Arviat

Arviat

 By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 07, 04 Qudrat, 164 BE

 
 A couple of years ago Grace, a former member of our Haldimand Baha'i community, moved to Arviat, Nunavut, formerly Eskimo Inlet, Northwest Territories, in order to live with the Inuit, formerly known as Eskimos. Then on Sunday we said goodbye to Gale, who, with her husband Mike, is following Grace to Arviat. Grace is a school principal and Gale is a public servant, but she plans to work there as a teacher. I do not know either of them very well, but since our goodbye conversation at the feast of Qudrat I have not been able get my mind out of the far north.

 It has been rainy the past week and though I have not had a full scale attack, the incessant migraine has dogged me and weighed down my brain with a thousand-ton chain. It is pretty clear that what I feared is the case, I am not cured, not free of this burden, my return to relatively normal health was due to the driest summer in over fifty years. The idea of escaping to the north and a drier climate is not new. In 1979 I spent the fall working as a night shift security guard in a gold mine in Val d'Or, Quebec. Unfortunately, I felt worse than ever there. Later, when it was too late and I was on my way home, I found out that the region had just gone through its rainiest autumn in living memory.

  Last night I learned everything I could on the Web about Arviat. Nunavut itself is an amazing place, a mere thirty thousand people stretched out over a remote, treeless, tundra covered area three times the size of Texas. If it were a nation, it would be the 13th largest in the world, in area (though probably the smallest, in population). The name Arviat itself comes from the Inuit word "Arviq," meaning bowhead whale. The town is situated on the western shore of Hudson's Bay and has about two thousand inhabitants. The "place of the bowhead whale," is about a quarter of the size of Dunnville, which I used to think of as a small town. Nonetheless, it is the third largest town in this newly self-governing area of Nunavut.

  All my life there has been massive unemployment in Canada, but lately the unheard of has taken place, there is actually a job surplus. The resultant demand for workers in the south has dried up the labor supply in Nunavut, especially in teaching, health care, and skilled building trades. Gale said that at Grace's small school on one day they were short no fewer than seven teachers. According to newspaper articles, some remote villages are being forced to send children home from school permanently, so desperate is the shortage of teachers.

  From the point of view of local culture, the recent political move to independence has turned a bad situation into a crisis. Before, educated locals, who are of course the only native speakers of the main (but not the only) native language, Inuktitut, were happily employed as teachers. This meant that traditional knowledge was being systematically transferred to the next generation. Now they are being lured away from teaching by civil service jobs, which of course are more attractive because they do not take away several hours from their evenings doing the drudge work of marking papers.

  Like every crisis, this is an opportunity in disguise. I have frequently written about how I hate tests and examinations because they obstruct and pervert the entire course of education. Excessive marking encourages invidious comparisons among students and unless judiciously applied at the right time and in the right manner, harm rather than help the learning process. All test taking teaches is how to take tests (and, increasingly, how to cheat at tests), not how to apply knowledge to real situations in real jobs.

  And here, reading about Arviat, I find another disadvantage to our obsession with examinations. They denude and degrade the teaching profession by making it easy to lure the best talent away to other, less crucial jobs. In this case, the loss of local teachers threatens the very existence of Inuktitut, a language that was recently assessed as the healthiest native language group in Canada. Does any of that make teachers rebel from their profession's toadying to test-tyranny? No, they continue, willing slaves doing unnecessary, harmful slogging for hours every evening. Teachers cannot teach if they waste their energy this way! How can you be expected to teach if there is no time left over to learn for yourself, or even to recharge your spiritual batteries?

  The problem with our materialist society is that we confuse make-work with work. Why else would we have become addicted to fossil fuels? Why else would we live in substandard housing, even in the richest places? Why else would we accept that scoring well in an examination is the same as knowing something?

 Work is getting things done and the ultimate make-work project is the examination.

  If exams are an addiction, then marking them has to be binge drinking. Like members of AA who refuse to consider an abolitionist agenda in spite of the havoc that alcohol has wreaked in their lives, teachers buckle under and accept this intolerable burden without a squeak. Baha'u'llah condemned sciences that "begin with words and end in words" and fail to "profit the peoples of the earth," (Tablets, 51) and the Guardian later interpreted this to mean "fruitless excursions into metaphysical hair-splitting." (Unfolding Destiny, 445) What could be more fruitless than to make the most fulfilling, valuable work in the world into a metaphysical fool's errand? And the price? In Arviat it means saying goodbye forever to a jewel of human diversity, a culture known to have flourished under the most difficult conditions on the same land for at least four thousand years.

 Next time let us take an aerial tour of Arviat using Google maps.