In the News

... We look out at a world that sometimes looks a little like it's gone mad. Random violence in various geopolitical regions, nihilist groups determined to use the death of innocents simply to make a point, demographic pressures that force rational countries to embrace the pluralism and diversity of greater immigration, anxieties about the mix between national security and individual freedom and a rising tide of opportunity for our young people if they are well educated to take on the world in their chosen area of passion and endeavour.

Many of us ask, aside from paying our taxes and helping our own family and kids, what can we do about all this other stuff?

Well, we can support public education. ...

Without a dynamic and compelling public education system we surrender one of the only real instruments for the management of diversity, the development of common cause and common equality of opportunity within our pluralist society. Without kids learning about each other, in a common setting instructed by caring, properly recognized and fairly paid teachers who reflect the best and brightest of our society, we would simply and directly be surrendering the imperatives of social cohesion and civility to the forces of fragmentation. These forces may be benign and humane and well-intentioned. But they are the forces of fragmentation. ...

Public education is about our own common resolve about the future we share. And I happen to believe that when the dynamism, quality, commitment to excellence and central social standing of our public education system is in peril, so is our future together. Values that we take for granted — equality between the genders, the presumption of innocence, democracy, the rule of law, embrace of diversity and pluralism — are not universally embraced by all whose parents may come to our shores. And what we might constructively do about the parents between the time they come as refugees or landed immigrants and become fellow citizens is a discussion for another time and place. But what our policy is about the kids is clear and has been clear for more than 150 years in Ontario and Canada. It's called public education.

And any failure on our part to invest in, to expand, to deepen and to embrace the full breadth and reach of public education is a simple failure to defend the kind of human and economic integration that is so vital to economic expansion and social progress. ...