Private Schools
About 5.6% of students are in private schools. A minority of these are elite private schools, which are attended by only a small fraction of students, but do have a great deal of prestige and prominence. It is not unusual for the wealthy and prominent in Canada to send their children to public schools, especially in the lower grades. A far larger portion of private schools are religious based institutions. Private schools are also used to study outside the country. For example, Canadian College Italy has an Ontario curriculum, but the students study in Italian.
Private schools have historically been less common on the Canadian Prairies and were often forbidden under municipal and provincial statutes enacted to provide equality of education to students regardless of family income. This is especially true in Alberta, where successive Social Credit (or populist conservative) governments denounced the concept of private education as the main cause of denial of opportunity to the children of the working poor. These rules lasted longer than Social Credit; it was only in 1989 that private K-12 schools were allowed to operate inside the boundaries of the City of Calgary.
Read more about this topic: Education In Canada
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or schools:
“Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Our good schools today are much better than the best schools of yesterday. When I was your age and a pupil in school, our teachers were our enemies.
Can any thing ... be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)