Friday, May 15, 2015

Mind The Gap


The title of this week's missive may mislead. I am not arguing for a studied gaze upon a certain clothing store on a High Street or a mall, but rather something quite different, and much, much more important.

The 'gap' to which I refer is the distance between two sides, a distance that should not be there at all. Let me explain.

In a true labour negotiation, two sides are prominent -- union members and management. No gap can be seen between the two, and if the negotiation fails, one or the other succumbs. At its worst, the union is so successful that management folds, recalling a statement by General Wally Westmoreland on a Vietnam triumph, "We had to destroy that village to save it." If management is similarly victorious, workers will do the bare minimum of work, making life exceedingly difficult for management to the detriment of everyone.

It is for these reasons that negotiations are taken very seriously for both sides, and in most cases a successful compromise is reached. Most importantly of all, no third party gets hammered by being an innocent victim.

If, however, an entity should find itself, through no part of its own, caught in the gap, then that entity suffers dearly.

In certain cases, the government steps in and removes the innocent party from the gap by naming that party an 'essential service'. Fire fighters and police officers are good examples here. There is one other party that should be in this category, one more essential than any other, our children.

It is incredible that a teacher strike can, in the 21st century, still be allowed to occur with schoolchildren caught in the gap. As one noted educator has written, "Never lose sight of the fact that the child as learner is not only the centre of the educational system, but the very reason for its existence." *

Not the teacher, nor the school board nor even the government, but the child as learner. And if H.G.Wells was right when he wrote that "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe" ** then it becomes truly imperative that teaching be designated an essential service as soon as possible.

Q.E.D.

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* Dr. R.W. Jackson, former Director of the Ontario Institute of Education, in Issues and Directions, Ontario Ministry of Education, 1980, p.1 -- Ed.

** H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Ch. 40 of the 1951 edition. --Ed.

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