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by Alfred Abouchar (Author)
The book the moment requires.
After more than fifty years inside Canadian education - as a science teacher, school superintendent, university faculty member, and founder of an independent academy in Toronto - Alfred Abouchar has written an honest examination of an institution that has lost its bearings.
Across twenty-five chapters and five sections, Restoring Trust In Education traces how a system that once cultivated minds and formed citizens has come to manage perceptions, inflate grades, stage reform, and produce graduates whose credentials announce more than their education has delivered. Drawing on Canadian and international evidence - from PISA results to employer surveys, from university skills studies to the daily realities of contemporary classrooms - the book builds a diagnosis that is at once empirical, philosophical, and personal.
But this is not a book of complaint. It is a book of recovery.
The final third proposes the conditions under which schools can once again become what they were established to be: places of substance rather than spectacle, of formation rather than performance, of intellectual seriousness rather than therapeutic accommodation. It examines what a renewed Education Act would require; what a serious commitment to bilingualism would look like; how the teaching profession must be rebuilt; what moral coherence in schooling means; and what the four daily pillars - teaching, classwork, homework, and assessment - must again become.
The book closes with a personal account: a life that began at Collège Saint-Marc in Alexandria, traversed the Canadian public system across half a century, and culminated in the founding of La Citadelle International Academy of Arts and Science - an attempt to enact in practice the convictions the book defends in principle.
Restoring Trust In Education is written for teachers who have not given up, for parents who are watching their children educated by a system they no longer fully trust, for school leaders who sense that the frameworks they have inherited are no longer adequate to the work, and for anyone who believes that schools can still be what they were meant to be.
It is the testimony of a life in classrooms, and the argument of a man who has thought carefully about what education is for.
