EDUCATION REFORM

Who Owns the School System?

And how do we take back control of it?

10 min readMar 17, 2025

Hands up if you’ve ever had an “issue” with the public school system.

If this were a typical straw poll,like many that I’ve conducted, I’d expect about 75% of people to raise their hands. But this might not be an accurate reflection of the real percentage because adults may have had issues when they were in school, or, they may have had issues when advocating for one (or more) of their children.

While we don’t have specific data about the percentage of people the system has failed, we do have data that says that across Canada, over 50% of the population and over 55% of parents report being “dissatisfied” with the school system. What makes this interesting is that the schools are supposed to be working for the parents, not for the government, not for the “stakeholders,” and not for the Board of Education… the parents.

You may have been surprised by that, and by the word “stakeholders” because when I was at university studying to be a teacher, I was surprised by that word too. What the heck was a stakeholder in education?

A stakeholder can be broadly defined as a person who has a vested interest in or is affected by an organization. As such, educational stakeholder groups include everyone who touches, influences or participates in the educational process. A look into the history of our public education system shows that a few of the original stakeholders were industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. They were extremely influential in determining what was taught, how it was taught, and more specifically, what was NOT taught.

John D. Rockefeller created the school system as we know it today through his philanthropic efforts and the establishment of the General Education Board (GEB) in 1902, which aimed to promote education and shape the curriculum to align with his vision of a more efficient and productive society. The GEB played a pivotal role in imposing a standardized model of education across the nation (the USA). This standardization, while seemingly efficient, carried with it a hidden agenda — to mold a workforce that would serve the interests of industrialists like Rockefeller himself.

By imposing a uniform curriculum and promoting rote memorization, the GEB aimed to create a compliant and obedient citizenry, well-suited for factory work. The emphasis on conformity stifled creativity and critical thinking, limiting the potential for independent thought and innovation.

“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”
John D. Rockefeller

By shaping the educational system to serve the needs of industry, Rockefeller aimed to create a workforce that would be docile and subservient to the economic machine. The ulterior motive was to maintain control over the labour force, ensuring that individuals remained cogs in the industrial wheel rather than empowered, critical thinkers capable of challenging the status quo and creating a world best suited to their communities. Rockefeller owned factories, and he needed obedient factory workers. Conformity was deemed important, and critical thinking was not only irrelevant, but usually detrimental to his needs. Having started school myself in the early 1960s, I personally experienced the full force of this, what we now recognize as, indoctrination.

In kindergarten, our class was making a little paper tortoise. It was designed in such a way that, after some colouring, cutting, folding and gluing, if you had done everything right when you pulled the tail, you could make its head retract into the shell. Simple, but ingenious for your typical five-year-old.

Instructions from the teacher were to start by colouring the turtle. “Everyone, please take out your green crayon and carefully colour the entire drawing.” But the drawing was NOT that of a turtle (a sea creature), it was a tortoise (a land animal — there is a difference). And most tortoises are not green, they are brown. So, being the scientifically accurate (and probably a little precocious) five-year-old that I was, I pulled out my brown crayon and started to colour my tortoise. I got about four strokes into it before I was severely and very publicly reprimanded for not using my green crayon. I was then forced to pull out my green crayon and finish colouring with that. But guess what… green doesn’t cover brown, so now it absolutely looks like a mistake, instead of a variation on a theme it was meant to be.

And it didn’t stop there. A few weeks later, on “parent visitation” day, I was surprised to find all the little activities we had done all mounted on poster board and on display on the wall… and they were all (almost) identical. The teacher was proudly commenting on all the great work we had all done, “Well… all except for Brent’s turtle.” (Again, publicly ridiculed. [Hmmm… is public humiliation one of the teaching methodologies now supported by our school system to modify errant behaviour?])

Ironically enough, I was recently involved in a (somewhat heated) conversation with a public school teacher who basically said that that “may” have been the way it was before, but that was back in the 1960s and we’ve changed since then (BTW… I’m pretty sure she wasn’t around in the 60’s yet).

Really… almost the exact same thing happened a generation later when my own daughter was in kindergarten. She was told to colour a drawing of a bear, brown, and she decided to make hers blue. Again, public ridicule, humiliation and now shame. Didn’t she know that all bears are brown? (Excuse me Ms. Teacher… Did you not know that the very name of this Disney character is also his colour? [Baloo])

But that was way back in the 1990s… We’ve changed since then… right?

Hmmm… as it turns out, there is a video currently going viral of a father telling the story of how he was just called to an emergency meeting with the principal because his son had decided to colour a chicken’s tail feathers purple instead of the brown he was told to. But this student lived on an acreage where the parents raised animals for their own consumption, including chickens. Guess the breed of chickens they were currently raising…? Lavender Orpingtons.

Lavender Orpingtons, a.k.a. Self-Blues, are a chicken breed famous for their awe-striking colour: they exhibit a silvery-blue/light slate-blue, gray colour that has a violet shimmer. They are literally purple chickens. But yet again, public ridicule, humiliation, shame, and now punishment for the major crime of “not conforming.”

But that was back in 2024. We’ve changed since then… right?

Actually… it’s doesn’t sound like we have. The system is still playing the same “Conformity over Truth” games it has been playing since at least 1902. And creating a population of obedient workers (now called consumers) still appears to be the goal of education systems everywhere, except now they can’t even find a job.

In a recent Conference Board of Canada report, Canadian employers reported that nearly 30 percent of recent graduates lack essential skills, including problem-solving (i.e. creativity and critical thinking), digital fluency, financial literacy, and adaptability. They essentially still think like factory workers and are unemployable in the new “non-factory” economy.

But this CAN’T be true. After all the Ministry of Education in Saskatchewan claims “creativity and critical thinking” in all their curricula, and recently made it mandatory that all graduates MUST take a course in financial literacy before they can graduate. Press releases lauded the teaching of “real and useful math” instead of the inane ability to factor polynomials that will never be used post-graduation. Why is it then, that an entire unit on “Lateral Thinking” (identified by Edward de Bono as the very foundation of creative problem solving) was forcibly removed from a high school Entrepreneurship program because it “wasn’t explicitly stated in the government-created curriculum?” Every entrepreneur out there knows that their ability to think creatively is the most important tool in their proverbial toolbox. For the life of me, I can’t understand why teaching that very skill would not only be omitted, but actively discouraged.

If that’s the case, maybe we should have a deeper look into this new direction to see if our education systems really are improving as they claim.

A few months ago I had a chance to look under the hood of one of the Financial Literacy courses now mandatory for all graduates, and it absolutely scared the bejesus out of me. As an example, when studying compound interest, one of the word problems offered was:

“John received $100 as a birthday present from his Grandfather. He decided to invest it for the future. His bank offered him a choice of two options. He could (A) invest his money for a six-year term at 2% per year compounded monthly, or, he could (B) invest for a two-year term at 5% per year compounded monthly. Which should he choose?”

Would it surprise you to learn that our school system says that the correct answer is (A) because at the end of each investment period, he’d have $112.74 instead of only $110.49. What the answer didn’t even consider was that answer (A) took six years to achieve that amount (the investment period) and answer (B) only took two years. True critical thinkers would suggest that you should choose (B), then simply reinvest your money after each two-year term. Following this strategy means that after the same six years, you’d have $134.90 instead of only $112.74. That’s a huge difference, and absolutely the right decision, but you’d be marked wrong if you chose (B) in this program. This proves that no matter what they claim to be doing, schools are still not producing critical thinkers, nor are they even trying to. They are just getting better and more subtle at hiding the fact.

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There have been many reports written by futurists and think-tanks suggesting that the main skills required by new employees of Fortune 500 companies are not taught in today’s schools. One of those reports was from the School of Government at Harvard and they issued advice to those planning a career in the global economy of the future; it said that “school credentials would be devalued compared to real-world skills” acquired by experience; it identified 10 qualities to acquire to meet the changing standards, none of which are usually found stressed by public schooling. These skills are;

Ability to ask questions that challenge common assumptions.
Ability to define problems without a guide.
Ability to work without guidance.
Ability to work absolutely alone.
Ability to persuade others that yours is the right course.
Ability to debate issues and techniques in public.
Ability to reorganize information into new patterns.
Ability to discard irrelevant information.
Ability to think dialectically.
Ability to think inductively, deductively, and heuristically.

These skills are NOT emphasized in your typical public school simply because public schools couldn’t even function if, for example, children were encouraged to challenge prevailing assumptions. They go on to state that if you want your kids to follow Harvard’s advice, “expect no help from your government-supported public school district; you’ll have to do it on your own.”

Do it on your own??? Does this mean you’re better off NOT sending your kids to public schools, the very schools that parents pay for and the same systems that are supposed to be working for the parents on behalf of their children, instead of these “stakeholders?” To answer that, let’s look at the stats:

Homeschooled students typically score 15 to 34 percentile points higher than public school students on standardized tests.
Approximately 74% of homeschooled students go on to attend college, compared to only 44% of public school students.
About 67% of homeschooled students graduate from college, compared to 59% of public school graduates.
Homeschooled students typically spend about 3–5 hours per day on formal education, while public school students spend around 6–8 hours in school.
The average cost of homeschooling ranges from $700 to $1,800 per child annually, whereas public school costs approximately $12,612 per student per year.
Homeschooled students often have higher levels of socialization and positive peer interactions compared to their public school peers.
About 78% of college admission officers expect homeschool graduates to perform as well or better than traditional high school graduates during their first year in college.
Homeschooled students typically exhibit better psychological well-being and self-esteem compared to their peers in conventional schools.
Homeschooling allows for tailored educational experiences that can adapt to individual learning styles and interests, contrasting with the standardized curricula required in public schools.
Homeschoolers are often more inclined towards entrepreneurship and self-directed careers, leveraging their independent learning skills to start businesses or pursue creative fields

But schools are suppose to work for the parents. This does not sound like the actions of an organization that’s working on behalf of the parents who pay for it. And it most certainly does not sound like it’s getting any better. It looks to me like our education system is still operating under the banner of “Truth from Authority” as opposed to “Authority from Truth” and yes, your kids are better off if they do NOT enter the public education system.

Albert Einstein once said,

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we had when we created them.”

The implications of this statement are profound. This means that we cannot use the same education system to create the thinking to solve the problems as the education system we had that created the thinking that caused the problems. And while I used to stand on my soapbox in the wilderness, railing against broken systems, I’ve begun to realize that the system isn’t broken — it’s operating exactly as it was designed to operate. They WANTED it to be this way.

This means it can’t be fixed; it needs to be replaced. Buckminster Fuller was once quoted as saying

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

How about we do just that. I’m all in. Who’s with me.

And here’s where you can help. If you can, feel free to email me, or write it in the comments. I’m looking for stories of how the education system has failed you, and/or what have you personally done to try and change it. With more than half the population dissatisfied with the system, there should be some really interesting additions. I await your responses.