Alberta’s education reforms tell students public life is safest when differences are hidden

0 September 20, 2026 10:27

By amending its Education Act to remove the language of ‘diversity’ and ‘belonging’ and restricting flags that can fly, Alberta is enacting a quiet curriculum of silence.

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In May 2026, the Alberta government enacted Bill 25, an An Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms.

On its surface, the legislation is wrapped in the reassuring vocabulary of modernization. It promises to strengthen accountability, improve efficiency, promote neutrality and complete the transition to digital administration for provincial exams.

But many education researchers who study curriculum policy will tell you curriculum is never neutral.

Under Bill 25, the Alberta government has codified a grammar of subtraction — a series of small, procedural changes that go largely unnoticed but carry profound, cumulative consequences.

In considering these changes, we must ask a painful but necessary question: Does this systematic silencing constitute institutional betrayal?

What the law enacts

What the law writes into the record is a script for what we are permitted to value, see and say.

American writer Nicholson Baker has documented the historic transition from physical library card catalogues to online databases — and how digitization often reframes the destruction of material relations as simple progress.

When a library catalogue was described as a simple storage facility rather than a site of exploration, it too became obsolete in the name of progress. Sorting and retrieval became automated and replaced active human navigation with algorithms.

In doing so, we lost the closeness of the physical encounter, the slow cataloguing labour of librarians and the institution’s collective memory.

Today, physical markers that anchor belonging are being systematically dismantled, much like the library catalogue.

This time, in Alberta, flagpoles are under attack. Bill 25 decrees that no flags other than the Canadian and Alberta flags may be displayed at public schools, unless specifically permitted by ministerial regulation or approved in writing by the minister following a formal request from a school board.

The provincial government said in August this portion of the bill is being delayed to ensure a successful transition.

But Bill 25 has also introduced subtle shifts in language that change how we come to understand our relations with each other.

Editing out ‘belonging’

To understand how institutional power operates, we must look to what anthropologist Laura Nader has called controlling processes.

Power does not always announce itself with a heavy hand; more often, it organizes compliance through appeals to order, harmony and common sense. It normalizes itself by making political choices appear like simple administrative necessity to maintain societal harmony.

Consider the preambular changes introduced by Bill 25. The legislation amends the Education Act by striking out the longstanding commitment to “welcoming, caring, respectful and safe learning environments that respect diversity and nurture a sense of belonging and a positive sense of self.”

In its place, the government has substituted a much narrower mandate: “A safe and caring environment that fosters and maintains respectful and responsible behaviours.”

Highlighted detail from Bill 25 shows wording changes to the Education Act.
(King’s Printer/Government of Alberta)

This is not a harmless semantic edit. It’s a profound shift in the relational landscape of schooling. “Belonging” and “diversity” are relational and democratic concepts and require us to negotiate differences, to expand our circles of care and to recognize the unique identities of our students. “Behaviours,” in contrast, are administrative targets. You monitor a behaviour, as well as code and manage it and enforce compliance.

By stripping our schools’ educational mandate of the language of “diversity” and “belonging,” and seeking to restrict the permitted symbols that can fly in our schoolyards, the government is arguably enacting a curriculum of silence.

By replacing relational belonging with behavioural management, the messy, democratic reality of the classroom has been marginalized. This teaches students and educators that compliance, not community or democracy, is the ultimate goal of public education.

Regulating visibility

The same logic of subtraction is set to be stamped onto the physical schoolyard.

Flying a Métis flag, shown here, or a Pride flag or a Treaty flag, is an act of public recognition.
(Stak & Co/Flickr), CC BY

A flag is a powerful symbol. Flying a Pride flag, a Treaty flag or a Métis flag is an act of public recognition. It signals to marginalized students that their histories, their griefs and their identities matter.

When the Alberta government requires an administrative permission slip approved by the minister for these symbols of inclusion while treating others as normal, it constructs a hierarchy of visibility.

The message to marginalized youth is clear — their presence is conditional, highly regulated and safest when kept invisible. Students learn public life is safest when difference is unspoken and unsung.

Managing through silence, erasure

This institutional habit of managing the ordinary through silence and erasure is not unique to public education.

For example, in research I conducted alongside my colleagues Shannon Moore and Tim Skuce, we investigated the hyper-masculine, exclusionary culture of elite men’s ice hockey where silence is not merely a passive state but an active form of discipline to preserve a specific brand of hockey.

This research shed light on how institutional silencing renders some people’s experiences invisible, and so again I wonder: Is being silenced a form of institutional betrayal?

Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer Freyd, who is the founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage, have defined and conceptualized the framework of institutional betrayal. Institutional betrayal refers to “wrongdoings perpetrated by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution,” and this includes failure to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoings by individuals committed in the context of the institution.

Confronting with deliberate friction

We depend on our institutions for our children’s education, our sense of national identity and our livelihoods.

We often, consciously or unconsciously, do not see the betrayal. We normalize what are presented as unfortunate realities of the current culture and political leadership.

But once the habit of noticing erodes, we lose the capacity to name what is disappearing.

To resist the systemic reproduction of domination, we must practice deliberate friction — the refusal to let subtraction become common sense. It’s the work of keeping institutions messy, relational and historical.

It means demanding that our schools conduct curricular loss assessments before they automate, restrict or centralize. It means asking before a change: What capacity is being removed? Whose history is being rendered invisible? Whose labour is being forgotten?

We must refuse the quiet scripts that trade human care for behavioural compliance. We must remind our institutions that their moral and ethical obligation is to protect, care and to honour the individuals who depend upon them.
Teresa Anne Fowler has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Concordia University of Edmonton.

Tags: Academic Journalism, The Conversation, The Conversation Academic News