Education

As Alberta staggered under a third surge of COVID-19 in May 2021, Premier Jason Kenney announced a province-wide, two-week school closure. Immediately, up rose the chorus that has accompanied [...]

Jason Kenney arrived in Alberta provincial politics with a laser focus on reforming K–12 education, and one of his primary targets was curriculum—what students learn in school. During the first [...]

Erika Shaker, the national office director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says yes. The cost of tuition shouldn’t be an entrance fee to a decent life. Most jobs that pay a [...]

Canada has too many disengaged citizens. Voter turnout is the simplest measure of this. For federal and provincial elections over the past decade, one-third of us have simply skipped out [...]

University labs and classrooms became participants themselves in a massive natural experiment during the pandemic. COVID-19 remade university life, forcing students and professors to retreat from [...]

The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it [...]

Shelly Wismath, the Dean of the School of Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge, says yes. The term “liberal arts” comes from the Latin liber, meaning free, and originally [...]

Betsy DeVos would be thrilled to have a [school] system like yours,” says Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, about Alberta. Donald Trump’s secretary of [...]

AV: You’re one of only two remaining MLAs from the Klein era. Yeah, I’ve actually seen six premiers. From 2004 until 2015 was quite an unstable government situation. They were changing ministers [...]

  AV: What do you see as the purpose of post-secondary education? It serves two purposes. The first is to create well-educated citizens who are prepared to engage in public discourse and [...]