Let’s take a break from the recent fire and rockslide and talk about education.
My friend has three preteen sons who have never gone to school. She and her husband live off the land in Oregon half the year and on a beach with the locals in Mexico the other half. They are both university educated. They homeschool their boys.
Their sons are all out-going, intelligent, fearless and self-sufficient. They have learned Spanish and help their parents with projects ranging from cooking to jewelry design, gardening, fishing and building. They spend their days creating and exploring.
My own four sons have all gone the traditional schooling route, to varying degrees of success.
Until university, school has often seemed to me unnecessarily oppressive, boring and static.
But even at a time when school districts in this province are constantly trying to do more with less, the Sea to Sky school district gives me hope. The powers that be in the district don’t get everything right – please modernize and fix your sex education – but they are getting a lot right.
Case in point: The two new programs starting up at Stawamus in the fall: Cultural Journeys and Learning Expeditions. Both, it seems, will take the best of what homeschooling has to offer: outdoor, purposeful learning and cultural enrichment, in the case of Cultural Journeys – and yet mom and dad can follow their own bliss while the kids are at school. The Learning Expeditions program will offer a way out of the high school blues, a way to apply creative ideas in real world, ways through project-driven assignments.
More traditional schools in the district are evolving too. Howe Sound Secondary, for example, has a 3D printer and in talking to Vicki Schenk, trades teacher in the district, I learned students are searching for real world problems they can solve with it. How cool is that?
Squamish is cutting edge in a lot of ways. People here think outside the box and push themselves to be better.
It is nice to see the school district is doing the same.
