Education Minister defends curriculum changes as election nears
With a provincial election due this spring, the Alberta NDP government is continuing to try and make changes to the education curriculum despite the threat of Jason Kenney “scrapping” it, should he and the UCP take over this spring.
“We saw Jason Kenney talking about how he was going to take this whole process and throw it through the shredder, which I found offensive,” said Education Minister David Eggen, in an interview with EverythingGP. “Any suggestion that you might use this for political purposes, I just don’t like that, and I don’t think Albertans do either.”
Eggen was responding to remarks made by the opposition leader in a speech on Saturday, where Kenney said he would “stop the NDP’s ideological rewrite of the school curriculum”, which Kenney later backed down from the following day. Eggen re-iterated that he and the NDP government will continue to try and make changes to the province’s curriculum regardless of what lies ahead.
The MLA for Edmonton-Calder explained that the NDP government is in year two of six in the process of changing the current curriculum, with a draft plan already finalized for kindergarten to grade four and a pilot program set to roll out in the fall.