High school students in Ontario will learn from a rebooted technology curriculum starting next year, the province’s education minister says, part of a push to equip them with up-to-date skills needed in a range of skilled trades wrestling with labour shortages.
“What we teach our children must be cutting-edge,” Education Minister Stephen Lecce said at an event in Mississauga on Monday. “It must reflect the changing marketplace.”
The revision follows others the Ford government has made in recent years to mathematics and science courses, which included ditching a split into applied and advanced subject streams in Grade 9 that was blamed for pushing racialized students away from higher education.
A new “digital technology and innovations in the changing world” course will replace “introduction to computer science” for Grade 10 students starting in September 2023, while a revised technological education curriculum for both grades 9 and 10 will be introduced a year later, the government said in a release.
The release noted thousands of vacancies for Ontario jobs currently require computer science or other technological skills, pointed to a looming shortfall of 100,000 construction workers and said one in five job openings in the province will be in the skilled trades by 2026.
The government is pushing the skilled trades as a viable option for those leaving high school, spending nearly half a billion dollars on the strategy over three years.
The NDP's education critic, Chandra Pasma, said the Opposition wants to ensure the changes are made with input from teaching staff and delivered into a well-funded public education system, which they say is not currently the case.
"We want to ensure that the new curriculum is developed by teachers in our public education system - a system that is well-funded, well-resourced, and where kids have the support they need," she said.
The new curriculum will emphasize coding concepts, which were mandated in the changed math coursework, as well as introduce content related to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, Lecce said.
“We haven’t seen this curriculum updated since 2008 and 2009,” he added. “A lot has changed.”
The revisions should help students prepare for well-paying jobs in sectors that increasingly rely on automation, such as agriculture, manufacturing and construction, the government said.
Lecce said the government heard a lot of advocacy for more STEM learning to be made mandatory in schools, adding the province is open to “working with job creators, with industry leaders and with the students themselves to make sure that our graduation requirements reflect the job market of tomorrow.”
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
Editor's note: This story was updated on Dec 13 to include comment from the NDP's education critic.
- Morgan Sharp
- Reporter
- @5thEstate
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Let's not forget it was the
Let's not forget it was the last "reign" of provincial Conservatives who cut school funding (to the point schoolboards stopped providing soap, toilet paper and towels in school washrooms), banished STEM requirements, and dumbed down curriculum to improve hs graduation rates.
That was all in the name of "preparing kids for work."
At the same time, music and art programs were gutted, gifted programs were severely downgraded, there was less help available for students experiencing academic difficulty, school pools were closed (so only kids whose parents had cottages or could afford lessons learned to swim) ... a passing grade became B (not because passing required better performance, but because what used to be a D became a B) ... and the list goes on.
The net effect was kids with diminished literacy and numeracy skills entering universities, and
print and voice media with abominable grammar skills (now all being folded seamlessly into AI: someone has to train the AI!) ...
And so we get to today, where hs, college and even university graduates can't apply basic logic and basic world knowledge to sort between science and propaganada, etc. Back to Flat Earth societies and idolizing the wealthy ... and oh yeah: buying into extremism.
Education seems to be the
Education seems to be the favourite playground of politicians and educational theorists. Education will not save society or the economy. Recruiting more "tech savvy" students is useless unless society is prepared to drop the stigma against "blue collar work" and employers are prepared to pay living wages to its productive workers, without the endless hassles of trying to beat down unions, or making working conditions so untenable they cannot retain workers. Predatory capitalism is the proximate cause of the shortage of skilled manual workers. Predatory capitalism succeeded brilliantly in making skilled workers obsolete in the developed world by off shoring production to the cheapest labour available (including slave labour in totalitarian jurisdictions).
Many current politicians seem to rely on these predators to fund their electoral ambitions so one should certainly maintain skepticism about their bona fides when it comes to restoring a functional labour force.
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