School choice is a mantra that we will likely hear a lot as we head into a spring provincial election, and on its surface, it sounds reasonable. Why shouldn’t parents have choices for their children? But that choice comes at a price, and that price is more than just the cost of tuition. It is an erosion of a public system that is the backbone of our democracy.
In September 2022, during a UCP leadership debate, Danielle Smith said she wants to see more public dollars go toward supporting private schools and homeschooling. She went on to say that she wants to move Alberta toward a “voucher-style” funding model for education by increasing subsidies for students who attend private schools and doubling direct subsidies for homeschoolers. Alberta is already the most generous province in its subsidies for private education, with private schools receiving 70 per cent of the per student grants available to public jurisdictions.
But what is the link between public schools and democracy? First, let’s be clear that when the Alberta Teachers’ Association says it supports public education, we mean we support schools that are governed by an elected board that is answerable to the electorate. As such, this includes public, separate (Catholic) and francophone schools.
Public education is a simile for civilized democracy ... any weakening of universal public education can only be a weakening of democracy.
-John Ralston Saul
In an address to members of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation in 2001, Canadian writer and political philosopher John Ralston Saul said, “… public education is a simile for civilized democracy … any weakening of universal public education can only be a weakening of democracy. I personally do not believe that citizens—Canadian citizens in particular—have any desire to abandon the true strengths of their society. I believe that there is a profound understanding in our society of the long-standing essential role universal public education plays in making us a civilized democracy.”
The strength of our public education system is that it serves so many different communities; it is capable of enormous diversity. We have witnessed this first-hand as schools and teachers have successfully integrated into regular classrooms students who need extra assistance in learning, even though many of the supports promised in Alberta Education’s 2009 Setting the Direction Framework never materialized.
Recently, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were required, with very little notice, to completely shift their classroom teaching to an online environment focused primarily on literacy and numeracy. For those students who did not have access to the required technologies at home, teachers and schools made those technologies available or provided alternate learning modalities. Again, the strength of the public education system is its immense ability to provide quality education to all learners.
Today we have a largely urban population. Our cities and towns are filled with a highly mobile population, two-job families, high divorce rates, single-family homes, non-traditional homes and long working hours for many parents. All of these factors have contributed to a loss of community identification and an increased divide between the haves and the have-nots.
As a consequence, the public education system is the only public structure that is still capable of reaching all citizens. In the true sense of inclusive democracy, for many, those buildings we call schools are actually the only remaining portals to citizenship.
Today, more than ever, we need the public education system. We must recognize that education is far more than training students for the world of work; it is the primary tool we have to ensure that our children grow up to become citizens in a democratic society. So, when politicians say they support choice, we need to remind them that public education is also a choice; it just happens to be the best choice. ❚
ATA News Interim Editor-in-Chief
