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Opinion: UCP's Bill 25 an anti-democratic move to control public discourse

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Here is a question I think Alberta’s social studies teachers should ask their students in class tomorrow:

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“Given that, traditionally, conservatives abhor government interference in citizens’ lives (UCP laws to get between patients and their doctors, for example) and governments who insert their political power into civil society processes where government never reached before (UCP interference in law societies and municipal affairs, for example), what ideology best describes the UCP and its governing style?”

Would this be allowed if Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ Bill 25 — An Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and Amend the Education Act, passes into law?

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It will be awkward for teachers, if not. Ideologies are the major curricular theme in Alberta’s Grade 12 program of social studies, after all.

Providing students with real world examples for social studies ideas is what helps make powerful teaching. But, as reported in the Edmonton Journal (March 31), for Nicolaides, “topics outside of the curriculum that touch on social or political matters should not be discussed in a classroom environment.”

The minister also stated, school authorities must ensure “neutral and impartial” learning environments and uphold the ability of students to express perspectives or ideas. Except, where then would students with expert adult guidance form their ideas or perspectives with others? How would they learn to express them well if classrooms cannot be a place where students work together to understand the political world they live in or hope for?

Nothing is more social studies than taking ideas from the curriculum to learn about the world (and vice versa) in the context of pressing issues of civic and social importance. That is, in fact, the Education ministry’s stated rationale for secondary social studies.

Nicolaides also said that teachers are expected to provide both sides of the argument. Most issues we as citizens in schools and beyond need to discuss have way more than two sides. To think well about any real-world political issue requires appreciating its multidimensional complexity. Teachers know this, and the best ones work every day to ensure students get this lesson. It’s a lesson I wish this minister with his stated either-or two-sided thinking had learned.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that citizens form when they engage in what she named as action. By action, Arendt refers to that interaction between people, like students, talking about a pressing political question. Action involves people doing what is unexpected: interrupting their routine and private activities to converse, and, through doing so, creating a place where citizens and a public can form.

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Schools promote democratic culture when young people can continuously re-articulate their thoughts as actions in conjunction with the thoughts of others. For this minister and government, the story their legislation tells is that all that is public should be private, that the political should be reduced to a controlled set of individual consumer choices and that the good life is itself a private affair.

This is one reason I have argued that temporary governments like the UCP should have no say on what constitutes the long-term project of public school curriculum.

A democratic culture is, like learning, however, a public affair. This is why we fund public schooling, its contribution to an evolving but always precarious democratic culture and political rule. And it is our democratic culture that is at stake in Bill 25, another ill-advised UCP government attempt to control what we as a public can and cannot discuss.

Kent den Heyer, PhD, is a professor of secondary education, curriculum, and social studies at the University of Alberta.

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