Canadian Students’ Decline in Writing, Thinking Skills Amid Rise of Ideological Education Worries Profs

Over the past decade or so, professors and students at various universities have engaged in self-censorship, coerced into conformity by rules and expectations that have made them not dare to speak controversial ideas, writes Mark Mercer. (Katherine Daly Morris/Shutterstock)

Some Canadian political science professors are concerned about their students’ inability to write good essays due to poor knowledge and literacy and the ideological bent in academia.

Travis Smith, a political science professor at Concordia University in Montreal, said he and his colleagues began noticing a “precipitous decline” in the quality of students’ writing roughly 10 years ago.

“We figured out it was because the cohort matriculating had been educated following some substantial curriculum change growing up,” he told The Epoch Times.

Smith said during his time as an undergraduate student, professors would give a list of topics and say no more.

“Nowadays, the students expect in excruciating detail as much information as they possibly can to make sure that the essays that they write are correct and safe and complete, with no risk involved … as if writing an essay were executing a program instead of an adventure in critical thinking that [has] no prescribed conclusion.”

He believes part of the problem is that students have too often been told what to think instead of how to think.

“Education has become highly ideological,” he said.

He noted that he often gets asked, “Professor Smith, what does it mean when you say you want us to use our critical thinking skills?”

“When I explain to them that they have no stake in giving me the answer that they think I agree with, the fact I would rather they argued something that I hadn’t thought of before, or maybe even that is different from the perspective I gave in class, they’re not sure what to make of that.”

His students “rise to the challenge” when given this opportunity, Smith said, but he’s concerned about a generation of students who will not.

“Our failure to train students in the use of rhetoric has made our entire society susceptible to bad arguments, or real misinformation communicated in an authoritative fashion,” he said.

‘Silent Stares’

The most strident concerns came from a professor in Western Canada, who for professional reasons didn’t want to reveal his name or institution.

“I’m teaching graduate students … telling them how to write essays. ... But what’s even scarier is that they tell me I’m the first person ever to do this,” Smith said.

“They’ve gone through all of high school and then entire degrees that are at publicly funded Canadian universities without any of this. ... I’m seeing institutional failure.”

Smith said universities don’t grasp the problem and focus more on issues like race-based hiring or different kinds of learning methodologies. He saw this disconnect at a professors’ conference.

“The profs are talking about experiential learning, and this and that,” and when he shared that his students know nothing about how Canada works and can’t write sentences, “there was just this silence.”

This “catastrophe” was repeated in his graduate-level political science class, he said, where “the knowledge level was really astonishingly low.”

When he asked if anyone could name a past or present Canadian Supreme Court justice, or explain what habeas corpus meant, he got silent stares.

In 2019, researchers from York University, Western University, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Toronto polled students on confidence levels in writing, test taking, analysis, time and group management, research, presentation, and numeracy skills. They found that only about 44 percent of students believed they had the skills required to do well, while 41 percent were “at risk” due to limited levels of basic skills, and 16 percent were “dysfunctional,” lacking nearly all of the skills needed for higher learning.

High school marks were a poor barometer for students’ upcoming challenges, the researchers noted. Sixty-three percent of “functional” students earned grades of A or A+, but so did 56 percent of the at-risk students and 45 percent of the dysfunctional students.

‘Very Little Knowledge’

At the University of Vancouver Island, professor of liberal studies and political studies David Livingstone blames student ignorance on the “discovery learning” teaching approach. He says this approach, championed by John Dewey nearly 100 years ago, has been proven inferior in decades of studies but somehow keeps re-emerging as a trend in teacher education.

“What it says is students learn better not by having facts crammed into their head. They learn things much better, and much deeper, if they begin to discover these things for themselves,” Livingstone explained in an interview.

He says the approach results in knowledge gaps he’s seeing in his students.

“The mechanics of writing—that you can fairly quickly fix, with a few lectures or some examples or working with them. But they do struggle to come up with interesting arguments. They don’t have very much background knowledge to pull from.”

A fresh example occurred on the day of the interview. None of his students knew the Liberals received less than 33 percent of the vote in the 2021 federal election.

“They said, ‘How is that possible? Like, that’s not even a third.’ I [then explained] first past the post and how elections work. They had no idea,” Livingstone said.

“The students who come have very little knowledge of history and very little knowledge of how the Canadian government system is supposed to work.”

The B.C. government launched curriculum changes in 2015 to encourage what it called a “personalized learning” and “self-directed learning” approach. But provincial scores three years later saw a decline in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test rankings, noted a Fraser Institute blog post in 2019.

PISA is an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) standardized assessment of reading, mathematics, and science skills conducted globally every three years for 15-year-old students.

“In 2015, the province ranked first in reading (536), second (539) after Alberta (541) in science, and second (522) after Quebec (544) in math. Three years later B.C. has fallen to fourth place in reading (519), science (517) and math (504)—a disturbing collapse,” the Fraser Institute said.

Livingstone says the drop in scores could be connected to the curriculum change.

The decline was observed not only in B.C. “Overall, though, average provincial scores declined by five points in math, six points in reading, and nine points in science,” the Fraser Institute noted.

Alberta has drafted a new elementary-school curriculum, and Education Minister Adriana LaGrange told reporters in March 2021 that “they [parents] told us they wanted to leave behind educational fads and unproven methods of discovery or inquiry learning.”

Livingstone says “they clearly signalled that they understood the discovery learning approach had been tried but doesn’t work, that students do need content, and they need it in an organized, structured, and laddered way.”