There is a tendency for those who were educated in B.C.’s public school system years ago — which is to say in the 1950s and 1960s — to wonder what the fuss is all about these days.

Why the hand-wringing over class size? Heck, we had 30 kids in a class back in the day. And composition? If kids back then couldn’t speak English, or had other handicaps that left them outside the capabilities of the average instructor, their needs were provided for separately in occupational or vocational classes, where the curriculum focused on remedial schooling geared to mainstream integration.

Today, we are more enlightened, having rejected segregation and adopted a more meaningful and altruistic philosophy: integrate the strugglers, be it due to language, physical or mental handicaps, make them part of the greater educational ethos and everyone will be better for it.

The mostly unanswered question is: Does it work?

The issue of class size and composition is just one of the bones of contention as we head into week five of the B.C. teachers’ dispute, and it’s an indisputable mess.

And, on this one, the teachers are right. We are not providing public schools with the resources required to deal with the increasing numbers of children with learning problems.

Composition is complex, though, for it encompasses not just children with physical and learning disabilities, with their own unique educational challenges, but also includes the pesky conundrum that is ESL, whereby more and more students are showing up unable to communicate effectively in the language of the curriculum.

Sometimes the two overlap, but when it comes to the ESL quotient, it wouldn’t be unfair to label it a singularly social and politically self-inflicted problem.

In July, Sun reporter and online data expert Chad Skelton wrote a story based on his research that found, among other astonishing facts, that ESL students are now in the majority at 65 of the 550 Metro Vancouver schools.

Working with data provided by the Ministry of Education, Skelton also found that of the 560,000 students attending B.C. public schools, about one in 10 are classified as ELL (which stands for English Language Learners, the softer term that has officially replaced ESL in open dialogue).

What that means, simply, is that thousands of public school students arrive in classrooms these days unable to read, write, speak or comprehend English.

And we, through public policy and runaway political correctness, have encouraged this.

While immigration had surely enriched our country, broadened our cultural horizons and transformed us into a more interesting, tolerant populace, at some point we need to discuss the reality that many newcomers arrive unable to speak the language, and often seem disinclined to learn it.

They bring children, and have children once they are here, who can’t speak English, who are subsequently not taught English in the home and who one day are plopped into the public school system with the expectation that British Columbia taxpayers will do that parental job for them, will teach their children to communicate in the language of the land.

Which would be great, if the teachers had the resources and the taxpayers had money trees growing in their backyards.

But that’s not the case, and today — decades after our public schools began offering free ESL support — the strain on the system, and especially on those students who are not ESL, is not only unmanageable but untenable.

How can a teacher do his or her job in a school where there might be 200 children and two dozen languages being spoken, jumbled together in one heap?

And how is it fair to those children who do speak English, whose parents have ensured they are ready for school and just want the education and attention their taxes pay for?

At some point, we have to acknowledge that under current imperatives, B.C. schools are today catering to a lower common educational denominator, leaving too many so-called average students and brighter kids to muddle through on their own because they can, or because the system thinks they can.

Surely parents — new to the country or not — have a responsibility to prepare their children for school, to ensure that their kids have a grasp not just of basic social skills but of workable English when they show up for kindergarten in this province.

And if they don’t want to teach them, or don’t have the means to teach them, then perhaps we need to return to a time of separate ESL classrooms in public schools.

Harsh? Maybe, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. And who would pay for it? Well, for starters, the parents. Perhaps on a sliding means scale.

And, of course, the taxpayers, because the barn door has long been closed behind the ESL stampede and because, as an open-hearted nation, we have a long-entrenched fiduciary duty to support newcomers who come here for a better life.

And because, frankly, we’re already paying for it, for this system that isn’t working.

It will take a lot of will and thick skin, of course, to institute such a radical overhaul, to reroute the path we’ve taken on ESL in public schools.

But instead of the verbal warfare that’s getting us nowhere at the moment, perhaps instead of insisting that we throw more money at a part of the public education system that is shaky at best, why not change the conversation and speak to at least one of the elephants in the room?

sfralic@vancouversun.com

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