New Curriculum Must Serve the People of AlbertaAlberta's United Conservative Party (UCP) government recently released the names of eight members of its curriculum review advisory panel. This new advisory committee is not to be confused with the still-existing 12-member curriculum review committee formed in August 2019. The latter is chaired by the so-called public education reform representative for the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies, a reactionary think tank taken over in 2019 by the corporate-funded neo-liberal propaganda outlet, the Fraser Institute. In a rambling and somewhat incoherent speech on August 5, the committee chair reported that due to COVID-19 the Alberta review committee essentially had nothing to report, however he did extol used car sales as a promising future career for students.
The UCP claim that both their curriculum review committee and their new advisory panel are "unbiased," which is quite ludicrous. The 12-member review committee includes no Alberta teachers. However, it does include a former Alberta deputy minister from the Getty and Klein conservative governments, the co-founder of the "free enterprise" Petrarch Institute, and an American educator who champions private schools. The bias of the eight-member advisory committee is mainly shown by who is absent. Again, no members of that committee are elementary school teachers or staff. None are women, who make up 71 per cent of school professionals in Alberta. None of the advisory committee members are Indigenous. And several members are closely connected with the UCP or the ideology driving that party. C.P. (Chris) Champion, for example, is the UCP's social studies advisor on the eight-member committee. He worked for the federal Opposition Conservatives, Alberta premier Jason Kenney's former party, for six years, serving as an advisor to Kenney himself from 2007 to 2015. Champion founded the right-wing Dorchester Review in 2011 which he still edits, which claims to "challenge the boring and politically-correct vision of history often found in the media and in academe." An authorless article from the first issue, republished online this year, critiques history curriculum introduced by "left" governments. It derides an Australian history curriculum as "light on facts and heavy with guilt about Aboriginals and immigrants." The piece also states that "in Canada the preoccupation with victimhood has mostly centred on Japanese Canadians and residential school survivors." Champion has been published in the Journal of Intelligence and National Security and is a member of the Canadian Military Intelligence Association. Several UCP advisory picks are far removed from their designated area of expertise. The advisor for arts and literature is a lawyer who just happens to sit on a theatre company's board of directors, obviously to give legal advice. The advisor for science is an associate professor of computer science. The problem with the latter selection is that there isn't any science in computing science. A true science such as physics or chemistry or biology studies and explains some aspect of physical reality. It is not focussed on how to build things; that is the domain of engineering. What is mislabeled as computer science might more aptly be called "computology" the study of computational processes and how they can be realized. The appointment of a non-scientist to advise about science is definitely a problem, especially when scientific inquiry, the main approach to teaching school science, is based on how actual scientists carry out their investigations. The context for the UCP's proliferation of panels was the three-year process of curriculum reform initiated by the previous NDP government, which the UCP opposed from the beginning as having a "left-wing bias." Interestingly, the Minister of Education has, when interviewed, been unable to give a single concrete example of the alleged bias. Premier Kenney has also attacked the reform process under the previous government as both "biased" and "secretive," even though it gathered input from thousands of teachers and the proposed changes were published for all to see online.
The real question amid all this political infighting is who should the new curriculum serve? Based on the composition of their committees, the UCP government obviously thinks it should reflect their neo-liberal ideology which serve the interests of the Alberta energy industry. In contrast, the people of Alberta think the curriculum should serve the people's interests, that is, it should include what will help create a society which is humanized in all aspects and where the people can participate in making the decisions that affect their lives, including the decisions as to what the curriculum should be. One thing is very clear. If existing curricula do
not adjust to changes and the needs of the people,
education will become irrelevant and obsolete,
thereby putting future generations at risk. But
education is a right which cannot be taken away.
That is why it is necessary to constantly question
how well the current curriculum is responding to
the needs of the people and to take the necessary
steps to continuously improve it in the people's
interests. The fight for a modern curriculum and a
modern education system must be part and parcel of
the fight for a new society that must be based on
the guarantee of rights for all. (Photos: WF, M. Sardinha)
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
The Alberta
curriculum reform is definitely an urgent need,
with a number of curricula now well beyond their
best-before date. The Alberta elementary science
curriculum, for example, is 24 years old and the
elementary art curriculum is 35 years old. These
and other curricula definitely need to be
modernized so that students can make sense of
today's world. This ossified state of educational
affairs is the result of 44 years of Conservative
governments which have continuously starved
education of needed funds in order to subsidize
the mostly foreign-owned energy companies which
continue to dominate Alberta's economics,
politics, and culture.
Kenney has also
repeatedly stated that the new curriculum should
focus on "foundational competencies," a phrase
from the world of job training which hearkens back
to the long-discredited back-to-basics movement of
the Thatcher-Reagan era, however he has never
clarified what those competencies actually are.
Kenney's equation of education with job training
should raise a red flag. Training implies a
one-way transmission of procedural knowledge where
the learner passively absorbs what they are told
rather than participating in the construction of a
broad, elaborated understanding. Critical and
creative thinking are ignored. Advocating
fundamental competencies as the main goal of
school education sounds suspiciously like an
attempt to promote indoctrinating students rather
than teaching them.