Jizya.  The dhimmi tax.  That’s what they called it.

In the old Ottoman Empire, that was the tax levied on people who didn’t follow the state-run religion. It was meant to encourage people to adopt Islam, or to punish them if they didn’t.

In Alberta today, we have a tax like that. If you are a member of a religious minority — say, a Protestant — you are forced to pay for government-run schools before you can build your own. The government may then graciously allow you to use some of your education tax dollars to pay for teachers, but only part.

That shouldn’t be happening. In 1962, we signed an international treaty called the Convention Against Discrimination Against Education. According to the terms of the treaty, it is against international law to fund government schools while denying funding to independent schools. We violate that treaty every day.

Fully half of Alberta’s private schools are religious. The overwhelming majority of those are Protestant. Nonetheless, those families are forced to subsidize ideologically-driven public schools, which have long since abandoned any pretense of neutrality. I attended public school in the '70s and '80s: there was nothing in the curriculum related to Christianity. 

They succeeded in producing students devoid of Christianity. A teacher who ran Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi by us — with the title removed — found that not one of us recognized the subject. Yet, I learned Marxist historiography, and was assigned Camus’ existentialist novel The Outsider in both French and English. Public schools aren’t non-sectarian: they are temples of state ideology.

In spite of this, the Alberta Teachers’ Association wants to raise the tax that religious minorities pay. Last October, they demanded the elimination of what funding the private (and Charter) schools do get. Their justifications are either false or irrelevant.  Here’s a sample:

1. “Private schools are for elites.”  That’s a lie. Studies showthat most private school parents have below-average incomes. The real class divide exists within public school systems, where the quality of education depends on your postal code. Compare Sir Winston Churchill High School in affluent NW Calgary to Jack James in the Northeast, which serves working-class families. Churchill gets the elite International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Jack James? A program for pregnant and parenting teens. 
2. “Private schools charge tuition.”  Of course they do — the government deliberately underfunds them, giving the rest of the money to the public system. Complaining about tuition while siphoning tax dollars away is like a bully demanding your lunch money, and then mocking you for not eating.
3. “Private schools pick their students.” Yes — just like public schools do.  Try enrolling in an IB program without an “A” average. The real difference is that private schools pick children based on whether those children want to participate in the school’s special programs — but the good programs in the public system pick students based on test scores.
4. “Every dollar to private schools hurts the public system.” False.  A Fraser Institute study five years ago found that Alberta saved nearly two billion dollars over eight years through school choice. Every penny saved went back into the public system.

The ATA’s administration knows that their arguments are specious. So why make them? Why push so hard to oppress religious minorities — when doing so also harms the children in the public system?

The answer is simple. Money. If the ATA can do away with school choice, the roughly 3,200 teachers in private and Charter schools will enter the public system — and be forced to become ATA members. That’s a $5 million annual windfall for the ATA’s own bureaucrats. This isn’t about students — it’s about union power.

The ATA frames their argument as a moral imperative, shaming families who seek alternatives. They’re trying to “save” public education — implying that the dhimmi families in private and Charter schools are wicked outsiders who are trying to destroy it. It’s like a parody of religion — those opposed to the true faith are a d***able lot, who deserve punishment.

The resemblance of the ATA leadership to medieval religious authorities is striking. But the Ottoman Empire abolished the jizya in 1856 – while the ATA is just getting started.

Let’s restore fairness to education. 

It’s time to say “no” to the mullahs of public education.

John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca

This article originally appeared in the Western Standard on February 25th, 2025. A printable pdf is available.