Defending Independent Schools and Home-Schooling in Canada

This book should appeal to several audiences. First, there are those involved in elementary and secondary education in Canada who may wonder how the current legal frameworks for independent schools and home-schooling in Saskatchewan came to be. Second, there are activists who are engaged in educational reforms in their own jurisdictions today, not only in Canada but also in the United States, who may find practical guidance in this book for achieving their own educational reform objectives. Third, this is a personal history involving real people in real time. Too often, politicians, lawyers, and journalists cite legal precedents for current actions without fully appreciating how people with real families and careers were caught up in establishing these legal precedents through no fault or desire of their own.
The book shows how it is possible to change an educational system in spite of the power of government, colleges of education, and teachers’ unions. The author’s efforts in Saskatchewan provide a case study on how to work with people rather than confront them, as well as proven advice on how to accomplish significant and lasting change. After he was appointed the first Director of Independent Schools and Home-based Education in the provincial Department of Education, the author facilitated two collaborative policy-making processes involving all the major stakeholders on both sides of what to do about the growing parental demand for independent schools and home-schooling. When both committees reached a complete consensus on all their recommendations to the government, the Department of Education was able to move expeditiously to implement these recommendations in legislation, regulations, and departmental policies, which still exist today much as they were implemented in the early 1990s.
The book also provides a critique of current trends in social studies education in North America, while expressing what should be covered to educate a citizenry. Although the author is a social scientist, he firmly believes that the traditional historical approach to social studies provides a superior coherent framework for all the other humanities and the social sciences. While some social science might profitably be introduced in high school, a thorough grounding in history and geography is essential. High school social studies should unabashedly teach the origins and the development of Western civilization from antiquity to the present day. It is more important to teach this correctly than to teach about peripheral cultures that did not contribute significantly to our own.
The author was a star product of Saskatchewan’s public education system. He received the Governor-General’s bronze medal in 1968 for the most distinguished graduate from his high school and the Governor-General’s gold medal in 1971 for the most distinguished graduate receiving a first degree from the University of Saskatchewan. Then he spent nine years away pursuing post-graduate degrees in economics from Oxford University and the University of Minnesota, and working for the United Nations in Ethiopia and for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kenya.
When he returned to Saskatchewan in 1981 to teach economics at the University of Saskatchewan, he never imagined that he would become the leading advocate for independent Christian schools and home-schooling in the province. Nor did he anticipate spending five years working for the provincial Department of Education, facilitating the design and implementation of the new legal frameworks for independent schools and home-schooling. Yet this is what happened while he also pursued his career as an academic economist, becoming head of his department in 1985. This book is a personal historical record of how this happened.
This journey was full of surprises in which he learned many things about Saskatchewan that he had not previously known, even though he grew up in Saskatchewan from the age of four. Hence, he has borrowed his subtitle from a book by his favourite author, C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, as well as a more recent book by Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford. Both are engagingly written accounts of their conversions from atheism and agnosticism to Christianity, both of which conversions occurred at Oxford University.
While he became the central player in this decade-long drama, he did not do this alone. The book acknowledges the involvement of many others who contributed to the final outcome. Now more than thirty years later, the author has re-connected with more than two dozen of these contributors who have graciously read the first drafts of their involvement. They have mostly confirmed the author’s own memories of the events which occurred, filed in some gaps, and added some new facts and information. Thirty years on, the author is also revealing some things previously known only to him. Writing this book has convinced him more than ever of the historical reliability of the New Testament gospels, also written some thirty years after the events they describe.
In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn points out that paradigm shifts often originate from outside a given system by disrupters who are less invested in that system. Such was also the case here when civic authorities attempted to tax independent Christian day-schools in the mid-1980s, thereby making it more difficult for them to exist. The author was not an education professor, but an economics professor with less vested interest in public schools. However, he discovered that the training of an economist was very helpful in two respects in designing and implementing new legal frameworks for independent schools and home-schooling. First, this trains one to look at systems as a whole, such as the entire educational system for a province like Saskatchewan, and how the different parts of that system interact with each other. Second, it trains one to pay attention to incentives, and how rules in the form of legislation, regulations, policies and norms create incentives that affect human behaviour for better or for worse. It helps one to anticipate, although never fully predict, how changing the rules is likely to affect the behaviour of the different participants in the system.