Public Schooling Is Failing Canada

Fix the education system or watch the nation being reduced to a third world status, warns the Canadian Council on Learning:

Canada could slip into Third World status if its education system is not reformed to produce innovative and creative graduates who can compete globally, say experts responding to the latest report from the Canadian Council on Learning.

"The education system that Canada has is going to lead us to produce more and more people who are chronically unemployable," said futurist Richard Worzel, who studies societal trends and patterns to help clients plan for the future. "What this means for the country is the gradual slip into Third World status."
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Canada also ranks low among OECD countries in the number of graduates in science and engineering, who are key drivers of productivity.

Moreover, 42 per cent of Canadian adults have what the council considers "low" levels of literacy, meaning they "perform below the internationally accepted minimum considered necessary for participation in a knowledge society."

Paul Cappon, president and chief executive officer of CCL, said Canada is not setting the conditions for future success.

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Obviously, the left will try to use the study to advance their causes. They'll demand more funding for government-run schools, claiming that more money would result in better education. They'll campaign for an all-inclusive state-run daycare and mandatory schooling for 3 and 4 year-olds, because, as the study finds, "25 per cent of five-year-olds enter the education system poorly prepared"...

What they won't mention is that the vast majority of our schools are government run. That what the government already spends on an average student (about $9000-$11000 a year) is comparable to (if not higher than) a private school tuition. And, yet, in spite of all this "investment", public schools keep failing. Private schools, where parents have to pay the tuition with their own after-tax money and homeschoolers, who have to contribute their own time, often sacrificing work hours, tend to do much better job.

So what's needed is not more "investment" into the government-run virtual monopoly on education, but more competition between schools, that would make the public school principals worry about losing students and funds should they fail to meet the parents' expectations. We need a voucher system that would allow the parents to freely choose between public, private and home schooling, instead of being compelled first to sustain the public system with their taxes and then pay for private schooling with their after-tax dollars.

Once the parents have a free choice of schools for their children, once they have the ability to punish failing schools by removing their children from these schools and sending them to others, once the principals and the teachers' unions which try to use children as guinea pigs in some long-disproved social experiments, see their schools going out of business due to a mass exodus of students - the schools will have no choice but to deliver a better quality education. There will be a lot less unemployable graduates and the parents too will be much better off financially.