Authoritarianism flourishes when pedagogies of conformity parade as neutral methodologies and when civic illiteracy replaces informed judgment, write Henry Giroux and William Paul. Photo courtesy Governor Maura Healey/Flickr.

For autocracy to succeed, its fingers need to be everywhere, plugging the leaks that might, in the tiniest way, threaten its claim to dominance. Lines of power may not be crossed other than by those who have access to them. Autocracy smothers any possibility of criticism, kills the imagination and often does so under the false claim of improving educational policy, classroom teaching, and pedagogy.

Last June, at her commencement celebration Ottawa student Elizabeth Yao got up in front of friends and families gathered at Bell High School and talked about her years there; the waffle fundraiser and dozing off as she read Shakespeare. But then she crossed a line. Expressing that awareness gratefully acquired from her studies and teachers, she added after the Indigenous land acknowledgement: “As a commitment to truth and reconciliation, I must acknowledge colonial and genocidal atrocities today, including the massacre of more than 17,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.”

The audience cheered. The principal of Bell High School did not. He told her that she had caused harm, that she shouldn’t come back to school on Monday. But, with the clarity of a young person who recognizes horror and speaks against it, she said she planned to return anyway. Ms. Yao did the unforgivable: she refused to treat her mind as a commodity and refused to toe the line of conformity, accept official orthodoxies, embrace shallow and predigested ideas or remain silent in the face of urgent social issues. Her speech revealed what authoritarian governments fear most: young people capable of connecting education to moral responsibility, historical consciousness, and democratic dissent.

If Paul Calandra’s Ministry of Education wasn’t trying to make a political point, it would leave commencement ceremonies alone. But that’s not how the Ontario government operates under the Progressive Conservative Party of Doug Ford. Students, he said, “should be in the classroom learning about reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic—the whole shebang.” But the “shebang” doesn’t include culture, politics or anything else that Ford’s increasingly authoritarian government doesn’t want to offer students as it reshapes education in Ontario. The “shebang” functions as a command for learned stupidity, the acceptance of low expectations, and the refusal to challenge dominant assumptions. Removed from education is the crucial pedagogical task of questioning inherited beliefs, interrogating power and nurturing critical thought. Instead, under such circumstances, education is reduced to an empty formalism, method, and dead zone of the imagination.

What is lost in Calandra’s championing of the “shebang” is a notion of critical education in which students are given the opportunity to seek the truth, question authority, hold power accountable and embrace intellectual honesty and integrity as guiding principles. Pedagogy should always be a powerful moral and political force for giving students the opportunity to learn history, connect knowledge to the power of self-definition and critical agency and connect the search for truth to the search for justice.

After hearing of a memo sent out by the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board to consider these ceremonies from “an anti-oppressive/anti-racist/anti-colonial lens,” Calandra reminded educators across the province that there is a very large boot poised above their heads. Commencement ceremonies, he said, are to focus only on recognizing student achievement. Organizers must not “express political views or promote personal or institutional positions, or engage in divisive or contentious issues of any kind.” Any deviations and “I will not hesitate to consider every tool in the Education Act to ensure that students are always put first.”

Such ideological micro-management never puts students first. If Calandra and his Ford government colleagues wanted to do that, they would have developed a reasonable funding model and ensured that students had the resources they need. Instead he brought in Bill 33, making it easier to take over more school boards, place police in schools, and even decide what they will be named lest some liberal-minded board chooses a name that cuts against the Ford government’s neoliberal grain.

What is at stake here is not simply administrative overreach but a broader authoritarian attempt to depoliticize education itself. Fascist politics has always feared institutions capable of producing critical thought, historical memory, and civic courage. The language of “neutrality” and “keeping politics out of schools” functions as a form of ideological camouflage. It undermines critical inquiry, rejects the transformative possibilities of the imagination and advances a........

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