Larger high school classes prepare teens for the real world and boost their resiliency, Education Minister Lisa Thompson says.

“We’re hearing from professors and employers alike that they are lacking coping skills and they are lacking resiliency,” she said Wednesday on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning.

“By increasing class sizes in high school, we are preparing them for the reality of post-secondary, as well as the world of work.”

Thompson’s comment drew the ire of educators, with one calling it “outlandish.”

“There is no evidence that larger class sizes increase resiliency,” said Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, adding that as class sizes have shrunk in recent years, student achievement and graduation rates have shot up.

The minister, he said, “hedges, obfuscates and spins” to avoid talking about the cuts being made to education, accusing the Ford government of being “willing to sacrifice quality” to save money.

Last Friday, Thompson unveiled a number of education reforms, including hiking average class sizes in secondary schools from 22 to 28.

Because those are averages, many classes for teens are already well into the 30s, which offsets smaller, specialized classes — and educators worry classes could soon hit 40.

Thompson said the bigger classes will be phased in over the next four years, and promised no teacher will be laid off — despite estimates from critics that more than 10,000 positions will be eliminated.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath accused the Ford government of cutting $1 billion from education, “cramming more students into crowded classrooms” and turning the system into the “Hunger Games.”

“I mean, if students are being told they’ve got to make it on their own, they’ve got to fight for (teacher) attention, the government is bringing the Hunger Games into our schools,” she said, referring to the popular books and movies about a dystopian society where youth are forced to fight one another to the death.

The government has estimated it will save about $250 million in the first year alone with the loss of teaching positions.

When asked to explain the resiliency comment at Queen’s Park on Wednesday, Thompson said “it’s coming from consultation that we did through the fall and into the spring — we heard from employers loud and clear that their new hires, their young hires, were lacking resiliency and coping skills.”

She cited the example of one young candidate who couldn’t handle a job interview, and cried.

“The employer was emphatic that this young person was a bright light and a good hire,” Thompson told reporters. “But again, they haven’t had that exposure, the coping skills to deal with stressful situations and so we need to make sure that students have an environment whereby they are communicating, they are learning how to discuss difficult subject areas and working through with people.”

When asked if she was saying larger classes mean stressful situations, she said she rejected that premise.

“What I’m saying is what we’re hearing is when we take a look at aligning our mature students in high school with class sizes with other jurisdictions across Canada, we’re enabling more group work, we’re enabling more opportunities for people to work with each other and actually build the skills that employers are looking for.”

Thompson also said teachers have told her that for group work, or teamwork, having between 26 and 28 students is the “ideal number.”

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Liz Stuart, president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association, said “the huge concern for us is the impact it’s going to have on the programming made available for students” with the estimated loss of about 5,000 Catholic teachers alone over the next four years.

The move, she added, “will negatively impact students every day in schools” and will especially hurt smaller, rural schools that may no longer have the staff to offer a class like Grade 12 physics.

“In the past, because the board had a 22-to-1 ratio, it may have been able to make that happen,” she said. “Now, it will be increasingly difficult to do that.”