It’s definitely challenging to talk about public education in times like these, but maybe that’s the point. In times of uncertainty and stress, we need to figure out how to do two things at once: fight back with short term tactics and think about what we need to do to ensure our collective resilience in the long run. 

So, yes, we need all those “buy Canadian”, “protect Canada”, “elbows up” tactics, but at the same time as we’re searching the shelves for Canadian products, maybe we could think about what more we need to do to ensure we have deeper strength as a country. 

Obviously, we need to think about our economic futures, about tariffs and trade wars; but this might be a good time to think about our democratic future as well and about how vital it is to have an engaged citizenry. We may not have any power over whatever the President of the United States chooses to do next, but we do have the power and the perfect place to do something about building our long term democratic capacity! We’re living through a period where people have less trust in government, where young people feel disengaged, and where many are falling prey to misinformation and polarization. But we can actually do something about that! 

There’s a wonderful citizenship scholar at the University of New Brunswick named Alan Sears who feels ardently that we could be doing so much more in our schools to ensure we’re graduating kids with the skills and competencies and sense of agency necessary to be engaged citizens. He thinks Canadian schools are long on rhetoric about citizenship and democracy and very short on real programs and action. (Read his great PFE paper here) One of my favourite things he says is that a key component of citizenship education is “teaching kids how to not get along.” 

So what could we be doing? For inspiration, we could look at Portugal where they care a lot about democracy – particularly because there are still people alive [like me] who remember when the country was a dictatorship. This makes them super aware that democracy is not something that can be taken for granted. In Portugal, they not only have a National Strategy for Citizenship Education, they also have a very hands-on approach to teaching kids about democracy and civic participation: School Participatory Budgeting. 

The Portuguese program isn’t a civics class in grade 10 or an uninspiring unit in a social studies textbook. It’s not teaching kids about democracy and civic engagement in a theoretical way; it’s letting them experience democracy in action. 

Every spring, in nearly every school in Portugal, groups of students in elementary and secondary schools get together to create proposals for a project they want funded. After they’ve designed their project, the students campaign for their idea, and then the whole school votes. Voting on the school projects takes place across the country on March 24th – National Students’ Day. 

In each school, whichever project gets the most votes wins.   

Through this exercise, students learn how to develop an idea from scratch, how to budget, how to campaign, how to try to get votes, and – maybe most importantly – about the reality of winning and losing in a democratic process. Research about the program, which has now been running for 8 years, shows that the learning sticks!   

So instead of just wringing our hands about young people not voting and worrying vaguely about the state of our democracy, we could be using this time of turmoil to build up our democratic field strength and rethink how we’re teaching civics and democracy in our schools. The impact will last us a lot longer than any trade war. You can read more about this fabulous program on our website.