The Alberta government’s newly tabled Bill 25, An Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms, arrives wrapped in the language of neutrality.

The promise is deceptive: teachers and school boards will be “impartial,” classrooms will be “balanced,” and students will be shielded from political or ideological influence. But anyone who has spent time in a real classroom knows education is not a sterile exercise. It is an encounter with ideas — messy, contested, sometimes uncomfortable — and that is precisely what makes it transformative.

What troubles me most about Bill 25 is not its stated goal but its likely effect — government-imposed censorship. By insisting on a rigid, state‑defined notion of “neutrality,” the legislation risks stripping teachers of the ability to do what the best educators have always done: challenge students to think critically about the world around them. Drawing on my own experience, I know how important this is.

In my final year of high school, I took two courses taught by the same teacher, Fred Lepkin. One was the mandatory Grade 12 Social Studies class, where he walked us through the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the machinery of propaganda that enabled it. Lepkin then taught us about Canada’s own shameful response to Jewish refugees — summed up in the infamous phrase “None is too many.”

He unpacked the FLQ crisis by teaching about the precipitating events and helping us understand the significance of using the War Measures Act. He led us through conversations about the moral and political tensions of the Vietnam War era, including the arrival in Canada of American draft dodgers.

The other course was an elective: Introduction to World Religions. We explored everything from the Abrahamic traditions to Zoroastrianism. Lepkin didn’t tell us what to believe. He gave us frameworks for understanding belief itself — how values are formed, how dogma operates, how to examine our own assumptions.

What he never did was preach. He didn’t proselytize, moralize, or push an agenda. He didn’t tell us what conclusions to reach. He taught us how to reach them. He filled our minds with information and questions, not answers. He trusted us to wrestle with complexity. He trusted us to grow.

Those lessons — how to question authority, how to demand accountability, how to recognize propaganda, how to think independently and understand that things aren’t always black or white — have stayed with me for life.

Bill 25 threatens to make that kind of teaching impossible.

If “neutrality” is interpreted as avoiding anything controversial, then teachers will be discouraged from addressing the very subjects students most need to understand: historical injustices, political decisions, social movements, human rights, and the mechanics of misinformation.

At a time when disinformation spreads faster than truth, when young people are inundated with unfiltered content, the last thing we should be doing is narrowing their intellectual toolkit.

A classroom that cannot examine power is not neutral. It is obedient. And a government that restricts teachers from fostering critical thought is not protecting students. It is protecting itself.

I worry that if Bill 25 becomes law, Alberta’s students will be denied the kind of education that shaped me — one that encouraged curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment. They will be taught facts, perhaps, but not how to interrogate them. They will learn history, but not how to recognize its echoes. They will hear information, but not how to discern truth from manipulation.

Teachers like Lepkin don’t indoctrinate. They inoculate — against ignorance, against complacency, against the very forces that erode democratic life.

For the sake of Alberta’s and Canada’s future, I hope the government withdraws Bill 25 and chooses a different path. One that trusts teachers. One that respects students. One that understands that education is not the absence of ideas, but the freedom to explore them.

Howard Sapers is executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

© Calgary Herald