Catholic schools now are being forced to abide with such alliances. With government funding Catholic schools are not free to teach as they want on all matters. If Catholic schools can survive in America without government funding I do not see why they would not in Canada.
Easy to say but not so easy to do.
I doubt very much that Catholic parents in great numbers would build and support Catholic schools - they are just too used to having them paid for. Their grandparents might have but now, when all that’s required to attend a Catholic school is a baptismal certificate, many would not bother if they had to pay for a private Catholic school.
My own province did away with Catholic education in 1998. Prior to that Churches had governance of schools which were established as
- Schools operated for children of all denominations [called Inter-denominational], and
- Schools operated for children of a single denomination [called uni-denominational]. Predominantly Catholic but also Pentecostal and Salvation Army.
This was changed to
- In and for the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Legislature shall have exclusive authority to make laws in relation to education but shall provide for courses in religion that are not specific to a religious denomination.
- Religious observances shall be permitted in a school where requested by parents.
It was done after two referenda, one in 95 where only by 55% did a majority say “yes, change to a non-denominational system” & one in 97 where 79% responded yes. As one trustee put it, " in many cases, people’s faith did not rally them to speak up, or (it was the case) that political or other affiliations trumped Faith." That same trustee has spent the last 14 years telling Catholics in other provinces not to be complacent.
Once they were given the go-ahead by the population it required changing the Terms of Union and that required a constitutional amendment and the approval of 90% of the provinces which they got without a problem. At the time the school boards either closed Catholic schools or took them over.
We are a large province geographically but our population is only ~600K. There are 3 private Catholic schools in the entire province, 1 in each of the two major cities and one in a very small community that chose to go private rather than see their school closed and their children bussed to a larger center. In all 3 cases, the infrastructure was in place and did not require anything to be built. Such is not the case in towns like ours.
The first of the city schools had been a Catholic School since 1856, built right after the Cathedral was consecrated. The gov’t closed it in 1998. The Archdiocese owned the buildings and a year later, due to strong parental demand and support from the Jesuits, the school reopened as a private fee-paying school with a Jesuit as it’s president. 13 years later it still only has an enrolment of 360 in a city of 165K (~40% Catholic). We had more kids than that in our two Catholic schools and we are a town with only 1500 Catholics.
It’s a sad fact that many Catholics just don’t care. The even sadder thing is that catechesis, which now was put in the parents’ hands, is often just not happening. The parents are the product of 9 or 12 years of Catholic education that taught them very little and they are totally incapable of transmitting the Faith to their children, they don’t know the basics of it and they aren’t interested in learning. So for now, we get kids coming to us for preparation for First Communion who may not have been in church since they were baptized, who don’t know the basic three prayers and in some instances don’t even know the sign of the cross. But their parents bring them for this ‘rite of passage’ (rather than ‘sacrament’), we give them 6 sessions of preparation, they make their First Communion and we don’t see 50% of them again.
Our best and, for a long time, only catechist was the Catholic woman who taught in the Inter-denominational school system and whose children attended the school where she taught. When she first came here, she had to teach catechism to her own kids to prepare them for the sacraments so she volunteered to prepare the children of other parents whose children were going to the non-Catholic schools (due mainly to language). She continued doing so for 14 years. But unlike in the US, here there is no requirement that anyone be trained to be a catechist. You volunteer, you’re a catechist. Few volunteer and, of those that do, fewer still are capable of ‘transmitting the Faith’ since they don’t know it.
) - but that is separate from provincial funding that is assigned per student. I know that in the city I live in, the public and separate schools seem to work together pretty well - they even have joint outreach schools for at risk youth.