Charles Pascal is being honoured tomorrow night for a career so varied it can appear he has spent the last four decades trying to complete some sort of self-devised Education Expert Lifetime Pentathlon.
Professor. Child-care centre founder. Deputy minister. College president. Education Quality and Accountability Office chair. The list continues at length.
But even compared with the lofty jobs in which he did the work for which he will receive the Egerton Ryerson Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Education, Pascal, 64, says he is most proud of one that will never appear on his resumé: "activist parent," maybe even "pushy parent," in the education of his own three children.
"From my point of view, my bio is just show business if you compare it to the most important role I play in education, the role of parent," he said yesterday.
One of Pascal's earliest contributions to education was a result of the birth of his first child in 1969. After he joined the faculty of McGill University, he helped convince the school to launch a child-care centre for faculty members' children.
In 1982, he became president of Peterborough's Sir Sandford Fleming College. Since, he has been – among other things – chair of the Ontario Council of Regents; provincial deputy minister; EQAO chair; and executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, founded in the 1940s by former Star publisher Joseph Atkinson.
He is currently on leave from the foundation to serve as a special adviser to Premier Dalton McGuinty, who made him responsible for finding a strategy to implement full-day kindergarten for 4- and 5-year-olds. He will present his report next month.
"When people introduce me with this bio, my living obituary, they note that I've had these different jobs," he said. "I think I've had only one career, just different ways of expressing what I think is important."
Since 1982, he has kept a daily diary. Every morning, he asks himself how well his actions the day prior reflected the core values that drive his life: equity, his chief educational goal, and authenticity, "a very sweet word for blunt, straightforward."
"He's incredibly kind," yet also no-baloney, said Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education, the advocacy and research group presenting the award.
"He talks a lot, Charles," Kidder said. "And he has a big healthy ego." But "probably out of everyone I can think of," she said, "he is an example of putting your money and everything else where your mouth is.
"You've got people in the world who can sort of talk a good line but not really do anything. And Charles isn't like that. ... he's not just a talker. It's not all talk, no action. He's a lot of talk, and really a lot of action."
