In the early 1980s, the report A Nation At Risk concluded that the American educational system was cracking apart. The much- vaunted “advances” in teaching were correlated with performance scores, including performance of American youngsters with respect to foreigners of the same age. What the stats showed was a nation whose young was sinking into a comfortable, woozy grotto while being reassured that they were “better educated” every time the ooze rose a little higher.

The usual stereotypes were brought up when the report was released. The advocates of educational reform were called every kind of “religious extremist,” from Low Fundamentalist (turning the classroom into disguised Bible study) to High Anglican (the ruler and the hickory switch), with charges of covert Roman Catholicism flying around too, to be sure.

This kind of issue reinforces a certain bias among Canadians, which keeps them interested in American politics as a sort of spectator sport: America as Yahoo Land. I went through an educational system, courtesy of the province of Ontario, which was nothing like any of the stereotypes floated about. The teachers I faced were actually quite easygoing – provided that you were a co-operative student and sat still.

That was the ticket for educating the likes of me: no emotionalism, either way. No teacher as cheerleader, and no hand-whupping teacher, either. Just an effectively businesslike teacher and quiet students. The only disciplinary actions were saved for students that were disruptive.

And there were very few of those. Even the tough kids calmed down and paid attention when class began.

If you have had a chance to see what the educational rankings of Canadian students are relative to those of the United States, and wondered what goes right in Canadian schools which hasn’t in American schools, the above is it. Students that are quiet pay attention, and learn more relative to students that don’t.

This system was taken for granted back in my student days; it was never justified, nor was there any serious need for it to be. I’m sure the original implanters, being more Anglophile than present-day Canadians, would have justified such a system using standards which would now be called “Victorian paternalism”: an education system that provides excitement and fun is essentially a system for a girl, the purpose of which is to make her latch on to a more sober husband with those magic words “you big smart man, you!” Teacher-as-cheerleader is a fine way to turn a girl into a wife in a home, but to educate a strapping boy that way would simply degrade him. It is the fate of boys to be productive once their curls are barbered away: saying that they need a wild spell of irresponsibility before a job-ridden adulthood is tantamount to saying that they need a wild past before being turned into a good woman.

This justification, of course, is likely to bring up the charge of “sexism,” which is of course deaf to the counter-argument that putting boys in a stream obviously fitted for girls is very effective at making them vulnerable to charges of a more reform-school nature: there’s no better way to pick a fight than to call a guy a gal, or to insinuate it. We’ve bumped up into the same dilemma faced by every society organized under a set of principles: should we add a bit of somewhat unfair flattery to an institution so as to control the people who are harder than normal to discipline within it – such as “conscientious effort in school is one of the fundaments of manly behavior” – or should we be as fair as possible to all at the cost of a little social chaos? If someone has found a way to be both fair to everyone and caring at the same time without being chauvinistic, I have yet to see it.

(I should add that the ‘smart man/dumb girl’ kind of unfairness has proven to be the most durable because most women despise men. The only kind of woman that perceives this division as unfair is the one who honestly admires a kind of activity defined to be “masculine” in society.)

Luckily, the tradition of American liberty offers parents a choice which is largely denied to Canadian parents: if the current mix offered by the educational system is out of skew, they can withdraw their kids and homeschool them. Instead of getting into a PTA cat fight, the American parent has the option of taking their kids away to a more informal setting, with the somewhat acceptable justification that the school board doesn’t know what they’re doing, and will only listen to a sort of parents’ strike, a kind of resignation out of principle.

I can say through adult experience that learning in a homeschooling format is harder, not easier, than the mainstream choice. Since the need to keep one’s social graces in a class of peers is absent, you can “afford” to dig into the boring stuff rather than the sugar-coated alternative. Because the McGuffey method is standard in the homeschool circuit, your social skills actually incline you to the boring books and methods that drain – such as learning French (or English) through reading a dictionary without the aid of mind tricks, rather than through using modules decorated with social angels to help you along the way. This does carry the price of draining one’s vanity during the study session, and for those used to the vain game it can be genuinely exhausting after only a few hours, but I can say that what is retained in your head shows a much greater command of the skill being mastered.

Here’s an obvious example: computer programming. The people that became masters in the field didn’t do so by going through a programming-is-fun book; they acquired the skill by reading through technical specs and boring lists of computer commands until literacy in one or more computer languages turned into the ability to think in it or them. I should know because I saw this as a tween in the early 1980s, and (much to my regret) failed to follow through. It would have cramped my style, I’m now somewhat ashamed to admit.

Once again, it has taken a technical advancement to show that a path deemed ‘wacko’ by the educational establishment is in fact the proper way to a full education. Once again, the studies comparing the educational achievements of the dull self-starters to the “cool” public school crowd, ones that found the latter lacking, were both ignored and thrown into the recycle bin.

Once again, Americans (and the world) have seen what really moves an American-style bureaucrat – not reason or data, but the need to “keep on top of things.” It makes you wonder sometimes if that kind of habit, despite the glamorous image attached to it, is not a form of mental laziness.