With general unease drifting up from the United States as its presidential election inches closer, Canadian author Margaret Atwood is at the ready. On November 12 she will share her perspectives on “Democracy, Public Education and the Common Good” during a public lecture at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary. While she’s sure to touch on the American election, which happens a week before she takes the stage, it’s her focus on the specific role public education plays in democracies that has our attention.

Atwood is well known for her poetry and novels, especially The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a story that explores the diminishing rights of women in a totalitarian and theocratic state. In this repressive society, women have their basic freedoms taken from them, including the right to read and write.

Atwood has repeatedly said that the ideas within The Handmaid’s Tale have been plucked from real-world events. In 2019, she expanded on this to Penguin Books Limited, saying a communist reign in Romania and the struggle for women’s rights in the States in the 1980s are a couple of events that influenced the book. But how does public education lend itself to democracy in these instances?

In an animated video released by the Financial Times, titled “Democracy,” Atwood envisions the democratic scale as a circle, with totalitarianism at the top, chaos at the bottom and a “temperate zone” through the middle representing democracy. She notes that if you “upset the balance of the temperate zone, [you] find yourself in a civil war. Witness a breakdown of the institutions that keep things running — the supply chain, the tax department, healthcare, the schools — and chaos will be the result.” Her monologue continues with power-hungry leaders then preying on the chaos to launch themselves into the driver’s seat.

In short, public education is the main pillar for keeping disorder, misinformation and general pandemonium at bay.

As the United States heads into an election whose results could tip it into chaos, Margaret Atwood’s insight comes at an opportune time to bridge the gap between public education and strong democratic institutions.

Margaret Atwood’s talk at the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) on November 12 is open to the public. Visit Ticketmaster to secure your seat. This evening is brought to you by the ATA, Calgary Public Teachers’ Local 38 and Calgary Catholic Teachers’ Local 55.