Room for improvement
Founding president of Holland College says Islanders aren’t getting the information they need to make educational decisions
Don Glendenning said there’s a major gap in current and independent information available to Islanders who want to make a decision about education.
A little over a year ago, he went to Souris to meet a couple of substitute teachers.
He sat and waited for them at a coffee shop.
“Where do people in Souris go who need information to make an educational decision? Where do you find it?” he asked himself. Glendenning struggled to find any real answers.
We don’t talk about this kind of stuff. One of his complaints about education is the lack of definitions, Glendenning said. “If you read the department of education’s philosophy and descriptions of programs, I don’t think they get to the point of clarity very often.
“I’ve looked for P.E.I’s definition of educational terms we use all the time. I can’t find any.” Glendenning, the founding president of Holland College, recently spoke about the quality of public education at the Inspire Learning Centre in Summerside.
A government, that has a responsibility for education constitutionally, should be asking how they could best deliver all of its services. It could be through the newspapers, social media or the Internet.
But we don’t do that, Glendenning said.
“We do it in farming and justice. We do it more or less in health, but we don’t do it in education.”
Unlike health, education is institutionally centered and people fall through the cracks. There is an ongoing concern about the quality of education services and little agreement as to what constitutes a quality offering.
It’s important to state a vision of what a person should be like, or able to do at the end of high school.
He doesn’t have all the answers, but he has views on how to improve the system.
“I basically think it’s unfair to expect children to make a decision when they don’t have the information to make it.”
Janet Payne of Kinkora feels education is in a transition on the Island. Glendenning has had 70 years as an educator, she said. “Being a parent and always interested in education, it was well worth taking my one-hour lunch break to come listen to his wealth of knowledge.” George Dalton of Summerside said he admires Glendenning because he was always looking for a better way to do things as the years go by. “He has a lot of wisdom and I found everything he said made sense. I think it’s time to come together and support his ideas.”