Liora Abrera Manoim (12) | Staff Reporter
I’m sure that most people would agree that teachers can make or break a student’s educational experience. A good teacher challenges students to reach their full potential, while a deficient teacher drags students down and stunts their growth. It’s not even a matter of good and bad teaching! Some teachers work for particular students, while others don’t. It begs the question: wouldn’t it be better for everyone involved if high school students could choose which teacher they’ll entrust their education to?
Now, this isn’t to say that students should have a slice of the pie that is the school’s hiring power. The debate is whether or not students should be able to have their pick of teachers already on the school’s payroll.
There are a few arguments that could be made in favour of giving students this power. Students have even more control over the direction their education will go and will be able to personalize their learning experience in a way that benefits them the most. Schools could see the performance of their teachers directly by observing the students’ request statistics; the more a teacher is sought after, the better they are at teaching. The quality of teachers would likely improve if the school board acted upon the new data they collected from implementing such a system, resulting in an overall increase in student performance across the country.
But if it’s such a great idea, why hasn’t it been implemented by now? Students have doubtlessly asked to switch one teacher for another teaching the same course. Well, there are plenty of arguments against allowing students to pick and choose their teachers. One is possible abuse of the system; students may choose teachers who are notoriously lax in their marking and classroom governing to slack off, or discriminate against teachers for their race, age or gender. Still, even if some students abuse the system, more would benefit from it. Wouldn’t it be better to implement the idea anyway?
Unfortunately, potential abuse of the system is not the only roadblock students face on the path to having the freedom to choose who their teacher will be. Implementing this strategy is logistically problematic. The school system notoriously struggles with having enough teachers to keep up with the amount of students, not to mention the lack of funding schools face. If there are many underperforming teachers that no one wants to study under, who will replace them? Implementing new systems takes money, but where will that money come from? Not the government, that’s for sure.
Aside from that, there’s a reason we’re assigned to teachers. Timetables are arranged so that students can take as many of their desired courses as possible, but sometimes those courses clash with each other, or they aren’t running due to a lack of enrollment. If students are able to choose their own teachers, it will be that much more difficult and time-consuming to organize schedules. Not every student will be able to get their first choice. How does one go about choosing which students get their first choice and which don’t? The problems begin to unveil themselves one by one.
Although giving students the power to select their own teachers seems like a good idea on paper, unfortunately it isn’t feasible to implement given the current state of Canada’s education system. Maybe one day, if the situation is better, this dream of student empowerment can be realized. Until then, all we can do is fight for improvement.
