Seventy per cent of Ontario high school students skipped the Ford government’s e-learning mandate
“It’s a hassle that I don’t really want to do,” one student said
An education policy introduced by the Ford government in 2019 seems to have fallen short of expectations, according to reporting by the Trillium.
Intended to help students develop digital literacy skills, Ford’s e-learning mandate stated that beginning with students entering grade nine in 2020, all Ontario high school students must complete two online credits in order to graduate.
Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request filed by the Trillium shows that nearly 70 per cent of students opted out or received exemptions, with 46,092 students completing the online credits, and 104,313 choosing not to.
“Parents don’t want their children to take it,” Beyhan Farhadi, an assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), told the outlet. “There has been an ongoing rejection of it, because it’s understood widely to not meet the needs of all students, and it is viewed as a way of functioning to cut costs to the education system.”
The office of Paul Calandra, Ontario’s education minister, told the Trillium that the e-learning credits serve a purpose. “Recognizing the importance of technology in our daily lives, including in work and education, the government introduced the online learning graduation requirement to ensure high school students are developing digital literacy and other important transferable skills,” the minister’s press secretary, Emma Testani, said in a statement.
But the Trillium also interviewed a number of Toronto high school students about the e-learning mandate, and their point of view differed.
“I just decided to opt out because it’s a hassle that I don’t really want to do,” one of them said. “I’d rather just come to school every day regularly instead of doing online learning.”
Related: High school students in Ontario will need to pass a financial literacy test in order to graduate
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
