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The renewed agitation by teachers in Ontario highlights the debacle of the whole public teaching and school administration apparatus that is possibly the greatest and most universal public policy failing in modern Western civilization. It is one of the richest and most distressing ironies of our times that all of our Western societies consecrate more and more funding resources to education to produce steadily less educated and ostensibly less informed and less usefully intelligent graduates of secondary schools and graduate university programs. Not surprisingly, we are also focusing on fewer and fewer real subjects of authentic study. As my learned and much-harassed friend Jordan Peterson has often said, any course calling itself something that ends with the word “studies” is not a real subject. It is just a part of a larger subject and generally implies the exclusion of most of the real subject (and I write this as a former lecturer at McGill University in “French Canada Studies,” which was in fact the history of Quebec).

Possibly the greatest and most universal public policy failing in modern Western civilization

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Illustrative of the endless and debilitating problem of the public education system in Ontario is the announcement on Wednesday of a one-day strike planned for Monday Jan. 20 of the public elementary school teachers in the Toronto and Ottawa areas. (Similar one-day rotating strikes have already closed public secondary schools across the province; Monday’s threatened strike would be the first to directly close elementary schools.) The announcement of the planned stoppage was accompanied by the breezy announcement by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO): “Please know this decision was made with student safety as our first priority.” Hapless parents of the locked-out children may want to reflect on the implications of the fact that the teachers to whom their children are entrusted feel that the best guaranty of the schoolchildren’s safety lies in closing them out of their schools. The response of the Ontario Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, seems to me very appropriate: the province will compensate affected parents with cash allocation for daycare services on strikebound days. Since, as far as I can deduce, the pupils don’t learn any more at their schools than they would at daycare centres, the schoolchildren are no worse off and the province will economize as long as the striking school personnel are not paid for the days they take off.