Election 2019: How Andrew Scheer plans to remake education in Canada

Do you want your tax dollars to be sent to parents to subsidize putting their children in private schools? Andrew Scheer promises to give parents $4,000 per child to help them send their kids to private schools. Could be prep schools, could be religious schools. Oh, and $1,000 per child for parents to keep the kids home and home-school them.

Scheer has 5 children in private religious schools. Let's see... Oh! That's $20,000 to help out the struggling Scheer household. Per year.

Are you ok with this? Does this seem like a good idea?

No? Congratulations, that makes you a radical leftist, according to Andrew Scheer.

See? This is how it works. He will propose ever more objectionable things and then call anyone who disagrees names. Names, incidentally, that come straight from the Republicans.

It is a Republican strategy. They reward parents for sending their children to private schools, particularly schools that reinforce the religious and capitalist beliefs of the party.This leaves less money to pay for the public education system. The public system deteriorates. The best teachers are lured away by the promise of better pay, smaller class sizes, fewer or no special needs children. There is no money for new technology, or even books.

Ok, some of you are opening your mouths or poising your fingers over your keyboards, about to argue that all that fancy stuff doesn't make an education better. That when you went to school they didn't have LED panels, they had overhead projectors and teachers wrote on transparencies with a sharpie. Or on the black board, with chalk. And you turned out fine, right? And while it is true that you can teach children to read and write and do math with very few resources, adults coming out into the world with only the ability to read and write and do math will be severely challenged by the demands of modern society and the modern workplace. Even cashiers and fast food employees use computers and other technology at work. Kids who do not receive an education in an environment where they learn to become comfortable learning to use new technologies will have very limited opportunities. They will not be competing for jobs on an even playing field with people who did have a modern education and all the bells and whistles that come with it. Schools now use the internet for research and, theoretically, teach children how to be safe citizens of cyberspace. Schools teach coding, web site development, and web literacy, all essential skills for making your way in the modern world and modern workplace. So settle down. I'm not done.

When a school community decides they need something and there is no money in the school budget for it, parents often fund-raise. But that only really works in more affluent neighbourhoods. If you have no money to spare and your neighbours have no money to spare, you aren't going to be able to sell a lot of chocolate covered almonds. So there is already disparity within the public system based on the socio-economic condition of each school's catchment area.

What Scheer is proposing would pull more funds out of the public system, thus widening the gap between schools where parents can afford to donate money or buy a lifetime's supply of gift-wrap, and schools where the parents cannot afford to contribute financially. Because wealthier parents, if they don't pull their kids out and put them in the private system, will manage to top up what the government funding lacks. Up to a point.

Buying new soccer balls or other gym equipment, or books for the library, or even laptops for school use, affluent parents would take on. But most likely not the salary of a teacher's aid. And so, when it gets to the point where Mom and Dad realise their precious progeny is not learning much at school because she or he is in a classroom with one teacher trying to cope with 45 ten year olds, and 9 of them have special needs, 3 have behavioural issues, and 6 don't speak English, and there's little to no teacher support, they are liable to sit down and crunch the numbers and seriously consider pulling the child out of the public system and finding a good private school.

Gradually, this reduces the number of affluent parents who will fund-raise for things to supplement the public system. Public schools in less advantaged communities will spiral downward faster because the parents cannot buffer the decline in public funding.

Eventually, you have all the wealthier kids going to private schools, and all the poorer kids going to schools that are lacking in just about everything.

Along the way, the government will offload costs on to parents more directly as well. School fees in provinces like Manitoba are maybe $30 a year to cover buses for a couple of field trips. When we moved to Alberta and our daughter started grade 11, I was shocked to get a bill from the school for over $1,000 for school fees. The total varied depending on what courses the student was taking. It was to cover "classroom supplies". I am sure many parents cannot cough up that much cash in September, especially after buying some new clothes, a winter coat, and the "school supplies" list they send out to parents. So, what was the $1,000+ paying for? I'm really not sure. Rachel Notley's NDP government stopped the school fees and increased funding for education so that parents were no longer paying for whatever it was. The world did not collapse. I am sure it was a tremendous relief to many families. Our daughter had graduated by then, but I was happy for Albertan parents in general. Now there are rumours that Jason Kenney will reintroduce the school fees. And other conservative-led provinces may follow this lead. Somewhere along the way, there is a tipping point, where well-to-do parents say, "We are paying thousands in school fees every year and the level of education in the public system is declining anyway. Scheer will give us $4,000 towards private school tuition. Can we make that work?"

The strategy is to establish a two tiered society. Those who go to private schools will have greater opportunities to attend university or other post-secondary education. Those in the public system will form the "grunt" class with limited opportunity for social or economic mobility. It won't happen in a single term of government. It may not happen in a single generation. But if this is allowed to get a foot in the door, it will eventually lead to an education gap that will mirror the income gap.

Why would conservatives want to create such a society, you might ask? Several reasons come to mind. If you look at the prophetic novel, 1984, by George Orwell, he described this underclass as "proles". They had basic education and held low-skilled jobs. Orwell explained it thus:

“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

Those who attend religious private schools can, additionally, be groomed to have the same world-view the conservatives hold. Also, those who are home-schooled for religious reasons.

There are many valid reasons to home-school. Perhaps you live in an isolated area and there is no school. Perhaps there are developmental challenges that require special instruction and one-on-one teaching. Perhaps your child has physical needs that can not be met in a usual classroom. Perhaps your child was bullied at the only school they could go to. Many reasons are valid. Not wanting your child to associate with people who are not of your faith, or wanting to make sure they only learn things you believe, are not good reasons. Children in Canada grow up to be adults who will have to learn to interact with people of many different faiths, and no faith system. Children in Canada will grow up to be adults who will need the skills to navigate a world full of sexting and cyber-bullying and cat-calling and peer pressure and full frontal nudity on tv. Children in Canada will grow up to be adults who will have to get along with people who hold very different views from their own, or their parents'. It does kids a great disservice to shelter them and keep them from developing the skills needed to work and live peacefully alongside people who are different from themselves. We get people like Sam Oosterhoff from this kind of home-schooling. We should not be encouraging that with national subsidies.

There are very good reasons why parents may send their child to a private school as well. Some children have special needs that cannot be addressed in a regular, integrated classroom, I believe we should be looking after those families as part of our social safety net, not having for-profit private institutions provide their education.

I know some parents feel their kid is the next Wayne Gretsky, and spare no expense to send them to a private school that focuses on athletics. Or they are sure their child is destined for Julliard or a career on Broadway, and send them to a special school for the arts. This could be driven by love and a desire to create whatever opportunities possible for their children, or it could be driven by ego. Regardless, if people want to spend their money this way, whatever. Good luck to them and their kids. Such schools should not be publicly funded.

Some people send their kids to private schools that are academically focused. They are prep schools, designed to both prepare students for a shot at a "big name" university, like Harvard, or Yale, or Cambridge, or Oxford, and to give the students opportunities to develop connections with the other future leaders of industry and their families. That recommendation from your former classmate's Mom or Dad can be the difference between getting on your desired career track or not. Getting a residency at the hospital of your choosing. Being taken on as a management trainee at an accounting firm. Being selected to article at a high profile law office. These networks open doors that keep wealthy families wealthy, generation after generation. They should not be publicly funded.

Some people send their kids to church-based schools. Some say it is because these schools have greater discipline than the public system. Discipline is not a problem in public schools that are adequately resourced to deal with special needs and can maintain low class sizes. Some say it is important to them that their children have a faith-based education. They want God to be part of every subject matter. This is where you may see "intelligent design" being taught alongside evolution, with evolution down-graded to being "just a theory". This is where you might see abstinence taught instead of sex-ed. This is where many kids likely learn to obey and never question authority. This is where kids can learn to look down on those who have a different faith, or no faith. This is where kids learn to feel that their religion makes them special, superior. Such schools do a disservice to the kids who attend them and also to our society as a whole, because we have to cope with them and their extremely biased views once they graduate and are released upon us. In some cases they also make a tidy profit for investors who may be able to use the church's tax-free or non-profit status to ensure every dime goes into the school and the pockets of investors. They should not be publicly funded.

So, by funneling more and more money out of the public system, the conservatives/Republicans achieve a number of goals.

1. They effectively entrench wealth among a certain group of people, generation after generation, leaving the rest of the public behind.

2. They create profit for educational corporations.

3. They create a generation of students more likely to believe the things the conservatives believe (especially in religious private schools) and may have a greater acceptance of authorities determining the way they will live after school.

4. They create a class of people for whom upward mobility is very unlikely. They create the proles. People who don't expect much, can be paid little, and lack the critical thinking skills to challenge what life has dealt them, or what the government is telling them.

5. They diminish the number of free-thinkers, activists, and visionaries who may challenge the government stance.

In Conservative-led provinces like Ontario and Alberta, the provincial governments are, or are planning to, roll back the modern curriculum, especially sex-ed, and revert to what was taught in the 1990s, before the internet was widely used. It remains to be seen what other changes may come. Given Jason Kenney's evangelical views, it is not inconceivable that "intelligent design" or creationism may come to be taught as part of the Alberta public school curriculum.

If you are feeling alarmed by all this, you should be. Education is preparing our children to become the decision-makers of the future. Investing in education is critical. We need the next generation to be well-informed, equipped with critical thinking skills, able to reason and fact-check and not just accept what they are told on faith. When we cut education spending, we rob the next generation and we rob ourselves. Don't we all want good, compassionate, empathetic health-care professionals when we are old? Do we not want to see our society moving forward? You can't squeeze education to the point of collapse and expect the system to produce educated, reasonable, articulate, thoughtful people to form the society of the future.

We can only have an effective, functioning democracy when the electorate is sufficiently educated in the way our system works, in critical thinking skills, and in researching and understanding complex and nuanced situations. We need a public that is aware of and able to navigate false pronouncements in media, both mainstream and social. An uneducated public makes bad, emotion-driven, ill-informed decisions. 

Education is in provincial jurisdiction. Andrew Scheer actually has no right to be making campaign promises related to changing how our children are educated. But all the norms seem to be sliding off the rails. We have Jason Kenney, Premier of Alberta, who seems to have forgotten that he is in provincial politics now, campaigning against Trudeau. We have "journalists", whose mandate it is to inform and enlighten and educate the public, abandoning any pretense of being unbiased and actively promoting a certain political party in their coverage of the news.

In Alberta, we saw an election in which a majority voted for a party led by a man who was the subject of numerous investigations at the time (investigations which continue to this day as far as anyone knows). As were a significant number of his campaign associates. Now, one investigation might be covered by the "innocent until proven guilty" proviso upon which our justice system is based. But several investigations? By different entities? In two different provinces? And one of them being the RCMP? I would have thought a lot of people might have thought, well where there's so much smoke, there's probably fire. Maybe we should give this dude and his party a pass this time.No one wants to live in a province run by crooks and grifters, con men and cheats... But no. Albertans elected him.

We are living in interesting times.

We need to give our collective heads a shake and try to remember who we are as a society. And what we want for our future and the futures of our children and grandchildren. I'm pretty sure the CPC wrecking ball to public education isn't it.