The Ben Mulroney Show - Canada is losing ground vs the world in education. What can be done?

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

- Murielle Riyasat Chief Business Officer and former teacher at  La Citadelle International Academy of Arts and Science   If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I want to go back to education because in our next segment, we're going to have a broad conversation about building resilient kids. And I want to remind everybody about where we stand in the world. So in 2022, Canada ranked pretty well at sixth globally in the OECD's assessment of 15-year-olds in terms of reading, math, and science. Sixth is not bad. But there's a pre-pandemic decline. Canadian scores in math, reading, and science have declined since around 2000. Math especially has seen a significant drop.

And here's the thing that I'm going to spend a little bit of time on. The idea of anxiety in our kids. In Ontario, 59% of students say school stress causes them a great deal of anxiety, higher than worries about friends, family, or money. And anxiety can stem from a lot of things. It can genetic predispositions, environmental influences like trauma, bullying, school pressure, parenting style, and socioeconomic stress. In 2023, there was a survey by mental health,

Research Canada found 64% of Canadian teens identify school performance as their biggest stressor. And school performance is their biggest stress. What do we do here? Because there's no homework, really, no meaningful homework. There are no exams until high school. Teachers do not have the ability anymore to discipline kids. So where's the stress coming from? Where's the anxiety coming from? And you know, my producer, Mike and I were discussing this before the break. And we'll touch on this in our next segment as well. I had at least three hours of homework every night. I woke up every day assuming that it was going to be a bad day. I went to a school that's the entire ethos of the school was predicated on failure. They had no problem,

despite all your homework, despite everything you did, creating a testing environment where I was, it was entirely conceivable, depending on the class. I was not a science or a math guy. It was entirely conceivable that I would get a zero on 20 in math and science. Like, what does that do to a kid's head? I'll tell you, it doesn't make you feel good. But at no point in my entire life, did I ever ascribe that feeling of doom and dread to anxiety.

One, because I didn't know what anxiety was. I don't think anybody back then of my age and my cohort knew what anxiety was. and so because of that, if I had been asked by these people, you know, how do I feel about school? I would say, it's fine, because I didn't have the language for it. Anxiety has been part of school forever. I can't tell you if 59% of students saying that they deal with a great deal of anxiety, I don't know if that's a big number or not.

I really don't. But in an environment where there are no tests, where there's no discipline, where everybody is, you don't have to worry about failing a grade. Heck, we don't even call it failing a grade anymore. I can't understand why that would call, that environment would be more anxiety driving than the environment that we grew up in. And when you name something, people will flock to it. I remember I worked with UNICEF and I went to Africa and we would build wells in towns.

And next of the well, they would build a school. And at that school, there would be a school lunch program. And what they found is within a few months of building that, the school was overrun. They had a whole new slew of problems. Why? Because word got out that this was here. When word gets out that there is something called anxiety, people will, there's a natural inclination, some people, a natural inclination to ask yourself, is that what I have?

And so I don't know how much of this is useful. Given the context that I just gave you, and we're going to drill down in the next segment. I am not suggesting, by the way, that there are not real anxiety driving issues in school. I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting that when you name something, it is easier to identify with that thing. In the absence of naming anxiety, it was just life. It was just the life we led. It was the school was the thing that I had to battle with.

I had to get through it. And now we're giving kids a language that some of them will leverage to, well, we've seen what happens. We've seen what happens. If we can identify it and say, oh, look at how much anxiety is being caused. We have to change the system so there's less anxiety. And then more kids can possibly claim. that they have anxiety. I don't know that we're on necessarily the right path.

But I'm just one guy with my own opinions. It's not tethered to any sort of academic rigor. And so we're going to talk to somebody after the break to see if I'm off base. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney show. This is the Ben Mulroney show. And I want to thank you so much for finding us wherever we are. And we're in a lot of places.

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All right. Before the break, we were talking about anxiety as a driver for policy within our our schools, our public school system and how so many kids are claiming that the school environment is the major driver for anxiety in their lives. And I don't know if there's a causal relationship or it's just a correlation, but we've seen a drop in sort of accountability for our kids and the tests that we put in front of them from, you know, academic achievement to quizzes, to discipline in the classroom. All of these things seem to be falling by the wayside.

And I don't know that that's necessarily the right thing. And so we're going to talk to somebody who has been working in an environment where they're doing the opposite. So please welcome Muriel Riasat. I hope I said that right. Chief business officer and former teacher at La Citadel International Academy of Arts and Science. Muriel, can you hear me? I hear you. Can you hear me now? I can. I can. So tell me a little bit about La Citadel International Academy of Arts and Science.

All right. Well, La Cittadel was founded 26 years ago by my father. It has very simple foundations. And you actually hit two of our values when you were just talking right now. We talk about excellence, discipline, achievement. So these are three academic values that we have. But what is often forgotten in education is respect, harmony, and compassion. And if you put all those factors together and you give the children the support they need, if you show them the way, which is what our job is as educators, then what you will do is you will create less anxiety in children. Anxiety, you know, you talked about it being a dysfunction in the system, but the system, I think,

I'm going to be a bit honest, the system I think is a bit broken. We've taken the root of least resistance as opposed to saying our job is to hold their hand, help them through problems because once children understand, then they don't have those anxieties. When you don't understand, when you're weak, when you feel like you're lacking knowledge, then you start to get anxious when you have a test or this and that. It needs to be part of the process

so that children start to feel more confident and then can undertake any challenges you give them. Well, I like that you said, yeah, I like that you said, we've taken the path of least resistance. If we acknowledge that the anxiety of the children in the public school system is real, then the path of least resistance is to say, all right, well, let's just get rid of all the things

that we think causes that anxiety. And that's the easiest thing to do. And in fact, as you're proving out at La Citadel is those testing mechanisms, those attempts to have them strive and achieve, they won't always succeed to the level they want. But that's okay. Those are the things that build them

into better versions of themselves. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, we have, homework has become a bad word. It's like saying the worst thing, homework. And the reality is homework is given to children to practice what they've learned in school. Homework is never something that's new. And so this is why there's a disconnect with homework because suddenly, oh my gosh, my child has to learn something. No, it should be something that was done in class. They practice. And if they didn't understand the teacher has to re-explain it, that's why parents shouldn't be helping with homework. Yeah. They should really let the children become independent. And if, and think of it. And think of it. about it at the elementary level, we're not doing PhDs here.

No. You know, these are the foundations to bring about excellence in high school to get to the university level. So that's the structure. It's a journey. Well, also, you know, the habits that we start forming at a young age are the ones that are going to carry us forward. And one of the things that I think is lacking in a world without homework is this idea

of self-regulation, this idea that a child, when they're in their room and they have the distraction of their phone and they have the distraction of comic books. and they have the distraction of their computer, the ability to have the self-discipline to say, now it's time to put that aside, and I'm going to focus on this one thing. And let me tell you, I had a tough time doing that as a kid.

I was so easily distracted, but it was something that I had to work through every single night. And there's no way it has not helped me. There's no way. And that is completely lacking in the educational environment of today. And not just that. I think the role of parents has shifted. Parents want to get the homework done. They want those results and those grades. And I think that that's a bit of the problem also in the system is we put so much stock on the status or the training. You know, you have all these training programs after school. And all they're doing is they're doing the memorization. They're not doing the skills like math, for instance. Math is about reasoning. I mean, I haven't met too many mathematicians in my life, but I have met many people who problem solve. And that's really the truth about math is teaching you. to reason through problems and think through them, right? Yeah.

So when you have a child at home, the job of the parent is actually to help them understand how they learn, okay, maybe my child, you know, who's in high school now, my child needs to come home, get changed, have dinner, and then eat. My second child needs to go straight to homework. And we had to figure that out throughout their whole elementary years. And now that they're getting to high school, it's helped us. And our children know how they learn best. Yeah.

And this is why even at the school, we have tests. We have exams at starting grade one. Yeah. And people often come here and go, oh, my gosh, exams in grade one. Well, exams are shocking if a child's never done a test. Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you remember quizzes? You used to learn something in class.

And then the next morning, the teacher said, okay, here's a problem. Yeah. Quiz. Yep. No preparing. No, I know. You just did it. You dealt with it.

Well, would I tell you know, I understood. Yeah, so tell me what you would say if, sort of the powers that be on the public side were to say we, you know, it's an issue of human dignity that we're not going to hold a kid back. You know, no matter what, everyone goes from grade one to two to three to four to five and so on. What happens in your school if, despite everybody's best efforts, a kid just hasn't reached the level to get to the next grade? Okay. So I find this to be a bit of the problem that happens a lot now, especially with that no failed. A child is born December 31st. They fall under a year. They can go into JK. But there's no

difference between that child and JK and the next child the year after who can start who's born January 1st. Education isn't a race. But what happens is if you progress to the next level and you don't have the foundations and you don't know, you're telling that child you're not capable. You're saying you're a C student. You're never going to succeed. That child no longer has aspirations to university. Now anxiety comes in. Now this stress comes in. I'm not good enough. All these factors come in. Hold that child back for a year. Give them the tools to reinforce the knowledge. Every one of us learns at a different pace. And that one year, I mean, I'm 49. Next year, 50, really not that much of the difference. It's the same. Yeah. So why are we doing this to

children and saying, okay, keep going into high school and get their illiterate. That's not fair to them. Yeah. But can I also say, like, I don't think there is anything wrong. wrong with teaching kids early that if you if you work hard and like failure is part of most of the gambits in life in one way or another you're either going to achieve all everything you want or you're going to achieve a little less of what you want and if you achieve a little less of what you want that means that line items you're going to have little mini failures in there I don't think that is uh there's I don't think that's a net negative I think fear can Fear of failing can be a hell of a motivator.

And we're living in a world where anything challenging is disparaged and it's viewed as toxic and it's viewed as a problem that needs to be excised. And you know what it is? I have a story, a quick story to share if that's okay. I had a student in the school for many years and we have science fair and some schools I know have abolished science fairs. Us, the whole community from daycare all the way to grade 12 participate in our science fair. So first of all, everyone does the same thing.

so there's no differentiation, and we're all good at different levels. So this one child, every year, would never get a prize, one, two, or three in as the science fair. And this child really wanted to get placed. By the time this child got to grade five, they got the first place. And now our community is quite small. Everybody knows each other. We're really, we take care of each other. We have small class sizes, so we don't have the 30 that you'll have in other schools.

We have maximum 20 per class. So when she won and heard her name as first place, she'd assumed I guess she didn't win, the entire school cheered because she had worked each year harder and harder to get to that placement. And that success that she received was 10 times more valuable than giving her a participation medal. Muriel, yes, the chief business officer and former teacher

at La Citadel International Academy of Arts and Sciences. I wish we had more time. But thank you so much for showing us, you know, what things could be like. We really appreciate it. The end. For four years, Noah and Sarah have been clying out from beneath the Denver airport. They have faced monsters, secret armies, and killing machines.

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