HANNAFORD: Moral rot at the heart of Alberta's school system

The Marxism embedded in Alberta's education system is the reason more and more Albertan parents are looking for alternative schooling for their children.

Thus educator Caylan Ford on Hannaford tonight, commenting upon the dramatic increase in home schooling, private schools and Charter schools of the last few years.

She may well say that. Two years ago, Ford founded the Calgary Classical Academy; it now has three campuses, 1,200 students and a waiting list of 3,000. And she says the Government of Alberta should deal with the problem.

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"A lot of parents can sense there is something lacking in the education their children are receiving. They might not necessarily be able to diagnose it, partly because for most of those parents, they didn't receive what we call a traditional education themselves. But the unease is there. So I think one of the problems, one of the things where modern education has really gone wrong, is the triumph of a kind of moral relativism. And I think this is a sort of powerful civilizational solvent."

And moral relativism, the idea that there is no absolute truth, only the 'lived experience' of different people, and that nothing can be known for sure, has indeed entered Alberta's school system via the colleges that train Alberta's teachers.

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Ford says, "I think that the teachers’ colleges are a major area that we need to focus on. A lot of the philosophical problems come from the fact that teacher colleges train teachers on what is very much a Marxist pedagogy. One of the most influential books they use is Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed.’ He's unapologetically a Marxist, the footnotes are full of approving references to Marx and Che Guevara and various Marxist theorists and it's virtually unknown outside of teachers colleges. So that tells you what its influence is there, and even if people are not directly studying it, they're studying works that are commenting on or inspired by it, so the language of Freire is pervasive in education faculties and in professional development and it's basically a it's a kind of radical revolt against reality."

Out of roughly 800,000 school-age children in Alberta, only 524,000 are within the public system, although a further 185,000 are in the operationally-similar Catholic system. What is astonishing is the growth of charter and private schools, and of home schooling which together have an enrolment of 83,000 pupils, or more than 10% of the student population — with waiting lists.

It is not that the Government of Alberta is completely unaware of the problem. "I think that some of the curriculum reforms that have been undertaken have gone in the right direction in areas of literacy," says Ford.

"But these (Marxist) assumptions are embedded in their education. That's something that should be a grave concern to a provincial government and you know one thing that you could do is to create more choice in the training and certification of teachers. But I think it's also totally feasible for the provincial government to actually say to education faculties, 'This is not helpful, we're not going to fund this, we're concerned about how we're forming the souls of the next generation and this (moral relativism) is corrosive to the foundations of our civilization. So cut it out!"