Blog Post
A H Harry Oussoren • Feb 16, 2021
Moving Beyond "Separate" Schools
The Ontario School System – too many boards
A "separate" religion-based public school system is an Ontario anachronism that can no longer justified.
It's time for the province to move into the 21st Century by merging the separate school system into one public educational system resulting in two boards - English and French.
Currently there is a four publicly-funded boards structure - English Catholic, French Catholic, English non-religious, French non-religious. This is ridiculous over-governance.
Perhaps in 1867 it made sense to have a compromise alternative in view of the sharp division between French Catholic and English “protestant” - non-Catholic populations - of Ontario and Quebec. Lamentably, no one at the time thought about the impact of this constitutional compromise on Indigenous peoples or Jews or non-believers.
So provincial governments were given the power to fund “separate” “protestant” and Roman Catholic educational systems in order to protect the minority rights of Protestants in Quebec and Roman Catholics in Ontario. The “simple” solution was enacted and persists in Ontario, defying reason, justice, efficiency, and educational consequences.
The issue is joined because the binary stand-off of the 19th Century has become a multi-cultural, multi-faith and no faith, pluralistic, complex society . Quebec has scrapped its version of the “simple” arrangement. But Ontario has not – even though Roman Catholics are now the largest religious constituency, substantially larger than “protestants.” In fact, in the 1980s, Ontario’s Davis Conservative government chose to extend public funding for Roman Catholic elementary and all high school grades.
John Tory, now mayor of Toronto, but erstwhile leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party, in the 2007 provincial election proposed that public funding be extended to other faith groups wishing to have separate schools. This idea went against the popular current. The electorate told Mr. Tory to seek another place to offer his leadership gifts.
Ontario residents increasingly are of one opinion about the “separate” system idea. One poll reports that 56% of respondents favour merging the public and separate systems.
The Justice Issues
Most people discussing the situation intuit that it is simply an unjust arrangement. To have public funds – taxes – pay for an educational system controlled by one faith community – the Roman Catholic Church - is unfair to the many other religious groups now part of the province’s societal fabric. An R.C. priest with whom I discussed this situation also agreed that it just didn’t make sense any more in this pluralistic society.
That is not to say that there is no room in the public school system for religious education. Helping students learn about the important role religion has played in all civilizations is essential to understanding the many-facetted human condition.
But this is learning about the large role religious observance and practice has played in life – not education for becoming a person of faith in this or that tradition. That type of formation is the role of the faith community itself, not the provincial government.
Injustice also occurs when the separate school system imposes religiously-based personal norms and standards that discriminate against minority groups such as LGBTQ2S persons. When statutory-based human rights conflict with religiously-based convictions, then individuals easily become victims of discrimination – overt and subtle.
Further compounding the injustice of the separate system is the disparity in amounts of money being spent on the separate system. Numbers vary, but the picture is clear that the public system receives substantially less money per capita than the separate system. Justice would be achieved when both systems receive comparable per capita grants or when the systems are merged into one.
Money Wasted
But the real issue is that the province is spending more than necessary on education as the four board system is currently managed?
I can’t argue against the need for a French board and an English board. To organize the French schools in Ontario under an English or bi-lingual board would be deleterious, I believe, to French education and culture in this province and in this officially bi-lingual nation. In Ontario, the minority rights of francophones need to be safe-guarded.
But merging the French Catholic and the French public boards into one public French system, and, amalgamating the English Roman Catholic boards into a single English public board system would generate huge long-term savings.
Imagine the current expense of duplicated bureaucracies and services, school buildings and equipment, libraries, IT, and other resources that are required in a four-board system.
Here we’re not talking about millions of tax dollars, but billions that could be applied to improving and strengthening the entire provincial educational portfolio. It could also be diverted to other priority areas such as housing for the homeless, safer public long term care facilities, Indigenous support services, etc.
When inefficiency is generated by no longer applicable historic circumstances in an immensely different society, then such extravagance (waste) cannot be justified.
Other provinces have come to that conclusion and made the challenging but necessary adjustment – Newfoundland/Labrador, Quebec. Why not Ontario?
The Need for Faith-Based Education
My educational experience included two and a half years in Calvin Christian School of the Christian Reformed Church in Vancouver. Often, only half-jokingly, I will say that that’s where I learned to swear, but also where I learned the stories of the Bible. There is no doubt that people of faith need to have effective means of passing on the heritage of faith to their offspring. So, the church I was then growing up in had its own micro, inadequately fee-funded “separate school system”.
Most Canadian Protestant churches, including the United Church of Canada where I’ve lodged since I went to high school, have relied, to their detriment, on the public school system for the education of their children. In the 1960s, public schools effectively phased out such religious education.
It resulted in children with varied quality “Sunday school” lessons to learn their own faith heritage and with little, if any knowledge of the faith heritage of their peers.
Other faith groups – Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists – have created more or less substantial educational programs to orient the younger generation to their faith heritage.
Education about Religious Heritages
Religious education is too significant to be so inadequately honoured. In our diverse society and in a shrinking world, we need to know more about our own heritage of faith (or “none”) and we need to understand more about the faith tradition and observances of others.
In a public system we can do that as part of the sharing of knowledge. An amalgamated public system – French or English – needs to recognize the significant contributions religious traditions have made to human life and reflect on their shadow side as well.
This is not happening in the current arrangement but could be one of the many improvements joining the systems might provide.
Act Now
The time is ripe for courageous and visionary action to improve the Ontario educational system. Amalgamating the four boards system into two would open real possibilities for educational outcomes that contribute to a more harmonious and informed populace.
Let’s not miss the opportunity. Our children deserve it.
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For more information, including about legal action to advance the cause:
Broadview magazine, January/February 2021 issue, pp. 20-25.
Visit OPEN (One Public Education Now); CRIPE (Civil Rights in Public Education; www.OnePublicSystem; www.open.cripeweb.org;
Pilgrim Praxis
The genocide in apartheid and settler colonial Palestine urgently calls for urgent discernment and action. Could the ongoing rounds of blood letting and destruction finally end to begin a journey toward truth, and justice-based peace? I hope so for the sake of all who dwell in this (un)Holy Land.