Category Archives: Democracy

Critical Education Call for Manuscripts: Palestinian Liberation in Education

Critical Education

Palestinian Liberation in Education: Solidarities and Activism for a Free Palestine

Special Issue Editor:

Hanadi Shatara
Assistant Professor
California State University, Sacramento
h.shatara@csus.edu

Overview and Aims:

Starting even before 1948, Palestinians and activists for a free Palestine continue to raise global awareness of the oppression and struggles of the Palestinian people. The genocidal events of October 2023 in Gaza along with the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians did not happen in a vacuum, but are informed by the historical context of Palestine and the continued activism that has expanded due to social media. Young Palestinian journalists such as Bisan Owda, Plestia Alaqad, and Motaz Azaiza are documenting in real time the atrocities within Gaza (Arafat, 2023) and many young social media consumers are speaking out and becoming civically engaged for Palestine (Roscoe, 2023), all while social media companies are censoring Palestine specific posts (Shankar, et al., 2023). Large scale protests and solidarity rallies for Palestine are happening around the world and almost every continent (Al Jazeera, 2023) with the possibility of free speech under threat in Europe when speaking for Palestine (Rajvanshi, 2023). Organizations led by young people such as the Palestinian Youth Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine university groups, and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center are showing the world capacity and volition for a free Palestine. With the increasing acts of civic engagement, these conversations have permeated into classrooms throughout the world.

Conversations on freedom dreaming for educational justice (Love, 2023) must connect social justice and critical education to Palestinian struggles, activism, and realities, and call for a free Palestine. Several critical education organizations have spoken out for Palestine and provided supports for educators and education researchers to use in their (un)learning. For example, the Abolitionist Teaching Network spoke in solidarity with Palestine on social media and curated resources for teachers in ways to teach Palestine and raise awareness of the liberation movement (Abolitionist Teaching Network, 2023). The Zinn Education Project (2023) in partnership with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change also provided lessons and other resources to speak about the violence and historical context in Palestine.

Yet, with these avenues of resources, there is much to learn about Palestine in the context of education. Silencing occurs within educational spaces, through social studies and ethnic studies curriculum (Morrar, 2020; Shatara, 2022) and dismissing the experiences of Palestinian young people in schools (Abu El-Haj, 2015; Shatara 2023). For example, in November 2023, a Palestinian American boy was suspended for saying “Free Palestine” when another student called him a terrorist (Conybeare & Ramos, 2023). Given these realities, how do critical educators decolonize their teaching and research to connect to themes of global oppression, resistance, solidarity, freedom dreaming, and liberation for and with Palestine and Palestinians?

Description of Invited Articles:

For this issue, I invite scholars, educators, and activists to connect their work in education to Palestine. I seek submissions for a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, empirical and conceptual research, critical social theoretical framings, and varying formats to engage with solidarities and educational activism for Palestine. Papers can be conceptual, theoretical, empirical with varying critical methodologies. Potential manuscripts can include interviews with Palestinian teachers and activists, book, film, curricula, and media reviews, field reports, as well as traditional academic papers. Some of the questions, but not limited to these, that papers can engage with include:

  • What does it mean to be a critical educator with regards to Palestine?
  • How can or do educators support the centering and (un)learning of Palestine in critical education work?
  • How do global themes of (settler) colonialism, imperialism, oppression, resistance, solidarity, freedom dreaming, and joy connect to the overall mission of critical education?
  • How can Critical Race Studies, decolonial and post-colonial theories frame the work in education for Palestine?
  • How can teachers and activists work together to teach Palestine in classrooms?

Timeline:

Abstracts (500 words) due to Editor via email (h.shatara@csus.edu): February 28, 2024.
Decisions of Acceptance: March 15, 2024
Manuscript due to Editor: August 9, 2024
Manuscripts under review: August 10 – September 30, 2024
Manuscripts returned to authors for revision: October 11, 2024
Final Manuscript due to Editor: November 8, 2024
Publication of Special Issue: December 6, 2024

About the Editor:

Dr. Hanadi Shatara is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Sacramento. She received her doctorate in Social Studies Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on critical global education, critical world history, teacher positionalities, the representations of Southwest Asia and North Africa, Palestinian and Arab American teachers, the teaching of Palestine, and teacher education. Her work is published in The Critical Social Educator, Social Studies and the Young Learner, Social Studies Research and Practice, and Curriculum Inquiry. She has also published several book chapters with the most recent called “This is not about religion: Troubling the perceptions of Palestine and Palestinians” with co-author Dr. Muna Saleh in the edited volume Religion, the First Amendment, and Public Schools: Stories from K-12 and Teacher Education Classrooms. Dr. Shatara was also a middle school social studies teacher for seven years in Philadelphia, PA, where she became a National Board Certified Teacher.

About Critical Education:

 Critical Education is an international, refereed, open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES). Contributions critically examine contemporary education contexts, practices, and theories. Critical Education publishes theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, higher education, and informal education. ICES, Critical Education, and its companion publication Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, defend the freedom, without restriction or censorship, to disseminate and publish reports of research, teaching, and service, and to express critical opinions about institutions or systems and their management. Co-Directors of ICES, co-Hosts of ICES and Workplace blogs, and co-Editors of these journals resist all efforts to limit the exercise of academic freedom and intellectual freedom, recognizing the right of criticism by authors or contributors.

Author Guidelines: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about/submissions

References

Abolitionist Teaching Network [@ATN_1863]. (2023, November 17). Our schools continue to be a vital space for teaching and organizing for a free Palestine. Here are a few resources to inspire conversations in your classrooms. Comment ⬇️ with materials & lesson plans you’re finding inspiring & activating #Educators4Palestine [Images attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ATN_1863/status/1725700843729473713?s=20.

Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2015). Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian American Youth after 9/11. University of Chicago Press.

Al Jazeera. (2023, November 17). In photos: People protest Israel’s war on Gaza across the world. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/11/17/photos-people-protest-israeli-war-on-gaza-across-the-world.

Arafat, Z. (2022, December 29). Gaza through my Instagram feed. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bisan-plestia-motaz-gaza-through-my-instagram-feed.html.

Conybeare, W. & Ramos, A. R. (2023, November 15). Orange County student suspended for saying ‘Free Palestine,’ family claims. KTLA. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/orange-county-student-suspended-for-saying-free-palestine/#:~:text=The%20family%20of%20a%20student,being%20suspended%20for%20three%20days.

Love, B. (2023). Punished for dreaming: How school reform harms Black children and how we heal. St. Martin’s Press.

Morrar, S. (2020, November 6). Changes to ethnic studies in California include expansion on Asian American lessons The Sacramento Bee. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article247016937.html.

Rajvanshi, A. (2023, October 23). Europe’s balancing act: Protecting free speech while curbing anti-Israel rhetoric. Time. https://time.com/6326360/europe-palestine-protests-free-speech/.

Roscoe, J. (2023, November 13). TikTok: It’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjb8b/tiktok-its-not-the-algorithm-teens-are-just-pro-palestine.

Shankar, P., Dixit, P., & Siddiqui, U. (2023, October 24). Shadowbanning: Are social media giants censoring pro-Palestine voices? Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-are-social-media-giants-censoring-pro-palestine-voices.

Shatara, H. (2022). “Existence is Resistance”: Palestine and Palestinians in social studies education. In S. B. Shear, N. H. Merchant, & W. Au (Eds.), Insurgent social studies: Scholar-Educators disrupting erasure & marginality. Myers Education Press.

Shatara, H. (2023). Critical Political Consciousness within Nepantla as Transformative: The Experiences and Pedagogy of a Palestinian World History Teacher. Curriculum Inquiry. 53(1), 28-48. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2123214

Zinn Education Project. (2023, December 4). Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel. Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/violence-in-israel-and-gaza/.

Wayne Au: A Pedagogy of Insurgency in Troubling Times

 

Dr. Au is a former public high school social studies teacher and is now Dean and Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is a longtime editor for the social justice teaching magazine, Rethinking scholarship about high-stakes testing, neoliberal education policy, teaching for social justice, critical pedagogy, and antiracist education. Author or editor of over 100 publications, his recent co-edited books include Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar- Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality (2022), Rethinking Ethnic Studies (2019) and Teaching for Black Lives (2018). His most recent authored books include the second edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality (2022) and A Marxist Education (2018).
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Teachers are on the frontline of ongoing social, economic, and community health crises. Using the organizing for racial justice done by teachers in Seattle, WA, in this talk Dr. Wayne Au will discuss how teacher actions represent a kind of pedagogy of insurgency that is required when social contradictions reach a particular level. While not all-powerful, it is important to recognize that this kind of pedagogy can have significant local impact as well as offer symbolic inspiration for teacher organizing at the national and international levels.

Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fatma Mizikaci and Eda Ata (University of Anakara, Turkey) began a free online webinar series called Global Thursday Talks to examine the social and political impact of the pandemic on education, and explore how the creation of digital communities has become indispensable in maintaining connectivity and building networks.

The book version of these GTT talks and interviews, Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis has just been published by Bloomsbury.

A wide-range of critical scholar/activist educators from Europe, North America and Turkey participated in the seminars and contribute to the book. I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to participate in the project along with Antonia Darder, Liv Mjelde, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, and many others.

My dialogue with Fatma and Eda as part of GTT is wide-ranging. I discuss my journey as an activist educator and experiences that shaped my thinking about education and its role in the transformation of society. I also describe how the pandemic created a crisis for teaching, learning, and democratic action within the pre-existing crisis that is neoliberal capitalism, including how the threats of corporate education intensified during the pandemic. I also spend time talking about various models of critical resistance for teachers and teacher educators – that is – how post-pandemic educators can take advantage of the disruptions of traditional practices to create more flexible, responsive and subversive approaches to teaching and learning.

Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education

Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education

Brill has just published the Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education, edited by Alpesh Maisuria, who is a professor in Education Policy in Critical Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.

“This encyclopaedia showcases the explanatory power of Marxist educational theory and practice. The entries have been written by 51 leading authors from across the globe. The 39 entries cover an impressive range of contemporary issues and historical problematics. The editor has designed the book to appeal to readers within the Marxism and education intellectual tradition, and also those who are curious newcomers, as well as critics of Marxism.

The Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education is the first of its kind. It is a landmark text with relevance for years to come for the productive dialogue between Marxism and education for transformational thinking and practice.”

I co-authored, with Sandra Mathison,  a chapter titled “Critical Education” for EME. In this chapter we define critical education broadly as a field or approach that works theoretically and practically toward social change that anticipates a post-capitalist world. We explore multiple foundational sources for critical education including Marxism and critical theory, but also democracy and anarchism. And finally, we provide an overview of several manifestations of critical education. While many conflate critical pedagogy with critical education, we contend critical education has a broader reach.

Please contact me if you would like a copy of our chapter on critical education, as I have a limited number of offprints I can share.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors

1 Introduction
Alpesh Maisuria
2 The 4th Industrial Revolution, Post-Capitalism, Waged Labour and Vocational Education
James Avis
3 Alienation and Education
Richard Hall
4 Alternatives to Capitalism
Peter Hudis
5 Capital Accumulation and Education
John Fraser Rice
6 Colonialisms and Class
Spyros Themelis
7 Communism: The Party – Pedagogy and Revolution from Marx to China
Collin L. Chambers and Derek R. Ford
8 Corporate State: “Downhill All the Way” – Education in England from Welfare to Corporate State
Patrick Ainley
9 Critical Education
Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross
10 Critical Realism
Grant Banfield
11 Cuban-Marxist Education
Rosi Smith, Leticia de las Mercedes García Rosabal and Maikel J. Ortiz Bosch
12 Dialectical Materialism (Materialist Dialectics)
Constantine (Kostas) Skordoulis
13 Disaster Education
John Preston
14 Early Childhood, Feminism, and Marx
Rachel Rosen and Jan Newberry
15 Employment: Education without Jobs – Young People, Qualifications, and Employment in 21st Century Britain
Martin Allen
16 Ethnography of Education and Marxism: Education Research for Social Transformation
Dennis Beach
17 Freire, Paulo (1921–1997) as a Marxist Revolutionary for Education
Juha Suoranta
18 Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937): Culture and Education
Peter Mayo
19 Green Marxism
Simon Boxley
20 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” (1928–1967)
Peter McLaren and Lilia D. Monzó
21 Intersectionality: Scaling Intersectional Praxes
Gregory Martin and Benjamin “Benji” Chang
22 Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924) and Education
Juha Suoranta and Robert FitzSimmons
23 Liberation Theology
Peter McLaren
24 Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919) and Education
Julia Damphouse and Sebastian Engelmann
25 Managerialism and Higher Education
Goran Puaca
26 Marxism and Education: [Closed] and … Open …
Glenn Rikowski
27 Marxism and Human Rights against Capitalism
Daniel Hedlund and Magnus Nilsson
28 Marxist Feminism and Education: Gender, Race, and Class
Sara Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab
29 Middle Classes of the World
Göran Therborn
30 Neo-Liberalism and Revolution: Marxism for Emerging Critical Educators
Alpesh Maisuria
31 New Left, Anarchism and Education
Nick Stevenson
32 Palestine: Education in Mandate Palestine
Bernard Regan
33 Plebs League: Towards a Modern Plebs League
Colin Waugh
34 Postdigital Marxism
Petar Jandrić
35 Poverty: Class, Poverty and Neo-Liberalism
Terry Wrigley
36 Public Pedagogy
Mike Cole
37 Public University: The Political Economy of the Public University
David Harvie, Mariya Ivancheva and Robert Ovetz
38 Social Class: Education, Social Class and Marxist Theory
Dave Hill and Alpesh Maisuria
39 State and Private Capital: Education, State and Capital
Ravi Kumar and Rama Paul
40 World-Systems Critical Education
Tom G. Griffiths

Index

“We can learn lessons from the streets” – Interview with Documento (Athens, Greece) on Uprisings in the USA

Here is a brief interview I did with Anna Papadimitriou for Documento newspaper (Athens, Greece), published in the June 6-7, 2020 edition. English text below.

Documento: The death of George Floyd has sparked massive protests in the United States. It seems that this is one of the “dominoes” that brought people out to the streets. What are the reasons fuelling people’s rage?

EWR: The brutal and horrifying killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin is the tipping point for large scale protests that ripped through over 120 cities in the United States. Floyd’s death is reminiscent of Eric Garner’s 2014 death at the hands of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo who placed him in a prohibited chokehold while Garner uttered “I can’t breathe.” But in recent weeks we have also witnessed the police killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death in Georgia by a white ex-police officer. The United States, and African Americans in particular, have suffered from an epidemic of police brutality and killing for years. Since 2014, after Michael Brown, an unarmed black man was gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri, there have been over 5,000 Americans shot and killed by police. Indeed, the rate of fatal shootings by police is remarkably consistent, averaging about 1,000 deaths per year. The rate at which African Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. Fatal police shootings have taken place in every state.

The ongoing protests of the police killing of George Floyd has predictably fostered a further eruption of police violence as police across the country have tear-gassed peaceful protesters, driven police vehicles through crowds, opened fire with rubber bullets on journalists and people on their own property. So the civilians’ rage against police violence has prompted law enforcement officers to escalate the unrest.

Police violence and murder in the United States cannot be separated from the context of racism and white supremacy that has been part of the country’s history and make up since its founding. The police in the North America and elsewhere were created to protect property and enforce repressive laws in the interest of maintaining interests advantaged by status quo inequalities, it has long been the norm for police to break up demonstrations of people advocating for civil rights or to attack trade unionists.

While the focus of protests in the US as well as in Canada have been in response to police violence and violence against black people there is the matter of the growing inequalities and inequities in everyday life. The coronavirus pandemic illustrates this as African Americans are dying from COVID19 at three times the rate of white people, as does continued lack of access to adequate health care for all Americans, the attack on women’s rights to make decisions about their own health, etc.

Then there is the largest bailout in the history of the US, USD 2trillion, which primarily protects the investor class and corporate interests, while 40 million workers are without jobs. The official US unemployment rate is now nearly 15%, the highest since records began. And most economists believe that the real figure is above 20%.

Documento:  President Trump is evidently a polarizing figure who is adding fuel to the fire, but it is evident that the American society as a whole is deeply fragmented and polarised.

EWR: The United States has long been a fragmented and deeply divided society. It is a country that has been built on slavery, racism, and white supremacy. The US Civil War, fought over slavery, begat continuing conflict over the racism and access to civil rights that has never been resolved. At the end of the First World War in 1919, Black Americans experienced the deadliest episode of races riots and lynching in US history. The apartheid society of the US continued to function well into the 1960s with de facto racial segregation continuing for years in housing and schools. The Black Lives Matter movement is a response to the cumulative impact of white supremacy and the longstanding fatal inequalities it produces.

Trump is certainly a polarizing figure and he added fuel to the fires with his ever increasing authoritarian and now clearly fascist rhetoric. At his political rallies and in his public statements Trump has offered encouragement and apologies for white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups. His remarks about  Unite the Right rally in Charlotteville, Virginia in 2017 were particularly flagrant. Trump’s approach has been to produce chaos and division rather than seek peace, reconciliation, solution to problems. By all accounts, his personal as well as domestic and foreign policy are at heart based upon bullying and authoritarianism and laced with ignorance and incompetence. This can be seen in his rhetoric regarding China and North Korea for example as well his characterization of US protesters as “terrorists,” his belligerent attitude toward state governors’ handling of the protests, his lack of empathy for 100,000+ coronavirus victims and his failure to manage pandemic.

Documento: What should we expect for the next day? Can these protests bring real change to the American society? Can a new political movement be born out of these protests? Or more is needed to bring change in an already established system?

It is absolutely possible for the current uprising to spawn a new political movement that leads to real change. It is possible, but not likely to produce systemic change. My pessimism for revolutionary change in the United States is because the vast majority of Americans see political conflicts through the lens of the two party system that dominates the political narrative. White there are some differences between the Trump’s Republican Party and the Democratic Party, particularly on social and cultural issues, both parties are supremely committed to the status quo, which is a view of the world that is defined by neoliberal capitalism and the extension and strengthening of empire. Both parties are driven by the interests of the corporate capitalism and of the super-rich. Despite the common rhetoric of the United States as a fountain of democracy and freedom, its politics is defined by economic-elite domination – the one percent and organized groups representing corporate interests have substantial independent impact on government policy. This is clearly illustrated in by the Trump administrations dismantling of environmental protections. Average citizens and mass-based groups have little influence on government policies. The protests illustrate the power of the people, but that power needs to coalesce in forms that are not coopted by either of the reigning political parties. The first step toward revolutionary change takes place in the mind. If there is change in the way people start to understand the world — such as rejecting the packaged ideological narratives of major corporate media  — then there will be a change in the way people behave. I am optimistic about what can be learned in the streets.

THE REGIMES OF TRUTH OF (GLOBAL) CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Event cancelled based on UBC recommendations regarding COVID-19.

Public Seminar
Institute for Critical Educational Studies

THE REGIMES OF TRUTH OF (GLOBAL) CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Marta Estellés, PhD
University of Cantabria (Spain)

Thursday, April 2, 2020
12:30 – 1:30 pm
University of British Columbia, Vancouver — Scarfe 1209

 Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to briefly problematize current ways of thinking and talking about (global) citizenship education. Citizenship is a process more than it is an attribute, since the concept has incorporated the main characteristics both of the political transformations experienced by the State and of the State’s relations with society. The successive battles for the definition of citizenship have an impact on that institution of socialization that is school. Examining the evolution of curricular prescriptions and orientations is enough to glimpse changes in the languages and frames through which certain relations between the individual, the community, and the State are naturalized.

The results of our research show that the two major cycles of socio-institutional restructuring in Western countries – from the crisis of the nineteenth-century liberal regimes to the present – have imposed different trends in relation to citizenship education in schools. The first cycle reached its culmination with the implementation of Welfare States after the Second World War. It was not a coincidence that the first major defense for democratic citizenship education appeared in this moment, with the reformist impulse that gave rise in 1916 to Social Studies in the US. The recognition of socio-economic rights and the formation of citizenship appeared inextricably linked in the texts of the reform, in an attempt to establish a new “regime of truth” that radically redefined the meaning of education for all, and not only for a privileged minority. This redefinition also implied a criticism of the patriotic and nationalistic purposes of education. This language, however, started to become blurred as neoliberal policies instituted their own frames in the 1980s with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. Citizenship education began to adopt the rhetoric of accountability with its emphasis on testing, performance levels, skills, etc. and the focus was on promoting responsible and active citizenship that clearly emphasized duties over rights. Thus, it began to be assumed that citizens should be responsible for their own well-being and not the State. Recent discourses on global citizenship education should be seen as heirs of this last redefinition. After all, global citizenship education “aims to empower learners to engage and assume active roles, both locally and globally, to face and resolve global challenges” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 15), assuming that the responsibility of solving those challenges lies with the individuals, not on governments or international organizations.

Marta Estellés, PhD, is Assistant Professor of the Department of Education at the University of Cantabria (Spain). Her research interests include citizenship education, social studies education, curriculum policies and teacher education. She has published several works on the intersectional field of democratic citizenship education and initial teacher education. She is currently working on a research project related to teachers’ political views and behaviors and their attitudes towards including controversial issues in the classroom. She is also part of the Fedicaria collective (http://www.fedicaria.org), which advocates for critical social studies education.

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Society, Democracy, and Economics: Challenges for Social Studies and Citizenship Education in a Neoliberal World

On February 20, 2020 I will be delivering the keynote address at the annual meeting of Gesellschaft für sozioökonomische Bildung und Wissenschaft (GSÖBW) / Society for Socio-Economic Education and Science in Vienna, Austria.

Abstract

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history,” arguing the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of the Cold War, and universalization of liberal-democracy was the end point of the humankind’s ideological evolution. Since then we have witnessed a continued retreat of civil rights, a massive rise in inequality, and liberal-democracy has now delivered a string of illiberal authoritarian, nationalist leaders worldwide. Many analyses of right-wing populism are dualistic – creating a narrative of democracy against right-wing nationalism. Individualism is at the heart of classical liberalism and as such is the root of the democratic crisis that is represented by the contemporary rise of so-called populism. In this paper I explore national democracies and the relationship between bourgeois democracy and fascism. Given what we know about the state of democracy in the world today, is it even possible to teach for a democracy that is not dominated by capital? Do we want to teach for capitalist democracy? Is there an alternative? Is the concept of democracy bankrupt? Is democracy as a concept and practice even salvageable? If democracy is salvageable then teaching about and for democracy in contemporary times cannot be done without engaging the complexities and contradictions that have come to define what real existing (or non-existing) democracy is and its relationship with fascism and populism.

Keywords: populism, democracy, social studies education, citizenship education, neoliberalism, socio-economic education

The full text of the talk is available here: DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23273.85600

Sandra Mathison: Privatizing private schools should top list of funding changes

Published in The Province (Vancouver, BC)
October 9, 2019
Since 2013, the province has subsidized private schools to the tune of $2.6 billion. The subsidies for 2018-19 alone were $426 million, and projections for this school year are $436 million. Julia McKay / The Whig-Standard

Privatizing private schools should top list of funding changes

By Sandra Mathison

Opinion: With a public system still reeling from more than 15 years of cuts by the previous government, there is no excuse for funnelling billions of dollars to private schools.

As the B.C. education ministry rethinks how to fully and adequately fund the province’s schools, at the top of their list should be privatizing private schools by discontinuing public subsidies to independent schools.

Since 2013, the province has subsidized private schools to the tune of $2.6 billion. The subsidies for 2018-19 alone were $426 million, and projections for this school year are $436 million.

These subsidies to private schools have increased at an astronomical rate: funding increases (adjusted for inflation) to private schools have increased by 122.8 per cent since 2000-01, compared to a 15.9-per-cent increase in funding to public schools during this same period.

According to recent surveys by the Institute for Public Education, CUPE B.C. and the B.C. Humanist Association, most British Columbians believe public funding of private schools needs to end. In a poll that Insights West conducted for us in May, four in five British Columbians (78 per cent) oppose providing taxpayer funds for elite private schools. Sixty-nine per cent of British Columbians oppose funding to faith-based schools.

Let private schools be private, and let them deserve the label “independent schools.”

Private schools cost taxpayers by direct taxpayer-supported subsidies, but also by exemptions from paying property taxes, numerous personal tax benefits for individuals, and collecting large sums of tax-deductible donations.

Private schools also cost B.C. in non-economic ways. Faith-based schools are allowed to ignore human-rights laws and discriminate against employees based on marital status or sexual orientation. Our poll shows that few British Columbians are aware that faith-based schools are exempted from the B.C. Human Rights Code, but once they were aware of this, 81 per cent of respondents did not believe they should be allowed this exemption.

Let private schools be private, and let them deserve the label “independent schools.”

Private school admission processes segregate students by class and/or beliefs, rejecting students who don’t “fit” their values. These schools are therefore isolating students from peers who are not like them. Many B.C. taxpayers’ children would not be admitted to these private schools — because they can’t afford them, do not have academic credentials, or they are not suitable given the school’s philosophy.

Private schools reject the idea that schools ought to be about equity, about providing an education for all students regardless of their individual attributes.

If the education ministry needs a plan, they could immediately end subsidies to elite “Group 2” schools, those spending more per student than public schools and charging significant tuition fees. These are schools such as St. George’s in Vancouver and Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island.

Then they could phase out subsidies to faith-based schools over a short period of time, say two to three years.

The ministry should review private schools that serve needs not currently well met by the public schools (possibly, Indigenous schools and programs for students with special needs) and work toward integrating those schools/programs into the public education system. They should ensure there is sufficient funding provided to public schools to meet those needs.

And at the same time, tax exemptions that diminish revenue that could support public education need to change.

With a public school system still reeling from more than 15 years of cuts by the previous government, and students with special needs bearing the brunt of the underfunding, there is no excuse for funnelling billions of dollars to private schools. That money should be allocated to the public school system where it can help every child achieve their fullest potential.

Sandra Mathison is the executive director of the Institute for Public Education B.C., a professor of education at the University of B.C., and co-director of the Institute for Critical Education.