New Alberta education bill under fire by educators, teachers’ association, NDP

Some teachers say changes to Alberta's Education Act announced on Tuesday amount to censorship. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has their story.

Following the tabling of Bill 25 Tuesday, teachers, their union and the Official Opposition have deemed the legislation “unnecessary.”

An Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and Amend the Education Act requires that teachers be unbiased in classrooms and refrain from making statements on political, social or ideological matters.

Alberta Teachers’ Association president Jason Schilling said the legislation was offensive to teachers.

“This expectation is set out in the teaching quality standard and enforced by school leaders, employer boards and the teaching profession commission,” said Schilling at a virtual press conference Wednesday. “Academic rigor and intellectual integrity are already demanded and demonstrated in Alberta schools, any suggestion otherwise is unfair and quite frankly, offensive to the profession.”

One former teacher called the bill “professional censorship.”

“The teacher is supposed to be the moderator, and if the teacher can’t intervene in saying things that are outright wrong … that’s a huge problem,” said Gary Nelson who is now a sessional education instructor at the University of Alberta.

“If teachers are afraid that they can’t have that involvement in guiding discussion with kids around what facts are, around what opinions are, and they’re scared to do that, the education of the kids is really put in jeopardy.”

Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said personal opinion and bias has no place in the classroom, and that schools “should be places where students learn how to think, not what to think.”

“The changes in the legislation help support critical thinking and help support discussion of maybe controversial or challenging topics because we’re safeguarding the students’ right in the bill to express diverse viewpoints,” said the minister Wednesday.

Nicolaides added that there are already guidelines for teachers to present topics in neutral ways, going back to 2024.

“We have a curriculum, and teachers are expected to teach to those outcomes,” said Nicolaides. “We talk about the horrors of genocide, we talk about Holodomor, the Holocaust, and teachers will continue to be expected to teach about those horrors to the level of our outcomes as they’re outlined and described.”

The bill also sets guidelines for what flags can be flown at schools and makes the playing of the national anthem required at least once a week.

“Their bill has nothing to do with classroom size or complexity or making schools more safe,” said Official Opposition and New Democrat leader Naheed Nenshi. “It’s about restricting freedom of speech. It’s about making sure that social studies teachers can’t actually teach current events. It’s about dictating what flags can be flown, and it’s about naming schools because they don’t want schools named after people they don’t like.”

Nicolaides said many school divisions in the province already have policies on flags and the national anthem, but the province wants to establish “minimum standards” through its legislation.

“We have to ensure that we’re as united as we possibly can be, and that’s why I think it is important that we establish some of these standards, recognizing that we’re making modifications to some of these standards that already exist.”

Flag, anthem and school naming regulations are expected to be in place come Sept. 1.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Jeremy Thompson