“Education is not the filling of a pale, but rather the lighting of a flame”

Jeff Hopkins Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry located in Greater Victoria is an independant high school that focuses on inquiry based learning rather than traditional learning found in most schools in Canada. The major difference between this school and a traditional high school is that students are given more autonomy in their education, and the school fosters an environment that allows for a variety of ways to learn. The structure of the school allows for student’s to research and learn about things that really interest them, while strengthening competencies such as critical and creative thinking. What I like about this school is that it gives students the opportunity to be excited about their education. PSII has a Detailed Daily Calendar that students get to look through and decide what subjects or classes they want to partake in. They offer a variety of classes to students ensuring that their is something for everyone. Some classes that stuck out to me were ASL, Electronic Music Production, Beginner Japanese, and Ceramics. On top of these more elective courses they also offer more traditional subjects like Pre Calculus 11 & Calculus 12, Physics and Chemistry. I think it is great that they offer a combination of traditional and elective classes to allow students who want to pursue university to have the background knowledge that they will need like Calculus 12. With that being said many of the elective classes that are offered are those that you would find in University or College level, offering specific and in depth subjects to deeper students interest and understanding of the topics. Jeff mentions in his video that a student created a paper on Ebola prior to the outbreak that happened in parts of Africa and it has been read by thousands of people to learn about the causes of an outbreak and how to mitigate it from happening. This is just one of the many incredible things that this school is doing, all because they are giving their students the freedom of choice for their own education.

The quote that is featured above is one that Jeff says at the beginning of his TedX video. I really resonated with this quote and I believe that it sums up this type of learning offered at PSII well. Some of the best learning or education I have had in my life has been done on my own time while researching topics of interest to me, not while writing an eight page paper on a historical event that didn’t quite captivate me. That’s not to say that learning about traditional topics and historical events aren’t important, they absolutely are. I believe it is important for humans to be well rounded and knowledgable on all topics. Where I think free inquiry is interesting and powerful is for example taking something like learning about New France. New France is a major part of Canadian History and it is important to know about the history of our country. However what if you had a student that learnt about New France but had an interest in Spanish History, you could say to them instead of writing a paper about New France, why don’t you compare and contrast the rise and fall of New France to New Spain, and try to find the commonalities or differences between these historical events. That slight change and freedom for inquiry could take a C paper to an A+ purely due to the increase of interest from the student. As educators are goal should always be to help our students suceed to the best of their abilities, not just in our class but as human beings. In order to allow our students to succeed it is our job to ignite that flame for learning.