You can tell from its title that Alberta’s Bill 25, an Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and Amend the Education Act, isn’t an entirely serious piece of legislation.
This is true notwithstanding Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ claim that “these changes strengthen accountability, reinforce neutrality and respect, and make it clear that politics and ideology have no place in Alberta classrooms.”
Alberta Teachers Association President Jason Schilling called it a grab-bag of amendments, some of which may even be helpful, with a clickbait title. “It has very little to do with politics and ideology, at least in the classroom.” This is fair.
Outside the classroom, though, it’s different. While some actual legislative work slipped into its pages, Bill 25 is like a lot of the United Conservative Party’s legislation leading up to the signature policy of Premier Danielle Smith’s premiership, next fall’s Alberta separation referendum.
That is to say, it is mostly performative. And the most performative part of all, as Mr. Schilling rightly noted, is the name, which is clearly intended to achieve two highly political goals:
- To wind up the UCP’s MAGA base and its imagined fears about “woke” ideology
- To so annoy everyone else that it will distract us all from the dodgy contracts and corrupt contracting scandals that ought to be roiling Alberta
As for removing ideology from schools and curricula, that would be impossible. Ideology is always taught in schools, and it is never taught as ideology. Like the air we breathe, the ideology of any state is meant just to be assumed to be the way things are, not anything we should think about at all.
So what is the act talking about when it speaks of ideology? It means challenges to the prevailing ideology of the party in power, even gentle ones like the idea that the rights enjoyed to the powerful and established should be extended to the weak and the newly arrived as well. This is what UCP supporters call “woke” when they get their dander up on social media.
A hint that this is so is found in section 2: “The preamble is amended … by striking out ‘welcoming, caring, respectful and safe learning environments that respect diversity and nurture a sense of belonging and a positive sense of self’ and substituting ‘a safe and caring environment that fosters and maintains respectful and responsible behaviours’.” This revision is repeated in several other sections.
Of course! Where diversity lurks, can equity and inclusion be far behind? We all know what MAGA, and therefore the UCP, think of the dreaded DEI!
As for respectful and responsible behaviours, whether that’s addressed at students or teachers, in this context it means toe the line, shut the heck up, and do as you’re told.
We need not go through the act line by line. Its purpose within the school system is elimination not only of the discussion of alternatives to the prevailing ideology, but critical thinking about alternatives to it, and even symbols that represent such verboten thoughts. Pride flags, for example. Watermelon pins.
This will never work. It doesn’t even work in genuinely authoritarian societies and, notwithstanding the best efforts of the UCP, we’re not quite there yet.
The first part of section 16(1) – which requires such pedagogical virtues as teaching a wide range of ideas, encouraging critical thinking, and acquiring knowledge and skills – is presumably meant to be ignored. Less so the requirement in the same section to “honour and respect the common values and beliefs of Albertans.” These, naturally, are left undefined.
Section 16(2) goes on to say, “No course, program of study or instructional materials referred to in subsection (1) may promote or foster doctrines of racial or ethnic superiority or persecution, social change through violent action or disobedience of laws.” (Study of the Old Testament, nevertheless, is exempted.)
This, clearly, is intended to prevent discussion, not promote it, and thus to discourage anything that might make anyone associated with the prevailing ideology uncomfortable. That is certainly how it will be interpreted by teachers, especially now that their professional disciplinary body has been taken over by the provincial government.
Beyond that, the act includes a long list of changes, which are summarized well in the CBC’s coverage of the bill. Enough decisions traditionally associated with local school boards will be stripped away that only the illusion of local control over education will be preserved.
For those of you who wonder why the government would bother to keep school boards when it has now centralized so many decisions that matter to itself, the reason is so that inattentive voters won’t notice their education taxes, levied at the same time as municipal taxes, are really provincial taxes.
The legislation also includes such old-timey ideas as requiring the national anthem to be listened to at least once a week – which national anthem do they have in mind, one wonders – and a prohibition on unapproved flags.
The former is not a bad idea, in my opinion, although the little monsters should be required to sing the anthem so that they memorize the woke and gender-neutral lyrics of the English-language version. (Never mind about the French, which is less theologically inclusive, as I recall. Il sait porter la croix, indeed!)
Singing the national anthem in either language, though, is an example of the kind of ideology that has always been encouraged in schools, and always will be.
So let me close on a personal note. I confess, although not in the religious sense, that I have very fond memories of our weekly Assemblies in the gymnasium at Monterey Elementary School in Victoria, B.C., where we all, every one of us, sang the national anthem, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and listened to the principal lecture us on why we should never, ever use such vulgar American expressions as “okay.”
I’m OK with that, actually, notwithstanding the fact Monterey Elementary was a public school. Indeed, this weekly ceremony – standing at attention strictly enforced – encouraged critical thinking.
For example, the national anthem was an easy-to-sing and memorize number called God Save the Queen – and let no boy dare to suggest otherwise!
Likewise, the Lord’s Prayer raised certain unanswered questions – for example, why would a loving God lead us into temptation? (No snickering about this was tolerated, backed up by The Strap. After all, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”)
And why would any sane Canadian, the principal repeatedly asked, use repulsive slang like OK when there was a perfectly good English expression, “very well”?
Very well, Mr. Brynjolfsson, on that I will abide.
But I have my own thoughts about the state ideology of the day that informed our lessons, encompassing Empire (pink on the map; genocidal in practice), “the white man’s burden” (I’m not making that up), and “muscular Christianity.”
Suppression of critical thinking, perversely, encourages it, at least as long as die Gedanken sind frei. And sooner or later, if we do some thinking, we will realize that, “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
