Lively Commentary on Canadian Education
Every generation produces its educational silver bullet. Progressive education promised child-centred discovery learning. Open classrooms were supposed to liberate learning. Computer-assisted instruction would individualize education. More recently, personalized digital learning was heralded as the solution to every problem facing schools. Today, artificial intelligence has become the latest…
The Canadian province of New Brunswick ranks last in student achievement and may be a worst-case scenario. Confronting a populace losing faith in public education, the Government of New Brunswick has rolled out yet another provincial education improvement plan. The accompanying 30-second “Together for Success” video promoting the new Anglophone and Francophone Education Plans [ ]
“Mandate creep” sneaks up on public service institutions and especially school systems. Provincial systems in Nova Scotia and elsewhere gradually wander away from their original core mandate of providing academic preparation and begin to resemble social service agencies. The current rush, post-pandemic, to provide universal school meal programs is the latest and most obvious example. [ ]
Canada’s Culture Minister Marc Miller is poised to introduce a Digital Safety Act and signal the federal government’s intention to move forward with a social media ban for minors up to 16 years of age. With social media addiction rampant among the smartphone generation, it is late in the game, but it is so far [ ]
Local citizens across New Brunswick could be forgiven for thinking that District Education Councils (DECs) were moribund. Post-municipal election pulse taking, in case you are wondering, revealed little more than a faint pulse in the education body politic. The ‘acclamation disease’ afflicting New Brunswick’s District Education Councils (DECs) can now be classified as an epidemic. [ ]
The ‘Culture War’ has totally enveloped our universities and effectively undermined the foundation of ‘the commons’- one place where open, lively civic debate and intellectual exchanges across the battle lines were still possible. A new University of Regina Press collection of essays with the ironic title Knowledge Under Siege, cobbled together by one of [ ]
Thirty-nine years after the founding of Spelling Bee of Canada, founder Juile Spence was beaming as she took centre stage at Crandall University in Moncton on Saturday April 11, 2026 for the first live New Brunswick provincial competition. Resplendent in her impressive yellow jacket and colour- coordinated dress, the undisputed “Queen Bee” of spelling had [ ]
Closing local heritage museums looked like a low-risk political calculation for Nova Scotia’s Tim Houston government. Local museums and public libraries have long occupied a low rung on the provincial pecking order, surviving repeated rounds of austerity by making-do with less. The latest cuts, however, proved deeply troubling—not only to me, but to many [ ]
One of New Brunswick’s most public-spirited citizens, Daryl Branscombe—founder and CEO of Greenarm Realty in Fredericton— surfaced again recently in the news. This time it was as chair of the Community of Creative Citizens calling for a provincial education review to end what he described as the “patchwork” approach to improving New Brunswick’s [ ]
Schools across Canada have spent billions of dollars on educational technology over the last 15 years. During that time, Big Tech has made tremendous inroads and significantly altered the terms of engagement in the K-12 classroom. Schools have gone paperless and most textbooks have either been completely replaced by online learning resources or reduced to [ ]