Messy. People Disagreed. Uncomfortable by Design.

In March, I stood on the floor of the House of Commons and delivered my campaign speech as a rap in front of hundreds of students from across the country. By the end of the week, my party had won the election simulation and I had been elected Forum Prime Minister.

Those five days in Ottawa taught me more about how this country actually works than almost anything I have experienced before. That is worth talking about.

Forum for Young Canadians, run by the Rideau Hall Foundation, does something special: it treats students like citizens, not citizens-in-waiting. We debated real legislation. We heard from Members of Parliament. We sat in the Senate. We practiced the uncomfortable, deeply human work of convincing strangers that our ideas were worth voting for. I left understanding how a bill actually moves through government, what trade-offs look like in practice, and why disagreement, handled well, is not a threat to democracy. It is the foundation of it.

None of it felt foreign. It felt urgent. Alive. And it made me think about how experiences like this could sit alongside everything Appleby already does well.

Last week, Grade 12 student Zaina Harhash ran a workshop called Heard, a structured open discussion where students and faculty talked through some of the hardest issues in the world right now: the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, the global energy crisis. It was not tidy. People disagreed. Perspectives collided. It was also one of the most genuinely educational times I have had at Appleby. We were not preparing for anything. We were just trying to understand the world. Ishaan Grotra and I ran something similar on DEIB Day, a workshop called "Uncomfortable by Design: Democracy Starts with Conversation," and we saw the same thing happen there too.

This is what civic education looks like in practice. And based on research Ishaan Grotra, Karishma Kulkarni, and I conducted this year with over 100 student respondents, there is real appetite for more of it: 72% of Appleby students said they do not have enough open discussions about real-world events, geopolitics, or politics, and 76% said they want more. The good news is that the foundation for these conversations already exists here. The curiosity is there. The faculty engagement is there. It is less about overhauling anything and more about creating space.

We are not asking for politics to replace academics. Appleby gives us an exceptional education, and that is not the point. The point is that understanding how the world works, how decisions get made, how citizens participate, is part of that education too. Simulations, structured debates, workshops, Forum: these are not add-ons. They are what turns students into citizens.

I did not learn to navigate democracy from a textbook. I learned it by standing up in a room full of strangers and making a case for what I believed in, occasionally in rhyme.

Every student deserves that chance.

Arjun Kulkarni presenting at the House of Commons