Lychee

To be fair, children start school when they're 6 years old in BC. They graduate when they are 18. Education is not worse here, it's set at a different pace so you can't draw direct comparisons. In the UK, children focus on academics at a younger age than they do in BC. It's not better or worse, it's simply different. It evens out later on in the course of their education.

Oink

Economic drivers aside, the main reason public education has a different cadence and intensity in Canada, is that unlike the UK, that they don’t primarily use education to drive social class distinctions and identities. That’s why people rarely fret about sending their children to the local school, there isn’t the pressure of social mobility. It can ‘work its self out’ if your child expects to live in Canada, if not, then some extra help on your part, or as was suggested, a gifted program if only for confidence rather than content.

Novocastrian

That's right on mate. Are you sober for once?

ExKiwilass

am thick, please explain

Hawk13

The whole British vs Canadian education thing comes up here a lot.

My take is that your kid may be ahead of the rank and file but in the end (after graduating) it will all balance out. And if they go on to Uni, even more so.

My girls were both ahead of the pack but took different routes. One took the easy route and breezed thru. The other went the "gifted" route. Thankfully the system didn't listen to my ex and move them ahead a grade (worse thing to do with girls and cliques, IMHO).

As for "gifted" programs, my youngest went that route. How to explain - most kids will be taking basic mathematics were as my kid was in a class with others taking pre-calculus. She did the same in sciences. Not sure if there is a "gifted" English program.

Novocastrian

In Ontario there is.

JonboyE

Being sufficiently educated to pass as a toff is one of the few ways * a working class person can escape a life of grinding servitude.

* becomming sports or rock star are others.

Oink

Because British education, like the wider society, is based on class discrimination and operates through processes that seek to classify students into social categories, eg upper, middle and lower or superior and failed. As such social class functions to privilege some and discriminate against others. Class operates in opposition to self-definition and acts to determine individual identity. Life chances as such are not constructed through ones own effort but through heredity accident. Education is the anvil where these heredity outcomes are beaten into shape.

CanadaJimmy

Which is why the UK is still ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for social mobility.

Anyway to the OP, sorry to hear about your bad experience living in Port Moody. I had always perceived it as a somewhat exclusive place, being a very small city and having comparatively high house prices. I witnessed some hateful rascism towards an asian family one time I was there ("go back to your country" etc.) which I was quite shocked at and at the time assumed was just that one person, but perhaps it is reflective of the backward thinking you mentioned in your initial post.

In any case I'm kind of not that surprised that you find it boring, there's not really any interesting things to do near by as there are in other parts of metro vancouver, asides from the waterfront. All I can say is don't judge the whole province on one place - every city and town is different and has it's own pros and cons and perhaps you will find one that suits you better, if you decide to move.

In regards to your general complaints about costs of things, MSP is a nuisance to have to pay, but we do pay lower income taxes than say the UK which is how the NHS is paid for. Taxes and enviro fees are annoying too at first, but eventually you will figure out where the best/cheapest places to shop are so they don't matter so much. You can also avoid enviro fees by shopping in the US instead

ExKiwilass

So when (some) expats complain their childrens' education in Canada is inferior to the UK, what they really mean is their child isn't getting some sort of special treatment based on class?

Oink

Everyone wants the best for their kids, it just education in the UK plays such an important role in social class formation and identity, that they’ve learnt the type of school a child attends is important for future ‘success’. There’s a reason the upper classes fork out out thousands of pounds in schools fees, or the middle classes buy homes in certain catchment areas, they feel its an investment. The lack of intensity and competition within and between schools here, I believe makes UK expats feel the quality of instruction is somehow lacking. Schooling in Canada, apart from the obvious, plays a different role in society. Public education by its nature is a conservative institution, it instills the values of the wider culture. Thus here, it’s far more about turning children of immigrants into some unified and thus compliment version of what it is to be a Canadian. If a child is going to grow up here and live here as an adult, there is nothing, ceteris paribus, wrong with putting them in the system of a major Canadian school district.

ExKiwilass

Very interesting...explains a lot. I don't see there's any advantage to private schools here - none of the private school grads I know have set the world on fire any more than the state ones. But perhaps in the UK it's necessary.

JonboyE

The town we used to live in before we moved to Canada had perfectly good secondary schools (in the State system) and a minor public school (in English English, this means a private school). Many parents would treat you as tantamount to a child abuser if you did not pauper yourself to send your children to the public school. They considered the benefits of being taught classics, a posh accent, and a network that gave access to the higher echelons of government, banking and the professions were the very least you could do for your children.

I think Lychee put it perfectly above, "it's not better or worse, it's simply different." I don't think that applies to just education. I do accept that that is an epiphany that comes earlier to some than to others.

Edit: or what Oink says.

Novocastrian

OK but before we get all lovey-dovey here, there is a thin skein of privileged schooling here too. In Toronto it's epitomized by Upper Canada College. Once the bastion of "old money" but now no doubt the bailliwick of Russian plutocrats' sprogs.

Such is capitalism.

dbd33

My corporate lawyer sent his children to UCC (and the girl's version, the name of which I've forgotten). At the time he said he did it so they'd have good contacts. I suspect it worked, they went to the US for undergrad on tennis scholarships, studied nothing, and then went to law schools in Canada.

I queued all night to get one of my children into what was then considered the better school in the area, no one else in the queue was English so the competitive view of education isn't an exclusively ethnic one.

In the event, she didn't go there but to a snobbier, though state funded, school where the students were specifically coached in the manners of the better people in Canada; where there were penalties for speaking with the accent, or manner of expression, of oiks. The board in the hall listing last year's graduates in order of scholarship money raised suggested to me that the school was not about woolly ideas of forming a Canadian culture (ha, talk about flogging a dead horse!) but about winning at school. That's what we, the vicariously living parents, wanted.

I understand that education is Oink's business and cannot tell how far his tongue is in cheek above but my experience is not that Canadian schools are equal and children blissfully bumble along. It is that the parents pay through the nose for a house on the west side of Vic Park so as be in the Toronto, and not Scarboro, school district and that their children are bent over the books at the convenience store counter late into the night. Their parents aint come here for the scenery, they're here for a better life for their kids and the kids are damn well going to get it by trampling over everyone else's.