Public education is situated at a time when provincial governments continue to underfund and underresource, as class sizes grow, as special needs programs are shortchanged, and as control is centralized. And as educators, students and their families pay the price—in communities across the country.
The authors in this issue of Our Schools/Our Selves explore what students, educators and school communities are grappling with in the absence of provincial leadership that sees public education as a system and a service to be prioritized rather than a budget to be decimated.
But as these articles also demonstrate, workers, educators, and students are pushing back, in defense of their rights and in defense of the public education system and the students and communities it services. If we are to learn anything from the decades of activism, it is that progress is never a given, that the fight for justice and equality is ongoing, and that building empathetic and compassionate communities is a full time commitment.
