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

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.