on special ed programming because this is like a thing as we’ve got more affluent, as we our schools have been around a lot longer. This has been a thing that like I think parents have I guess started to expect of our schools in in a lot of ways, or it’s slowly grown, snowballed, maybe into something that, admittedly, is a great thing in many ways, but are we doing the same kind of educational or supportive consumerism on the special needs side, like expecting one-on-one’s with our kids, or basically just sending them and being like, “Well, hopefully the school can provide that support.” I’m not, yeah. You maybe it’s not… They’re like, “I don’t feel equipped for it.” Yeah. So maybe there’s some partnering there. But like, has that happened? Have we have we moved too far one way. Should we be looking at, you know, what our level of support is on that side of things?
JW
Yeah. Honestly, that’s not like, as far as like parental engagement for special ed or support for special ed or like handing off students with special learning needs to the school, it’s not something that is a real big topic of conversation in my circles because I think a couple of things. I think you know if we go back to the foundation of schools, schools exist to assist parents. If you want to talk about situations where parents need assistance, it’s when students have special learning needs, right? So they need the expert help in a special way, and so schools have that. I think the tricky part becomes how do you bear that burden financially in a way that’s fair, and what’s been beautiful is in our schools we view it as a covenantal community responsibility. So we’ve been able to, you know, have a high degree of special education support that’s provided by the broader community for families that have special needs. So, yeah, on the one hand, I do think because you know we’ve already talked about that there’s probably a growing number of parents that are sort of just treating school as automatic, or you know maybe even they have serious questions about whether the school is valuable at all, those kinds of things. That’s going to impact special ed. That’s going to be there’s going to be parents that are, or even like there’s a I think there’s a book about having children with special needs. It’s like the life you never expected, and you know parents weren’t expecting to have a child necessarily with special needs, and now they have it, and they have to deal with it. And maybe there’s a sense of like frustration and like push it away. So you know, I don’t like, and
TV
In like an I don’t deserve this type or?
JW
Yeah, or this shouldn’t have happened to me. Maybe like that kind of stuff, and it like I’m not here to excuse that kind of thing, or to say, you know, to berate those kind of parents. But it’s like, I think those are realities of living in a fallen world that schools have to negotiate. And like I said earlier, there’s never going to be perfection, right? So yeah, I think it’s been beautiful in our schools to see a greater inclusion of students with special needs, a greater level of support for students with special needs. But I’m not going to that. That does come with questions. Like I think boards ask questions about how do we afford this? When do we make these decisions about what kind of one-on-one support is needed versus, and when is it fair to ask the whole community to pay for an EA for you know this student that that needs extra support?
TV
Yeah, I guess the board has to decide whether or not they want to put that on the teacher if they can’t be afforded or back on the parent. Like, and ultimately, it’s a parent’s responsibility. But I guess the parents are not as equipped as like an educational assistant to really come alongside their child in some situations.
JW
Yeah, and I think this is this is a beautiful way that also churches can provide support, right? That they can come alongside families and with financial support and those kinds of things, but I think, I think schools do need to be realistic about what they can and can’t do. You know, especially like smaller communities. The temptation, having been in a small school, especially a school that was starting out, the temptation to try to be all things to all people was really strong because if you’re not all things to all people, then you know that family with their tuition is, that family with their tuition is walking, and that means significant things for the budget. And yeah, there’s real things to consider there. Um, but yeah, like schools, I think tend to err on the side of support for families, which has been a beautiful thing to see. And it’s, you know, a lot of times we complain about government and government support, but one of the things that’s been nice, even in Ontario, is the opportunity to access financial support. So if there’s students that have physical handicap, physical needs, the government does provide funding, and sometimes that funding can be used in creative ways by schools to help support other students in the school. So, yeah, it’s. I think that the, you know the original question is: Is there a risk that parents are off, are outsourcing the education of their children? I think that’s there. I think probably it’s even maybe a little bit more of a temptation when a child has special needs. But I think on the flip side of it, it’s also potentially more of a need when a child has special needs. And so it’s beautiful to see when schools can provide for support for a student like that, and the covenant community can come around that and provide for that support.
TV
Have you found the rate of diagnosis has gone way up, and has that caused strain from this perspective? Like, are parents out there looking to get a diagnosis for their kid to even justify the support that they might want them to have or attention they might want them to have?
JW
Yeah, like I do think there’s more and more students. Principals will say there’s more students that are on learning programs, like learning support programs. Yeah, more receiving support from the from the special ed department in the school. So that’s a growing trend. That parallels what’s going on, I think, in the world around us, like I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that’s unique to reformed schools.
TV
It’s unique to whoever has social media. So, to everybody.
JW
Yeah. Like, and that that you know, you bring up social media. You talk about mental health, right? Mental health support. That’s a growing thing, and especially in our high schools, so yeah, I think that’s a factor that comes into this as well. That it’s a as we can be skeptical and say you know it’s you know because society is just going all terrible around us and or because you know everybody wants a diagnosis for everything, and you know you want to have therapy, you want to have support. I think those are real things that that come into play, but we can also be charitable and realize like more kids are getting more support, learning better, getting help, right? And that’s good for them, and it’s good for schools to provide that, it’s good for parents to receive that, and having a more honest picture about you know not everybody learns the same, not everybody is capable of the same things, and yeah, like all those things are. It’s really tricky to just paint with one brushstroke and say this is how it is. These are the things that are going on, right? There’s lots of factors that are going on, and yeah, principals have to, and schools and boards and whatever they have to negotiate all of that, and try to do what makes the most sense.
TV
But so yeah, there’s no one. There’s no one like yes, do it or no, don’t.
JW
So yeah, you couldn’t just apply a hard and fast rule. It has to be sort of a case by case basis.
TV
But I feel like even that, like our schools tend to, they tend toward help, and then they feel bad when the case says no. Like so, I think that’s that is something that you got to be prudent with as like board members. There is a point where it’s just like, yeah, we can’t. We can’t support it. I mean, businesses run into this too, where like you have, you may have employees who struggle, or yeah, or you have an accident or something. It’s like, well, I don’t really want to throw you on the government, but like, if we continue to, yeah, you know, pay you out of our pockets, we’ll all go under. So it’s like a you know, the hard truths of life.
JW
Yeah, and everybody needs to realize the limits of what what’s possible, and I think it’s good for schools because you we already kind of mentioned it. Like if schools try to be all things to all people, it’s going to happen on the back of somebody.
TV
Yeah.
JW
So if they don’t, you know, it’s the parents, but it is the parents’ child. It’s their responsibility. The Lord has given them that child, and if they do, sometimes it’s the teacher, and sometimes that means everybody else in the classroom suffers, and that’s a very real problem that a school has to say. Okay, what are our limits and what can we do here? So yeah. Like one interesting story is we had a speaker come to do our principals’ conference this fall, this past fall, and he was really this is this topic of special ed in our schools was a topic of interest to him because he sends his kids to a Christian school in the States, and they were actually told by the school that their daughter would not be able to be supported by the school anymore, so then they had to send their child to another school, and you know that creates tension in the family. It creates financial burden for the family, and so he was very interested to hear that by and large, our schools try to accommodate as many students as they can, and I think, like I said, we kind of, and you said we tend to maybe err on the side of accommodation.
TV
Yeah, we’ve done that, and I know as a school in Calgary, but then you also get a reputation for being those people, and then you also attract all those people. That’s right, because they know that they’re you’re more than likely to say yes. Yeah, and that’s well, yeah. If you’re the last one to say no, you end up with everybody, so it’s yeah.
JW
Well and then you start to have these conversations about who is the covenant community that’s supporting this, right?
TV
It is a tough. It’s tough to navigate all the way across. Yeah, I’m curious. Another thing that came up with from teachers was how I guess how parents play investigator in in you know moments when the child comes home and says something negative about teacher, or the teacher calls and gives feedback about a student who’s you know not doing well. I mean, I hope the positive end of both of those are just easy to deal with, but the negative end always turns out to be like a he said-she said or like, yeah, you know, do we trust all students? Is that that’s like what came out of me too, or whatever? Is that like a trust all teachers or trust all students, or like, how does a parent… what does good interaction look like? I guess in that situation, I mean, they’re all could have they’re all nuance and like you know, maybe one is drive down there, and one is call them.
JW
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it’s it was interesting to read some of the comments around that. You know, there’s that old adage that a lot of teachers repeat. It’s like if you believe half of what your child says about what’s going on in the classroom, then I’ll believe half of what your child says about what’s going on at home. Right? Like we can we can agree to understand that a child is potentially exaggerating about how bad or good things are on either of that that of the of the team that’s working to develop the child. But I think, yeah, like there may be a change in society towards more like believing all children, and I think parents may tend to be more willing to believe the child. But that being said, you know, as a parent, if I get a call or an email about something that’s happened with my child, I am going to investigate it. I’m going to talk to other people who are involved and try to figure out. But it’s not necessarily like I hope as a parent that what you want to know is the truth, right? And it’s not necessarily you don’t trust the teacher to give the whole truth. But there’s always lots of sides to every story, right? And so, as a parent, if I’m going to investigate something or I’m going to look into something, it’s because I want to know the truth and I want to know as much about the truth as I can, so that I can deal with my child, I can respond to the school appropriately, all that kind of thing. So there was a comment like, “Should they be a private investigator?” And I sort of underlined it and put, yeah, like yeah, go be a private investigator. But it’s more like, yeah, when like a private investigator, you know, like they get called when people are like a spouse is cheating on a spouse or that kind of thing, and then it’s like you’re digging up dirt, right? So, that would not be the attitude. Like that’s not why I underlined it, yes. Where it’s more like you want to know the truth. Just know the truth. Yeah, but it’s so. I wouldn’t. I would not say to a teacher, “I’m going to believe the teacher 100%.” I wouldn’t say to my child, “I’m going to believe my child 100%.” I’m gonna just try to find out the truth and respond to the truth as best I can and as wisely as I can as a parent and I hope that that’s what most parents are trying to do. I do think there’s a growing sense, especially like we want to go back to COVID, and the experts.
TV
No one wants to go back to COVID.
JW
But the experts said certain things, and there were lots of questions about whether that was what we should have done or not done. And certain sectors of the reformed community responded strongly to that. There were sectors that strongly said let’s do whatever the experts say, and there were sectors that said let’s not do anything the experts say, and I think some of that boils over into that institutional trust has now eroded, and it’s like actually I’m a parent I know best.
TV
But you have to just like if you’re sending your kids to a reformed school, Christian school, like you should have a you’re trying to develop a relationship with their teachers to the point where like you can trust them. Yeah. If you can’t do that, then yeah, get on the board. Yeah.
JW
Yeah, trust that you’re on the same team, right? People on the same team might not always see eye to eye or even agree about everything, but by and large, I trust that my teachers want the best for my child, but they’re not out to get my child. You know that kind of thing. So that’s why, as a parent, I’m gonna want to find out the truth. Not because I don’t trust the teacher, not because I don’t trust my child, but I want to know what really happened and try to deal with that as best I can. Everything, right? Like I think is the wise approach. I hope it’s the wise approach.
TV
It sounds wise. The um the policies of the school. That’s another thing that I thought of. Like the a couple of the teachers’ feedback said, like you know, the culture of your home bleeds over into the like it almost be it doesn’t become the culture of the school, but like though if those two aren’t aligned, you have a real the kid doesn’t really know what to do with it, and then that kind of works its way down to like, does every parent have to support every policy the school puts in place? It’s like, well, you might disagree with a dress code, but you can’t go telling your kid that because they’re going to come in dressed, you know, and then what are you going to say? Because the kid knows what you think. So, how do we navigate those things where you might not agree with the masses at the you know society level on every little thing, but if you want to work together as a community, you have to uphold that for your kid.
JW
Yeah, yeah, and this is like, you have an interesting little thing with homeschooling. Is sometimes like, you know, I was homeschooled, so I can I can say some things about homeschooling, hopefully. But like in homeschooling, it’s fine to just say my way or the highway kind of a thing. Parents have full control over education, kids learn that too from their parents, and that attitude can spill over into the rest of life. Right, like so what’s neat about a school, and what’s challenging about a school is that you’re working together with a community of believers, and the board has put in place to establish policies, and maybe you don’t agree with all the policies, and you don’t think things should be done the way that the school is doing them. But you’ve committed to sending your kids there, so you’re expected to comply with those policies. Some of the some of the comments from the teachers made me cringe a little bit because it’s kind of like the school has set the policy, and the home has to enforce that policy. Well, no, that’s not how that actually works, right. The school sets a policy, and the parents send their child to the school. But like, let’s talk about, for example, cell phones. As you
TV
That’s probably a better example than dress code. Although tattoos in the dress code is a that’s a that’s a contentious one too.
JW
Well no the dress code works because like okay so a tattoo is something that if a parent says you can get a tattoo but the school says you can’t have one.
TV
But cell phones are better because the the parents are feeding that problem if they don’t agree.
JW
Yeah so that’s right so like, parents have to agree with the policy of the school and uphold the policy of the school when the child is at the school.
TV
Yeah.
JW
So if the school says, you know, we have a cell phone ban from bell first bell of the day to end of the day, then you know it behooves parents not to text their children, not to encourage them to have their phones on them during the day. Yeah, because that’s the way the structure works. That’s the way the system works. That’s what you’ve asked the parents as a parent, you’ve asked the school to do this, and so you know you support that. If you want to behave differently during summer holidays, and you want to behave differently in the evenings, you want your kid to have a phone. You want them to be on the phone. Like that’s where I get a little bit of a like teachers need to also respect that’s a parent’s right to choose. A parent has a right to choose those things and decide those things, and like accept all the, the good and the bad that comes with that. Right, that’s for better or for worse the parents’ responsibility to choose those things, and teachers don’t have the right to dictate how that goes. Teachers have the responsibility also to enforce the policies of the school. So, the interesting thing about cell phones is like you’ll have in any given school. If you have 10 staff, you have 8 teachers that are like, “Yeah, should be a ban. Don’t want to see cell phones.” And then you have maybe two or three other teachers who are like, “I’m the cool teacher. I let the kids have cell phones.”
TV
I text my kids in my class. They follow me on Instagram.
JW
Yeah, right, so there’s like there’s the that’s the flip side too, right? So like, yeah, we can get upset with parents for undermining the rules around cell phones, but teachers sometimes can undermine rules around cell phones as well, or undermine school policies around dress code, right? Like they’re not enforcing dress code, or they’re not enforcing it the same way as other teachers do, and this is the kind of thing where you know there’s just the nature of the school, the nature of human beings, is there’s always going to be these kinds of tensions and there’s always going to be teachers that want more, teachers that want less, parents that want more, parents that want less, and we have to negotiate all of that imperfection in the best way that we possibly can.
TV
Hire a principal. And then ride him until it’s solved.
JW
Yeah, make it all the principal’s problem until things go my way.
TV
Or stack the board real fast.
JW
Yeah, but I do think, like, okay, so let’s go back to dress code. Not all the schools have uniform. Not all the schools have a dress code. Well, most of them have a dress code. You have to again. It’s sort of like the cell phones. You have to encourage your kids to do that dress code and follow it at school and expect them to follow it at school. But I do think as a parent, if you have a disagreement about that dress code. When your children get older and they raise questions, I think you can have open conversation with your kids about how you feel, but in a way that doesn’t undermine the project of the school and what you’ve asked the school to help with. Right? Like, I don’t think any teacher or school is asking for blind support, right? Like just support us no matter what we do. We have to be willing to engage in conversation with each other, and schools shouldn’t just blindly enforce uniform expectations or you know, do things that aren’t in alignment with the broader parent community. So, you know, if it’s one or two parents that say we don’t like the dress code, that’s one thing. But if you have a broader community, it’s like we have questions about the dress code, well, then the school has to understand that it’s there to assist parents, and and negotiate those things with the parents in the ways that it’s supposed to do that, right through the board, through the committees, through the whatever.
TV
I think the structure in general is good, like to do that. And a lot of times, there’s not because of the representation, there’s not really that disconnect with the masses, like yeah, in general, right?
JW
No, I think in a lot of ways, like, and this is where like the beauty of the work that I have been able to do for the last eight years is just to see all these parents that care about schools and love schools, and you know, if you’re working on the league, you don’t just love your own local school. You love, you know, all the schools in the province, and sometimes you love all the schools in the country, and you want them all to do well and I think, you know, by and large, that’s there’s a lot of parents out there like that. I, we have our kids at Guido, and in sort of in line with this conversation, principals will often quip like the parents that you want to show up at parent teacher interviews don’t show up, because they’re not necessarily invested in the education of your children. But the flip side of that is a lot of parents are at parent teacher interviews, right? There’s a lot of parents that are coming and they want to talk about the education with their kids. They want to meet their teacher. They want to, you know, have that dialog, open dialog, and they want it to be a team that’s working together for the benefit of the child. So, yeah, there’s concerns about parental support. Parental support seems to be changing in some ways, but I wouldn’t want us to be reactionary to that and just like throw the baby out with a bathwater and say we need to do everything differently. Or I would also wouldn’t want teachers to, you know, throw up their arms and say all the parents don’t care anymore. Yeah, you know, it’s terrible.
TV
Not really the case.
JW
There’s lots of support out there, and our structure of our schools is a really beautiful thing in a lot of ways, so yeah, it’s been working well for a lot of years.
TV
For a while, that’s probably why we’re having these conversations. I think there were four or so teachers who mentioned taking kids out of school for vacations and what disruption that causes in the classroom, I guess parents want to pull their kids out and do whatever they want to do with their life. Maybe that’s an affluence thing. Yeah, but what kind of disruption does that cause in a class? Is that a justifiable complaint from teachers?
JW
Yeah, so I think I think it is. So on the teacher end of things, having been a teacher, we had some parents that would do that sort of without a whole lot of notification or without trying to support their kids. So they’d be like, “I’m taking my kid out tomorrow for the next week. We’re going to Florida.” Or we had other parents who were like, you know, they were going to go at spring break for an extra week, and they would come at Christmas and say, “I’m hoping to take my child for an extra week to Florida. How can we prepare them over the next three weeks?” Or the next whatever, however long it is between Christmas break and March break to get ready for. In either of those situations, you’re asking a lot of the teacher.
TV
You’re like, “Can I have an EA for three weeks?
JW
Basically, it’s like, “Can I have a custom education plan?” And it’s either the three weeks, it’s either the three or whatever seven weeks going into it, where you’re trying to think about everything that happens before, or this three to seven weeks after it, where you’re trying to catch them up on all the things that have happened, and usually that’s what happens because, as a teacher, I wasn’t necessarily sure where we would be at in that week that they’d be gone. So it’s really hard to say, you know, do questions, you know, 17 and 18 from the math book on page 100, when you don’t know whether you’re actually going to get to page 100 by that point, so you’re usually what’s happening is after they come back, you’re trying to catch them up, and some schools will say like, “Okay, well, you do that; it’s an inexcused absence, and your child will just get a zero.” But no teacher really feels good about that. So you do ask a lot of teachers, and it’s like okay. So let’s say your child is gone for a week. You have a test. They do the test when they come back. Well, a teacher has a couple of choices: either they wait to mark everybody’s until that child is back, or they mark everybody’s without that child. But then they have to try to get back into the groove of how that test was marked, and so it’s not just the…
TV
That could be a good strategy for kids who are struggling. Yeah, it’s like the guy always write my test a little later because then she’s happier.
JW
Yeah so it’s not just the checking off of the work that needs to get done. It’s also like all the mental work that comes with preparing what happens on a daily basis. So, you know, teachers have plans, but you know, it’s a lot of effort to try to adjust those plans and adapt those plans for the one kid that’s gone or the three kids that were gone. Right, that happens all the time when kids are sick. And so you know it’s part of the job, but it does get frustrating when it’s not necessary, right? When it’s a vacation that a teacher says, “Well, this is kind of superfluous.
TV
The parents think it’s necessary for their child’s development. We gotta go to see Disneyland, otherwise, what are we doing?
JW
Or parents look at it as like a an opportunity, and I again as a parent, I don’t want to take that responsibility or that privilege or that right. It’s their decision, but I do think it’s good for them to be aware of what that decision costs. And no matter how much work you try to do to make it easy for school, you’re putting an extra burden on the school.
TV
Well, and even if they can write a test and get back, and or you mark everything at zero, like to catch the kid up in math, is like, well, you know, he’s just he’s asking more questions the next week. Pretty much inevitably doing more work. Yeah, but you should just be able to send a bill. They should be like, “I assume this is going to cost this. Here is an extra…”
JW
Yeah, that might fix it because I think sometimes, like when I, when I taught, sometimes you have it’s like, well, the better deal is to travel when it’s not March break. Right. So we’re actually doing the Dutch thing, and we’re going to save some money by doing our family vacation the week before March break, and then we’ll just do school work on March break. It’s like, yeah, but that means I’m doing extra work, and maybe if I charge you the bill, it’ll make up the difference, and you’ll just decide.
TV
And getting a teacher to work on their March break is probably expensive. So okay, so that’s good. That’s beating on the parents. Like, stop pulling your kids at school. What about you mentioned off air, but what about the teachers sending work home for their the parents to do? So you said that you notice more and more parents receiving well, maybe you specifically receiving stacks of stuff to look over or you know, review with your kids or sign off on, yeah. You want to punch back as the teacher or as the parent?
JW
As the parent? Yeah, sort of a little bit. Like I think we’ve made school like so. We talk. We’ve talked a lot about how parents’ expectations have changed. I think teachers’ expectations have also changed. I think schools have become more professional, and teachers have become more professional. And so, you know, they’re documenting learning. There’s lots of marking that’s going home, and you know, sometimes we’ll get a package from one of our kids that’s like an inch thick, and it’s just filled with like all their work. And then on top of that is a little paper that the teacher says, you know, sign off on this, or like every night there’s a reading log. Our kids are supposed to do 15 minutes of 10 or 15 minutes of reading, and you have to sign off as a parent that they’ve actually done it. And it’s like the teacher is giving parents homework to double check on what their kids are doing, and so you know that’s that might be good when you have one kid and that kid is your sole attention, and you can spend you know half an hour to an hour every night going through the package and whatever. But when you have five kids and they’re all coming home with a package, like it becomes hard to manage. And so then I sort of as a parent I say, make sure your parent that your expectations of parents are reasonable and be realistic about. Again, I you know I mentioned like school is not the be all and end all. School is not everything in the life of a child and in the life of a family, and the school shouldn’t try to fill every hour of every day of the life of a family, either it should be reasonable about giving families extra time to do things like sports or family outings or…
TV
Having a nap or whatever it might be.
JW
Or whatever it might be. So there’s a comment about like my child just needs a nap. They can’t do all their homework. It’s like sometimes I think that really is the case. Sometimes kids just need to sleep, and schools have to be willing to work with parents. Hopefully, parents like hopefully the theme of the conversation is that parents are willing to work with schools, but also that schools are willing to work with parents and meet each other halfway, right? So that like yeah, that you’re not having unreasonable, not putting an unreasonable burden on parents, or not you know trying to hold parents accountable for how they’re educating their children, but you understand it’s a teamwork, and you’re working together.
TV
Yeah, it’s communication, right? Man, I think we’re like I don’t know what the time is we’re at, but I mean, I’ve that was most of the feedback I think we got from teachers. There was some, you know, pointed, you know, things, but you know, you gotta let the boards deal with some of this stuff. That’s good. But there was, yeah, it’s really cool to see the engagement from teachers on this question. Like, what do you what do you wish that parents knew and start thinking as parents like. It’s not just a, you know, plug and play or like a you know drop your kids off in the morning and you know and hope for the best kind of thing. Is there anything else that we missed?
JW
Yeah no one of the one of the quotes that one of our principals like to likes to throw out is sometimes you have this conversation it’s like where is the where’s the lines of responsibility, and I think that’s really helpful to have clear lines of responsibility and understand. But when we talk about schools, we talk about a unity of purpose between home, church, and school. And his line is that’s not a division of labor, right? It’s a unity of purpose. So it’s, you know, there is a division of labor there. There are things that that school is being asked to do, that church is responsible before God to do, and parents are responsible before God to do. But it’s not necessarily, you know, let’s not think of it as dividing the labor up. And you know, you make sure you keep your distinct task. We are, we have a unity of purpose. We’re all in the same team, and we desire the best for our children. And it works best when we all cooperate and fulfill our roles, but as a team working together for the benefit of the children.
TV
Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it.
JW
Yeah, that’s yeah. I found that that. That a beautiful quote in a lot of ways, right? That idea of the unity of purpose that we have, not a division of labor, but a unity of purpose.
TV
That seems like a a good nugget to leave everyone with, leave everyone to think about. Yeah, John, appreciate it. This is great.
JW
Yeah, thanks for having me.
TV
Yep, just renewed energy toward your children’s education. Of course, it’s the summer now. We’re recording. Yeah, perfect timing.
JW
Yeah, perfect timing.
TV
Yeah, it’s easy to say now that it’s over but it’ll start up way before we know it.
JW
It’s a good podcast to listen to in August when you’re just getting ready to go again.
TV
Yeah, exactly.
JW
Get fired up.
TV
So thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate it, and keep having Real Talk.
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