Kickstart Canada brings together leading voices in academia, think tanks, and business to lay out an optimistic vision for Canada’s future, providing the policy ideas that governments need to ensure a bright future for all Canadians.
This article originally ran in The Hub on 22 August, 2024.
A majority of Canadians think that Canada is broken after years of stagnant incomes, affordability challenges, rising crime, government failures on basic functions like healthcare and immigration, and a deepening cultural malaise. But decline is a choice, and better public policies are needed to overcome Canada’s many challenges. Kickstart Canada brings together leading voices in academia, think tanks, and business to lay out an optimistic vision for Canada’s future, providing the policy ideas that governments need to ensure a bright future for all Canadians.
Across Canada, provincial governments appear to be grappling with an acute sense that K-12 education is in trouble. Reports of increased violence, teacher shortages, concerns for student mental health, frustrated parents, and striking educators seem to have policymakers grasping at straws.
Cell phone bans across multiple provinces appear to be the strategy of choice this summer to allay increasing concerns about the quality of Canadian K-12 schooling. Last year saw calls for increased support for youth mental health; the summer before was full of promises to help students “catch up” after years of pandemic learning disruption. A lot of promises and policy initiatives—but not a whole lot of follow-up.
Each of these disparate policies seeks to address a perceived problem. But taken together, they lack coherence, no matter how well-intentioned they might be. They are provincially applied bandages, without clear implementation strategies that leave educators and parents increasingly out of sync.
Systems of education provide the context in which policy either succeeds or fails. The orientation of each system reflects the impulse toward the purpose for which it is built. Increasingly provinces are focused on building large schools, consolidating services, and centralizing power upstream and away from local communities: the creation of a one-size-fits-all mode of schooling.
Yet a one-size-fits-all system means that policies meant to increase equity outcomes through tailored strategies for each student will always fail. But the current solution, according to those who advocate for them, is always the same: more funding, and more resources.
We have lost the plot. We have a lot of strategy but not a lot of common cause. We no longer have a shared understanding of what K-12 education is for. What is its purpose? Why do we educate kids, and why do we want to educate them well? And for that matter, what does it mean to educate them well?
Globally, advocates for education broadly fall into two opposing perspectives: on the one hand, those who articulate that education is about the production of human capital, contributing to increased national prosperity, and on the other, those who advocate that education is primarily about human rights. Within the second camp, there is further debate among those who would eclipse longstanding parental rights with the right of the child to education.
A deep dive into these debates is a topic for another day. For now, suffice it to say that neither option is enough. Those who advocate for education as human capital continue in the legacy of reformers who view mass education as an investment toward labour market outcomes. Early pioneers modelled public education as a factory, investing in standardized bureaucracies that move students through the system. Education is one-size-fits-all, with a side of back-to-basics curriculum and standardized testing. This perspective views international students as cash cows en route to the Canadian labour market and views productivity as the measure of educational success.
On the other hand, many of those who advocate for education as a human right are in danger of divorcing students from the communities of which they are an integral part. Prioritizing the rights of the child over the rights—and responsibilities—of parents and caregivers, and viewing them as fully autonomous decision-makers, is a modern construct that ignores the familial and communal context in which children grow best. It’s primarily a development that serves ideological claims rather than truly considering what is best for the child, or the best science of child development.
The commitment to parental responsibility (the phrase “parental rights” is somewhat of a misnomer), has its roots in a historic understanding of in loco parentis: that parents delegate their responsibility for the education of their child to educators. Scholars acknowledge that today’s education systems position educators as actors of the state, rather than stand-ins for parents. The current contentious debates pitting the autonomy of the child against the rights of parents (increasingly viewing parents through a lens of suspicion), fundamentally reframe the conversation away from this core understanding of parental responsibility and duty of care. Children are not islands. Most parents care deeply about the well-being and education of their children and become expert advocates for them.
In the midst of these broadly opposing perspectives on education, which all too frequently pit excellence against equity, the Canadian education policy community has lost the ability to talk clearly about why and how we educate. Our conversations are stunted, and they are increasingly polarized. They are full of buzzwords but lack substance and courage.
We can do better.
We can have better conversations by creating a better system. A better system would be rooted in the core purpose of education, which is primarily the formation of personhood: the growth and development of small humans into knowledgeable, curious, empathetic young adults who can engage competently with the world around them.
What do I mean by the formation of personhood? I mean students who, through discovery within a content-rich curriculum, are able to identify their unique gifts and interests and apply them meaningfully: for mathematics, toward entrepreneurship or finance; for philosophy or debate, toward law; for engineering and physics, toward a skilled trade.
I mean students who can glean from the moral virtues of their religious tradition and cultural heritage, who are rooted in their own identity, who have an integrated sense of self that comes, in part, from education in the context of community, and who are therefore able to thoughtfully engage with others outside of their own traditions. I mean students who know the history of ideas and who can discern fact from fiction, who can think critically about themselves and absorb new ideas with humility. And I mean students with a developed sense of civic identity, who desire to make a positive contribution toward public life, to participate in changing their worlds for the better.
When we focus on K-12 education as primarily about fostering the development of whole persons, then policy conversations become better.
Because of course, in a diverse and democratic country, everyone has different ideas about what the good life means. How do you best foster the education of whole persons with competing visions of what that looks like? You let those competing visions play themselves out, side by side. Enter educational pluralism.
In pluralist educational systems the state funds and regulates education but is not necessarily involved in delivering education; delivery can happen in multiple learning contexts, and usually involves civil society organizations and community-oriented models of schooling. In short, it’s a system that allows for all the visions of the good life that exist in a democracy their chance to form persons through education and sees local communities as the primary actors in education.
It allows us to test which visions are working, and which are not. And it allows us, as a political community, to account for, and respect, the diversity that is inherent in our country. Some provinces (hat tip, British Columbia, Alberta) do this a lot better than others (here’s looking at you, Ontario.)
I want to be clear: educational pluralism is not an unregulated, unaccountable choice. In fact, it is a system common among many democratic countries, especially in northern Europe. Policy for educational pluralism revolves around three central tenets, or goals.
Availability
Since education is always a moral enterprise, students go to the schools that best suit them, and parents should be able to choose education that aligns with deeply held convictions. Multiple international agreements highlight this, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
The Netherlands, for example, has enshrined the availability of different types of education within its constitution since 1917 and funds more than 30 kinds of schools. Denmark, too, values freedom for education so deeply that it constitutionally protects minority rights to schooling through what it calls the “five principles of freedom”: ideological freedom, pedagogical freedom, financial freedom, freedom of employment, and freedom to admit pupils.
Canada’s anemic interpretation of its own constitutional history, in fully funding only Roman Catholic or minority language (French) schools in most provinces, pales in comparison to the robust diversity in these European countries. The UN agrees and has called it out as discriminatory in Ontario.
Accessibility
As far as reasonably possible, these options should be accessible to all. They’re not just systems that serve the wealthy and privileged. Australia, for example, offers additional funding to independent schools that serve low-income families and students with special educational needs. Finland funds all schools equally and bans tuition fees at independent schools. The common perception that independent schools are only for the wealthy is a barrier of our own making. (It’s also not, actually, entirely true, even now.) It flows from both a poor understanding of independent schools in Canada and the communities they serve, and the denial of the reality that school sorting according to income already happens very often within district (public) systems.
Arguably, making more school options accessible for more families would reduce inequities, not increase them. Indeed, Australia’s most recent performance on international testing in math, science, and reading (through PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment), saw a reduction in the gap in learning scores between the highest-income and lowest-income students. This gap is smaller in Australia than the average for developed nations. Australia is not the only country with educational pluralism where this is the case: Ireland, Finland, and Denmark achieved the same.
Accountability
While the state should provide autonomy for philosophical and pedagogical approaches, it should hold schools accountable for student outcomes. Since education has a public impact, we care about the education of our neighbours’ children.
Most places that support pluralist models do not allow schools to exist as for-profit institutions (Chile is an exception to this general rule, as is Sweden, and the province of Ontario.) This is one way to ensure accountability to a community of stakeholders and the public. Many countries ensure basic curricular requirements and teacher credentials or require students to pass standard exit or achievement exams. But how to navigate deep philosophical differences within a democracy? This is not easy.
Cardus senior fellow and educational pluralism scholar Ashley Berner elaborates on accountability mechanisms that enable countries to distinguish between indoctrination and exposure, by requiring students to demonstrate an understanding that they have been educated through encountering multiple perspectives on a variety of issues. She offers an example in the Netherlands, which funds creationist schools but requires students to demonstrate an understanding of evolutionary processes on national exit exams. Her argument that accountability is ensured through robust curricular norms, such as ensuring exposure to primary sources and encountering viewpoint diversity, is one that everyone should consider, no matter their perspective on religious schools.
Each of these principles of educational pluralism—availability, accessibility, and accountability—hangs on a broad consensus that no matter the kind of school, students will engage with a robust curriculum (read: the liberal arts). Schools are free to offer this curriculum in the format, context, and traditions that best suit their community, but all students will be assessed for mastery of specific, agreed-upon outcomes.
It’s this commitment that both ensures the accessibility and opportunity for underserved or minority students is effective and that fosters broad respect within society for diverse approaches to education. In fact, it’s these commitments that historically have enabled conservatives and progressives alike to embrace educational pluralism.
Pluralist systems are open to many ways of educating, and because of this, they foster better conversations about education. What kind of conversations might be possible? We should be talking about why curriculum matters as a policy lever. Or about innovative pedagogical approaches such as nature schooling and classical schooling, and why they’re so attractive to increasing numbers of parents.
We could talk about why so many Black families have started homeschooling, and why homeschooling has taken off in recent years. And about how independent schools don’t actually separate the haves from the have-nots, but instead might promote social cohesion and foster civic identity.
We should talk about why school choice within district (public) systems is not enough, why we need real, constitutionally protected opportunities to unite the education of our children with our deepest-held convictions, and why it’s important that all provinces in Canada provide options for schooling—even schooling that I wouldn’t necessarily send my own kids to.
And, we need to talk about why accountability for education matters, and what can happen when we fail to hold some schools accountable for questionable outcomes.
Formally recognizing the primacy of parents in choosing their children’s education would be a healthy start. And across the board, a commitment to real engagement with parents. This could take the form of incentives for schools to create localized parent volunteer programs and community engagement strategies. Or the creation of teacher-parent partnerships through professional development workshops on parent engagement strategies and diverse parent experiences.
Together, I want to develop education policy based on honest conversation. Won’t that, ultimately, serve the flourishing of students in all Canadian provinces and territories? Educational pluralism isn’t just an idealist vision of an unattainable goal—it’s a hard-won, contested space of deep difference. But in the end, it’s a system built for students, leveraging the strength of local communities—one that will foster civic outcomes and social cohesion, spur economic growth, and help kickstart Canada as a country full of citizens capable of reaching its full potential. All because it first encourages the development of whole and flourishing persons.
August 22, 2024
