Our education system is decaying

Leftist ideology is displacing mathematics and science

Late in life, my father left the RCAF when my schizophrenic mother needed more help and put himself through teachers’ college hammering together crates at the LCBO for minimum wage. When he graduated, the teachers union made sure he did not get a teaching job in the B.C. mainland so he spent his teaching years at places like Fort St. John, Dawson Creek and Massett in the Queen Charlotte Islands teaching industrial arts and driving home to Coquitlam weekends to help care for my mother. I grew up dirt poor, my younger brother committed suicide and my older brother left home at 16, lying about his age to get a job and putting himself through University as a mature student to become a lawyer and eventually receive the Order of Canada for charity work in Manitoba.

I used to admire my teachers. They worked hard, put in lots of overtime and were poorly paid. While they had a union since 1920, they were professionals and cared deeply about the education of children entrusted to them. That was in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

As time went by, the teachers’ unions recognized the employer had unlimited resources and were spending other people’s money, and became more militant. At the same time, to placate parents they allowed “grade creep” to enter such that universities needed to adjust grades downwards for many schools in assessing applicants. The honour of being named an Ontario Scholar was awarded to about 3% of students in 1966 and 30 years later about 30% received the award, not because they are better educated or smarter but because it is easier today to get the 80% needed to qualify. Many students graduate high school today with poor English grammar and low math skills. Reading, writing and arithmetic haven’t changed much but the teaching profession has changed. Now it spends its time indoctrinating our children on left wing ideology like Critical Race Theory and post-modernist concepts like gender fluidity. I paid for my children to attend private schools to ensure the got an education rather than indoctrination. Two have graduate degrees today and are self-made millionaires; two have graduated more recently and have jobs in technology each paying over $120,000 a year; and one is in fourth year university. They have benefited from good educations.

But today’s teachers are not doing their jobs and have become militant unionists.

The greater militancy has led to much higher costs. The average teacher in Canada earns almost $100,000 a year in addition to a generous pension indexed for inflation, higher than Chemical Engineers or graduates in pharmaceutical sciences. Taxpayers have paid for the teachers to benefit from a $241 billion pension fund for Ontario’s 29,902 teachers, about $8 million for each teacher. While compensation has grown class sizes have shrunk from an average of 35 in 1960 to about 22 today. More pay, less work.

Today Ontario spends over $30 billion on education for its 2.1 million grade school students, or about $15,000 per student per year. With an average class size of 22 students and a school year of 194 school days with a typical day having 3 classes, the cost per class is $567 for one and a half hours of teaching. Teachers have two months holidays every summer.

I share the view that education is a fundamental need and that Canada has had the benefit of a first class education system for decades, but the fact is that system is in decay and today’s teachers are overpaid and underworked and do society a disservice by bringing their political views and sexual orientation into the classroom.

But with respect to the people (many of whom I admire and respect) who have criticized me for a Tweet that claimed teachers are overpaid and underworked, the evidence suggests that Tweet was accurate.