What's wrong with Canadian students?

We tend to think our kids know nothing yet our Government invested in General Motors Corporation in the USA $10,600,0000.00 and today 350 GM Canada are being offerd $600,000.00 to retire without pensions as 90,000 GM of Canada retirees lost their Cost of Living increases because Toni Clement told Canadians General motors of Canada was 100% owned by the Corporation . The Superior Court of ontario and the Superior court today both agree it is a Privatly owned Canadian Company. This must stop as we sit and watch Ships and Aircraft being built for Billions as 18,000,000. Work in Canada to maintain a government spending 1.6 trillion.

Plano, yes I absolutely agree that this wasteful spending of my and all Canadians' tax dollars must end. I don't remember voting/ or agreeing to give GMC any money! Do you?

But, back to the concern at hand here. I think it is terrible that Canadian students of grade eight or higher, do not know the answers to these basic social studies questions! What is the problem here? Students not learning or listening, or teachers not testing or teaching? Or is it the curriculum that the provincial school boards are responsible for? Is this problem with students from all provinces, or just a few? Each province has its own education requirements, shouldn't there be a standardized curriculum across the country? If so, that what or who is the problem with?

If it is determine it is with the teachers' lack of emphasizing this information, and just pushing the students through whether they pass or not, it must be addressed. The teachers are the people who are the 'hands on' educators; maybe someone should ask them what the problem is? After all that's where all the education money goes to teachers' salaries...but that's another issue.

Not to nitpick, and while agreeing that it is one of the five great lakes, but, last time I looked at a map, Lake Michigan was 100% within the confines of the United States.

Correct Ken.... and the remaining 4 are only "partially" in Canada... being shared with the U.S.

Maybe the question should be to name the Great Lakes of North America... but then you'd get a myriad of answers like Lake Athabaska, Lake Tahoe, Lake Placid, etc. etc. The university kids might need to spend the remainder of their lives googling the correct response.

Maybe it starts with interested, engaged parents - when was the last time your kids saw you watch a Canadian news show, read a Canadian newspaper or news magazine, vote, discuss current events? How can we expect our students to do all this if we don't have a hand in setting the example?

I have to admit that I am quite disappointed by the stuff we teach our kids at school. I remember my kid studying for an Economics in Social Studies. It basically emphasized how the role of economics was to make sure we all end up with equal incomes and that it is wrong for some people to be rich...it sounded more like an NDP/Union speech and nothing like what economics really is. How many social studies teachers actually understand economics? How many public school teachers can talk about David Riccardo, or Friedman or the Chicago school of economics? It's no wonder our kids don't understand the Economics part of social studies...the teachers don't even understand it.

Shame on you Donna. Lake Michigan is wholly within the USA.

Wonder how many answers Donna had to google herself ?

It strikes me as odd that it has taken until now for professors to recognise the sad state of the education system. Over the decades there has been a continual reduction in the lowest common denominator(LCD) as applied to education, to the point where today no one is allowed to 'fail'. What can one expect from such a system? Society is just beginning to see the impact of the decisions made over the last 20 - 30 years. It would appear a major portion of each new flock of high school 'graduates' are ill equiped for the future. They are little more than teenagers lacking the necessary skills to pursue advanced education or to deal with day to day life. It is time to ask questions as to how the billions of taxpayer dollars for education are being spent.

This also may sound a little like tinfoil hat paranoia, but why wouldn't this fit into the agenda of the upper (ruling) class? An uneducated populace is much more willing to just go along with whatever they're told, and are easier to control.

The other side of things is that, remember when we were in school arguing against why calculators weren't allowed to be used in math tests? They were a tool that you were pretty much guaranteed to have access to, so why not be allowed to use it? Today's kids have hand-held devices that give them instant access to the repository of World knowledge. With a tool like that, that you're taught you will ALWAYS have access to, why would you bother learning (or teaching) trivialities? Why learn where Great Slave Lake is when you can be taught how to look it up using an Internet search engine?

This also boils down to the kids themselves. I was a Geography nut, and took it for granted that others should know at least half as much. But when my little brothers were in their late teens (driving), I asked them and their friends to identify a major landmark of the city we live in. They couldn't, which totally shocked me. Even with me guiding them along the roads they drove often by the place, they still couldn't identify it.

In high school, my geography teacher said that he once was in the cockpit of a commercial airliner (yes, we were allowed to do that then) and he asked the navigator what large river they were flying over. They didn't know, and took a few minutes for them to look it up on a map. So why be taught such skills when the end-jobs themselves involve punching numbers into a computer, and just doing what it tells you to do?

troy has it right. governments want you stupid. in our last federal election only 61% of people who could vote voted. that means more % of our total population DIDNT vote for the current government than % of people who actually voted for PC(38% minority govt vs. 39% total voter abandonment.). when the governement has no one to question them then they get to do what they like. by making the publi stupid and less inclined to vote then they ensure that the only votes cast are ones made by those in the "in" crowd.
pay attention here out of 24 million voters 10 TEN thats 10 million did not vote. because they dont like what they see happeneing and dont feel there is an alternate choice, which is where i fit, or they just dont care. 1/3 of our WHOLE population either doesnt care or hates the govt so bad the way it is they stay out of it.
that is stupid aint it, in a country that is supposed to be a democracy we are seeing virtually no democratic practices. no one would have bailed out the auto workers or banks. NO ONE. oh wait im sure all the idiot CAW employees who are barely more than trained monkeys demanding 80$ per hour in wages and benefits( more than teachers) and the bank tellers who live off ripping off everyone else would have voted to bail out banks and auto, but certainly had that been put to an actual vote this would be a whole different game. why is weed illegal if so many smoke it, that shows again not democracy, but just dictatorship essentially.
the faces change but the game is the same, the dumber we are in general the more those in power can continue to be in power.
everyone use your google and look up "bastille day" this will be their fate if things dont change

Jim you're an idiot "why is weed illegal if so many smoke it" Lots of people drink and drive, beat their spouses and children and commit fraud. Should these too become legal since legality is based solely on the amount of people inconvenienced by rendering an activity illegal.

Hmmm...again with the "Teachers are bad" mantra - 'cause it's just easier to blame someone else for your child's possible lack of committment to learning/engagement in lessons on a day-to-day basis. Having been a grade 1/2 teacher for twenty plus years, I don't believe for a second that students who have gone through the Canadian education system (k-12) don't know these basic facts. Every question posed above was addressed/discussed/studied in my 1/2 class last year and each year previous. It is further explored in greater depth and detail in subsequent grade levels.
Throw-away anecdotal comments like " Out of his class of 35 students, only 19 were able to correctly name the Prime Minister of Canada" - really; do we know that these are students who were taught in Canada? Was a general quiz of Canadiana tossed out in the first week of classes to the 35 first-year students, sixteen of whom were international students who had been in the country all of thirteen days? Geez, people - are you all unaware that Canada has consistently ranked in the top 5% in Global education rankings - for years.
“Measuring up: Canadian Results of the OECD PISA Study” is the first of two reports that provides pan-Canadian results from the PISA 2009 report and provides a more detailed analysis at the provincial level.

Highlights of both the international report and Canadian report include:

■Canadian students continue to be leaders in reading, math and science.
■Canadian students perform well in a global context in reading. On the combined reading scale, only four countries surpassed Canada: Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland and Hong Kong-China.
■Nine of the Canadian provinces performed at or above the OECD average on the combined reading scale.
■There was no significant change in Canadian mean performance in reading from 2000 and 2009. However, only one country outperformed Canada in reading in 2000, while three countries outperform Canada in 2009 (meaning the relative performance decreased).
■While the Canadian average performance in reading is not significantly different from 2000 to 2009, the proportion of high and low achievers in reading has shifted resulting in a decrease of high-achieving readers.
■Students in minority-language school systems had lower reading performance than students in majority-language school systems. In five provinces (NS, NB, ON, AB, BC) students in the English-language school systems outperformed students in the French language school systems on the combined reading scale. In Manitoba and Quebec, differences were not statistically significant.
■The overall performance of Canadian students in math and science are well above the OECD average and remain unchanged from previous PISA results. Canada is outperformed only by seven countries in math and six countries in science.
■The Canadian gender gap: females outperform males in reading, while males outperformed females in math and science.
■Equity, a measure of how well a country can maximize its students’ potential, was ranked as extremely high in Canada. The combination of high PISA scores with high equity demonstrates that there is a small gap between highest and lowest performing students.

Recommendations from the Pearson report on education:
1.There are no magic bullets: The small number of correlations found in the study shows the poverty of simplistic solutions. Throwing money at education by itself rarely produces results, and individual changes to education systems, however sensible, rarely do much on their own. Education requires long-term, coherent and focussed system-wide attention to achieve improvement.
2.Respect teachers: Good teachers are essential to high-quality education. Finding and retaining them is not necessarily a question of high pay. Instead, teachers need to be treated as the valuable professionals they are, not as technicians in a huge, educational machine.
3.Culture can be changed: The cultural assumptions and values surrounding an education system do more to support or undermine it than the system can do on its own. Using the positive elements of this culture and, where necessary, seeking to change the negative ones, are important to promoting successful outcomes.
4.Parents are neither impediments to nor saviours of education: Parents want their children to have a good education; pressure from them for change should not be seen as a sign of hostility but as an indication of something possibly amiss in provision. On the other hand, parental input and choice do not constitute a panacea. Education systems should strive to keep parents informed and work with them.
5.Educate for the future, not just the present: Many of today's job titles, and the skills needed to fill them, simply did not exist 20 years ago. Education systems need to consider what skills today's students will need in future and teach accordingly.

With the world changing so quickly, let us worry about strong basic education - language, math, science, history and geography. The techno side will change so much between when your child enters grade 1 and when they leave high school, you will not recognize it at all. Let us worry about them learning to use their own computer, that thing between the ears. I have students who really don't understand basic grammar, and their response is, the computer will fix it. - REALLY.
Step 1, get all techno out of the class room until grade 7. Why, they get tons of it at home, and that why they will be encouraged to use their own brains. A research project showed that when an individual writes cursively they are using the same side of the brain as they would use when reading - therefore we can conclude that learning to write cursively would help a child's reading - it does. Why is it then Canada and North America are the only two countries in the world (that use our phonetic based language) that no longer teaches cursive. Get back to the basics and help our children.

It's not only geography that is dismal... try spelling, penmanship, grammar and math. I am rather appalled at the allowances made in my kids' school for abysmal spelling, illegible penmanship, unreadable sentence structure, and math shortcuts (calculators in third grade!). Sure, kids are pretty technologically savvy, but they haven't a clue about the basics. My son texts me and uses abbreviations (IDK, JK, LOL, etc.)...I tell him that if he isn't going to spell things out then don't bother texting me. Scarier yet, he uses abbreviations and acronyms in conversation. I despair, but I will drill the basics into him eventually! We are heading for a generation of illiterate ignorant students how have no idea how to spell unless it can be an abbreviation or acronym!

lol on Lake Michigan not having even an inch in Canada.

Poorly worded question to make a point ends up costing article validity.

I teach in the southern US and believe me, you haven't seen stupid until you try to teach college level English skills to these students. Many of them are at a grade six level or below. Canada is a paradise full of geniuses compared to many states, where graduating from high school illiterate is quite normal-- I'm not being hyperbolic at all. shocking.

I agree, the deterioration is there, and it is largely due to the the number of new immigrants who don't assimilate in the new lands. They tend to stay within the confines of their respective communities.

Well, I'm not sure where these students are from originally, but, I can tell you my 10 year old son could answer those questions. He was taught those things in the past year. I know, I spent a lot of time looking over his homework where he had to discuss current political issues at all levels of government. So he knows who the Prime Minister is, who the Premier of our province and who the mayor of our town is. He has had to do plenty of homework on the Canadian provinces and capital cities and major landmarks in each.... If he knows this stuff at 10 years old, why don't these people at 17/18 years old not know this stuff? Could all these people really be from outside Canada? Is that really a valid reason?

The immigrants I know tend to work way harder than us native Canadians - the immigrants have an appreciation for the possibility of a good life with hard work.

An uninformed and disengaged citizenry are not citizens at all. They're a flock of sheep. No wonder Stephen Harper is Prime Minister.

Welcome to the age of technology where facts can always be looked up and people are as dumb as can be tolerated. Even though I am only in my mid-20s, it is my experience with many peers that knowing this is useless. I know it, am proud of it. To Ken's point regarding Lake Michigan. The questions should more correctly read is "Which of the great lakes are shared with the USA?" or something to that effect.

one province, one professor? really? haha

Well folks, I've just reached the "ripe old age" of 70 yrs. I was born, raised and educated in one of Canada's eastern provinces. Came to live in Ontario in the 60's after living in the U.S. for a few short yrs. I've been here since then, and I'm still "floored" at how little people in this province know about our wonderful country!! I ask where they went to school, and all seem to have gone, here, which doesn't say much for the education system here in this province. Now, ask about something or someone in the U.S., oh, they sure know those answers, but "ours", nope, haven't a "clue". So, how do we expect our young people today to know the answers to these questions when their parents and grandparents can't answer them. And when I lived in the U.S., I realized that they dont' know anything about any country, only their own. I find the main issue with people here is our "socialized health care",that's the only thing Canadian they seem to understand. And you try to make them listen that they need "out of province medical coverage" if they travel beyond our border, nope, they still think it should be covered by the "system". We should have coverage even if we just travel into another province, as we all have something "different". That's my three cents worth.

Technically speaking, Lake Michigan is not in Canada so the answer to the question you've written is incorrect. Oh the irony!

70years old and very canadian. Tradesman(very differsified), teacher(college level),bussiness ower,father,I think that qualifies me for an opinion. My opinion does not matter because no one cannot fix stupid and that is where we are headed unless all those that defend all that is wrong get their head straight. One should try and recruit employees with basic skill to do any menial work to really understand how undermarketable our children are getting to be. It really saddens me to know that it will only get a lot worse before it gets anywhere near better. Good luck Canada.

Truth be known, take away all of their electronic gagets and we would really know how incompetent our younger generation is. The are our leaders of the future. Just imagine how our country will be managed.

I could and did name the Great Lakes in Canada. All FOUR of them.
Lake Michigan is wholly within the U.S., and as such is not a Great Lake in Canada.
"6. Name the Great Lakes in Canada."
If you want to present an article on the state of education, at least have the correct answers yourselves.
Sheeeesh!!!

I am originaly from an african country. I was educated there and worked a little bit as an accountant before I came to Canada at age 29 in 2002. I like to compare education systems here to that of my country, trying to understand what causes the poverty there.

In Canada, the curriculum is an excellent one. So is my country's.
In Canada, teaching methods and equipments are awesome. In my country, those are inexistant. However, any grade 6 student will answer some of the questions that triggered this. Any grade 9 will surely answer all of them.
In that country, kids have no choice than work hard, unless they plan to still be in high school at age 30: If you don't have the required marks, you start over again the same grade until you succeed. For that same reason, parents (only the educated ones) will follow closely on their kids work ethic and performance. There, Kids are used to working very hard in school and that helps them to assimilate the subjects. The big problem that will take them no were is they don't know why they learned all they learnt. The can't make sens out of it. Because of the lack of equipment, material and good books, it's hard for teachers to link the educational programs to everyday life or even work on being creative.

In Canada, kids are given so much in schools. However, there is a lack of discipline and purpose in them. They don't like to do effort, they only want to have "fun". And some school boards are falling in the trap and try to keep them "satisfied" by filling the classrooms with all kinds of gadgets. What can you expect with that for a 4th or a 5th grader? There will only be so much time lost. Computers should be taken out of elementary school classes and put in a computer room where classes would go as needed. That will help teachers and students focus on the basics.
Second, many schools have dropped giving out homework, which I think is wrong. It helps parents help their kids.
Second, there should be more books with texts and related questions (which integrate geography, history, science etc.
School boards and schools in Canada should have tougher guidelines on the matter of discipline and teachers should be strict when applying them.
Finally, communication between school and home should be improved. Schools tend to inform parents only when it's too serious or too late. Parents need to be more consistant and strict when they discipline their kids.
My hope is that things will change in the futur, but before we get there, I get the program from the the ministry of education's website and try to teach my child as much as I can.

The top 10% of the kids will know their stuff and they will be the ones who govern our country. That's how society works and how public education works. Too many kids today only want to learn what they feel is important. A common question that secondary students ask is: "Why do I need to know this?". Well, you don't really need to know it to 'live'--but the more you know and store in your brain, the more equipped you will be. The more you use your brain, the stronger it becomes. I agree to get rid of the techno gadgets until the kids are at least in grade seven.