Restoring Trust In Education
A Call for Values, Vision, and Integrity in Our Schools
by Alfred Abouchar

---

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.

---

Alfred Abouchar has spent more than fifty years inside Canadian education. Educated at Collège Saint-Marc in Alexandria and at the American University in Cairo, where he completed a double-major Bachelor of Science in Physics and Chemistry, he immigrated to Canada and earned advanced Master degrees in Physics and Education from the University of Western Ontario and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, respectively. He has been a senior physics teacher, a department head, a dean, a provincial consultant in mathematics and the sciences, and Superintendent of Curriculum, Research, and Continuing Education at the Ottawa-Carleton French-language school board. He served on the Ontario Advisory Council on Multiculturalism and Citizenship nominated by successive Premiers, founded the Association Multiculturelle Francophone de l'Ontario, and mentored future teachers as Professor at the faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. He is the founder of La Citadelle International Academy of Arts and Science in Toronto, an independent school he established to enact the convictions defended in his writing. He is also the author of several Grade 9 science textbooks and Grade 11 physics textbooks used in Ontario and Quebec schools, one of which received the Hilroy Scholarship for Innovation in Education and the Roy C. Hill Foundation Award. Restoring Trust In Education: A Call for Values, Vision, and Integrity in Our Schools is the work of a life spent in classrooms, in leadership, and in the slow building of an institution. It is the book he has been writing, in one form or another, since he first walked into a classroom as a teacher more than half a century ago. He lives in Toronto.

---

Contributors

Author

Alfred Abouchar