Courts in the Classroom: Education and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Ross Willmot is Executive Director of the Ontario Association for
Continuing Education.

These conference papers, supplemented by additional ones by other prominent jurists and scholars, provide a thorough analysis of how the Charter may affect education in Canada. As such they frame more questions about the effect of a “national” document on education, nominally a “provincial” responsibility,” than they answer. The information and analyses given from various perspectives should be useful to those who set provincial educational and school district policy as well as to those scholars interested in the intersection of law and education policy.

The topics covered include the potential influence of the Charter on the substantive rights of students and teachers in the Canadian school system; the interaction between education and the Charter’s constitutional guarantees for Canadian minorities; the impact of the Charter on educational policy-making; and recent constitutional trends in Charter jurisprudence and education.