The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools

Join MISC Director Daniel Béland and Dr. Paul W. Bennett for this online book launch and discussion on the publication of Dr. Bennett’s latest book, The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (McGill-Queen’s University Press: 2020).

Over the last fifty years, Canada's public schools have been absorbed into a modern education system that functions much like Max Weber's infamous iron cage. Crying out for democratic school-level reform, the system is now a centralized, bureaucratic fortress that, every year, becomes softer on standards for students, less accessible to parents, further out of touch with communities, and surprisingly unresponsive to classroom teachers.

Exploring the nature of the Canadian education order in all its dimensions, The State of the System explains how public schools came to be so bureaucratic, confronts the critical issues facing kindergarten to grade 12 public schools in all ten provinces, and addresses the need for systemic reform. Author Paul Bennett proposes a bold plan to re-engineer schools on a more human scale, advocating for a new set of priorities: decentralize school governance, deprogram education ministries and school districts, listen to parents and teachers, and revitalize local education democracy.

Paul W. Bennett, is the founding director of Schoolhouse Consulting and lead researcher at Schoolhouse Institute in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Currently, he is the national coordinator for researchED in Canada and an expert commentator covering a wide array of public policy issues in K-12 education across Canada.

The webinar will be followed by a Q&A.

This webinar is free to attend. Registration is required.