We talk about class sizes, complexity, funding, and resources — and yes, those are serious issues in Alberta’s public education system.

But beneath those debates lies something deeper.

A real threat to those who depend on control and division to rule is public education itself.

Because public education isn’t just about classrooms or curriculum. It’s about relationships. It’s about human beings learning, struggling, and growing together across difference, across disagreement, across the inevitable friction of life in community.

That’s what makes it powerful. And that’s what makes it dangerous to those who seek power over rather than power with.

 

Teaching as Relationship

Good teaching has always been relational. It’s not simply about transferring information; it’s about connection. As educator Parker J. Palmer wrote:

“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”

Teaching is the art of helping young people understand themselves and others, through moments of frustration, discovery, and empathy.

Public schools are one of the last spaces where people from different backgrounds come together and learn, quite literally, how to live together. They are microcosms of democracy: imperfect, dynamic, and deeply human.

When those spaces are undermined, when teachers are devalued, class sizes balloon, and support for complexity disappears, we are not just weakening education; we are eroding the social fabric that holds us together.

 

The Politics of Division

Fascism and authoritarianism thrive on isolation. They depend on “us versus them” thinking, on people losing the ability or the will to connect.

As Hannah Arendt warned:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction... and between true and false... no longer exist.”

When people stop trusting each other and stop talking to one another, we become easier to control.

This is why governments that fear the public interest so often target educators, artists, journalists, and caregivers: those whose work depends on cultivating empathy and dialogue.

Relationships, and the capacity to hold difference are inherently democratic. They are the foundation of resistance.

 

Conflict as Connection

My work, as a mediator is grounded in a simple belief: we can get through conflict not by avoiding it or silencing it, but by creating space to build our own strength and capacity and working to understand others. 

Conflict, when engaged with care, curiosity, and at times support, can deepen understanding and strengthen relationships. What destroys us is not conflict itself, but disconnection, the message that disagreement means disloyalty or that caring across difference is weakness.

That’s garbage.

Disagreement is the heart of democracy. It’s how we grow, how we learn, and how we build resilience as a society.

The government's message that we should fall in line, that questioning leadership or advocating for our kids is somehow selfish, is precisely the kind of narrative that shrinks our democratic capacity. It isolates. It shames. It teaches us to fear one another.

 

Education as the Front Line of Democracy

Our children’s classrooms are not just spaces for learning; they’re rehearsal spaces for democracy.

Every day, students practice sharing, listening, making mistakes, apologizing, standing up, and making amends. They learn that people are complex and that understanding one another is hard, but worth it.

Public education is one of the last remaining commons, a space that belongs to everyone, regardless of wealth, belief, or background.

To attack that system is to attack the relationships that make democracy possible.

As bell hooks wrote:

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”

This is the work of teachers. This is the work of students. This is the work of all of us.

 

Connection Is the Revolution

When teachers fight for smaller class sizes and fair funding, they are not only standing up for themselves, they are standing up for every child’s right to relationship.

They are fighting for connection. They are fighting for the public good.

History reminds us that every movement for justice, from the Civil Rights movement to the end of apartheid has been fueled by connection. People finding one another, refusing to be divided, and insisting that love and care are not weaknesses but acts of resistance.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said:

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

That truth runs through every classroom, every conversation, every act of care within our public schools. Teaching and learning are, at their best, relational acts, small daily revolutions that affirm our interconnectedness and build the capacity for democracy to thrive.

 

The Work Ahead

In my work, I help people increase their capacity for social interaction, especially when they disagree, because relationships are the path through conflict.

We are being told to turn on each other. To blame teachers. To accept isolation as normal. But we can resist that narrative by reconnecting, and choosing care, curiosity, and courage over fear and division.

Public education is where we practice being human. It’s where democracy lives.

And it’s worth fighting for.