When we choose to look away, public education suffers

In his gripping 2025 memoir, Hiding from the School Bus: Breaking Free from Control, Fear, Isolation and a Childhood Without Education, Calvin Bagley recounts the escape from an early life of deviance, denial and deprivation under the guise of homeschooling.

Our southern neighbours are testimony to what happens to society and government when public schools, other public systems and public conscience break down.

Sadly, this scenario is just as possible in Canada because, in the face of growing threats, we too often just look the other way.

Bagley recounts being religiously indoctrinated into believing that schools were evil, that they should be avoided at all costs to protect and preserve his soul and that government was complicit in trying to engineer his personal downfall. And to some extent the government and his community were complicit in perverting his early learning by looking the other way, while his parents dodged the law and intent of home schooling while using it for their own ends.

Like our democracy, we too often take our public schools for granted.

We notice them when the media points out where schools have failed as in the latest concerns over reading, or when we want something more from them like a new Indigenous studies curriculum. On one hand this is good, as if to suggest that they will always be there if we need them. On the other, we tend to ignore the very real political risks and present dangers to their ideals and purposes presented by our silence and antipathy. We look away — it’s not our problem.

At least one Manitoba school board, following their U.S. counterparts, are pursuing and using their trusteeship for promoting a narrow religious viewpoint not representative of many of their constituents and their children. Those same trustees send their children to private schools.

They are exploiting two growing and alarming electoral trends — fewer people willing to serve as trustees and low voter turnout. Along with some trustees running on singular private agendas such as residential school denial, the lack of interest and participation in school board elections poses a real threat to public schools.

Meanwhile, the government and the media are looking away, and hopefully the community will reverse the tide of apathy in next year’s trustee elections.

A second threat comes from extreme partisan politics when the school system becomes a battleground — if there’s anything that should not be subject to party divisions it is public education. Lately, the idea that education is a private good has gained traction — were that to prevail there would be no need for a common curriculum or compulsory attendance.

Schools are neither protected from privatization nor from being associated with the anti-public sentiment that seems to have captured the imaginations of all parties.

Public services, schools included, continue to be the target of cost-saving measures by governments, an attitude that contributes to the significant underfunding of schools in some provinces. Simultaneously, teachers are shut out of educational policy discussions with the resulting contract conflicts and corresponding public union bashing. It’s like any attack on their own public institutions and personnel is fair game even as we look to them to solve our social and economic problems.

Similarly, the media is implicated in undermining public trust and confidence. The public schools seem to be targets for undue criticism, emphasizing system failures and teacher misbehaviours even though in schools they are rare. Private institutions are seldom held to the same standards even when they access public resources, which private enterprises are currently doing more frequently with copyright programs and user-pay service contracts.

This media narrative defines education as primarily a private consumer good and personal right as opposed to a collective responsibility and public good. Further, it portrays the private as efficient and accountable and the public as inflated and self-serving with little or no evidence.

Finally, at present, public schools currently have few champions and advocates they can rely on. The very organizations and people who should be standing up for them are either reticent, silent or apologetic. With full knowledge that some trustees have brought partisan politics and religion into school visits and public pronouncements, their organization or other trustees demure.

Superintendents and their organization seem to indulge such behaviour by acting as if nothing untoward is going on. Teacher organizations remain silent, seemingly out of fear for retribution against their members.

In the aftermath of Bill 64, the educational centrepiece of the previous government, open advocacy and support for public schools and the people in them, including students, have diminished or disappeared. Bill 64, although withdrawn, may have achieved one of its covert purposes, silencing the guardians of education.

It appears this provincial government is virtually on its own when it comes to upholding public schools, something which no government has been able to do without help from local authorities and professional involvement.

We seem to have forgotten why we created them in the first place — to ensure people are equipped to participate in democracy as confident, knowledgeable and responsible citizens.

To provide every child with as equal an opportunity as possible to lead a fulfilling, responsible life. To emphasize that a better life, and democracy are only possible if our young achieve the attitude that everyone is worthwhile, we’re all in this together and share responsibility for each other’s flourishing.

In many countries schooling comes at a personal and unaffordable cost, meaning many children are simply denied education. We are fortunate in Manitoba to have, in spite of its shortcomings, one of the best, most inclusive, most equitable school systems in the world — the envy of many.

Public education is one of the only public places left where all are welcome and cared for regardless of diversity, difference and distinction. For all our sakes, please don’t look away and please speak up.

The loss would be devastating, tragic — and totally preventable.

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.