This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Paul W. Bennett, October 16, 2025
The erosion of liberal education in Canada’s kindergarten to Grade 12 schools is no longer a matter for speculation — it is now undeniable. Thirty years ago, Peter Emberley and Waller Newell’s Bankrupt Education (1994) offered a prophetic warning. They diagnosed a “crisis of public confidence” in our schools, highlighting the rise of a “vague and value-laden” curriculum in which “substance” was giving way to “social experimentation.” Students and teachers, they claimed, were reduced to guinea pigs in a system steadily abandoning knowledge, intellectual rigour, and preparation for higher education.
That diagnosis has aged remarkably well. Liberal education, once at the core of Canadian schooling, has been pushed to the margins. Today’s curriculum is dominated less by the pursuit of knowledge and more by the politics of identity, student self-esteem and civic activism.
Historical amnesia, presentism, and the hollowing-out of subject disciplines have left our students less prepared to think deeply, argue persuasively and participate meaningfully in democratic life. When Donald Trump threatened to make Canada the 51st state, far too many among the current generation were left not only completely mystified but unable to fathom its origins running deep, across time, on our shared continent.
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Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D., is the director of the Schoolhouse Institute, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an education columnist for Brunswick News/Postmedia.
