Though this is an American perspective, I feel it safe to say it can be equally applied to the Canadian School system...
LinkDANA POINT, CA-- Americans are raised with the idea that public school and compulsory education were developed with the best interests of American citizens in mind. The reality that the school system is now an out of control bureaucracy with too much unchallenged power is staring us all in the face. No media attention ever focuses on the power wielded in the thousands of special districts across the country that support public schools, (using such municipal police powers as the power to tax), because the conventional wisdom being pushed by the mass media is that teachers are uncompensated heroes. By organizing the school system as a virtually independent branch of government, supported by the powerful public employee unions of teachers, the education bureaucracy has become an unassailable monolith. It now has its own agenda, wholly separate from the interests of the millions of school children who they have under their direct control, through laws of wardship that basically enable them to set aside the civil rights of the minor children for the slightest reasons. For this reason the education of children has become secondary, and the students who graduate from the American educational institution lack the basic skills of literacy.