One struggles to imagine what hardships Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce endured in high school to make him willing to consider obliterating high school teachers, and perhaps teaching as a human concept rather than “online managing.” For teachers are invaluable, Lecce less so.

A “confidential” government document just revealed by the Star shows that Premier Doug Ford’s government had been considering keeping two online courses optional in high school — it’s now mandatory — till 2024 when students would be allowed to earn diplomas entirely online. (Pause for the sound of cheering from sullen teenagers in the back row of class.)

Ontario Inc. would then sell its online credit courses for big money, presumably in the U.S. So far, one online school credit is mandatory in five states. They are Michigan, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas and Alabama. I rest my case. If my editor mandated three-paragraph columns, we’d end right here.

The MPP for King-Vaughan is 33, which means his quest for vengeance — a standard teen movie plot ever since “Carrie” — began relatively recently, and his online bio doesn’t mention his education at all. This is odd. You can’t shut up most politicians about their formative years as they hunt down the parental vote.

Even odder is his untraceable and undated website photo, which shows him standing outdoors with a woman in front of 21 children saying “cheese please.” Are they relatives? Passersby? He does not say.

It’s hard to imagine that actual high schools would want him on the property, especially since teachers’ unions began taking strike action over Ford’s ballooning class sizes, e-learning, and wages. I can’t imagine abolishing teaching as a profession would make him more popular with anyone, and that includes parents who don’t want teens lurking over their laptops at home no matter what the government says.

My understanding is that Lecce did graduate from high school — I could call and ask but my point is I shouldn’t have to — got a degree in political science and has been education minister since last June, after MPP Lisa Thompson was moved. That’s just over six months.

I don’t demand that politicians be qualified. That’s not the nature of the job. But since the education minister is in charge of two million students and a budget of about $30 billion, he should offer some link, however tenuous, to the field. He is not an accountant nor has he taught or been a trustee. He may not know what teachers actually do.

When work-to-rules hit classrooms, as they have done in elementary and high schools and will do for 45,000 English Catholic teachers next week, he won’t grasp the nature of the loss. Even if Ford were still premier in 2024, which I doubt, learning online might work in technical courses but not anywhere else.

Education is not a business of profit and loss. The only profit is amorphous, meaning the creation of literate students who can count, write, think logically, link ideas across subjects, make friends, and launch into lifelong learning. But the costs are specific.

Cutting costs by eliminating a great number of teachers would be a false economy. Both teachers and students would be unemployable. Really smart students can cope with bad teachers and the dead lump that is an online course. Students who do less well tend to crash without the guidance of a devoted teacher.

Could you command a classroom? It’s a “terrifying confidence trick” that takes years to learn, says British teacher Kate Clanchy, who has written “Some Kids I Taught, and What They Taught Me,” the best book on teaching I’ve yet read.

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“I can still confidently tell rowdy adolescents to behave on the bus; still enter a classroom and look at the back row in the indefinable, teacherly way that brings quiet.” That’s talent. No, it’s magic. “I still want to change the world and think that school is an excellent place to do it,” she says.

Teachers are society’s bulwark. Clanchy teaches poetry to impossibly difficult “excluded” students, a project I would have once called entertainment. Now I think it teaches them, as Clanchy says, to format themselves, to find “distance and control” in an unmanageable world. Teachers are on our side.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick

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