There’s a reason why it looks like immigrants are getting all the good jobs.
It’s because they are.
And before you get your panties in a bunch or your knickers in a twist, it’s not because of some replacement conspiracy theory. It’s not bleeding-heart liberal woke ideology.
It’s the simple fact that every year that goes by, we are choosing to make education less and less accessible to our own citizens.
You want your factory jobs? Great. That’s the best your kids can hope for.
Because in a world where knowledge is compounding and growing exponentially, access to education is everything. And if we’re being honest, much of the rest of the world is doing it better than we are.
Think about it.
Your head of IT is probably Indian. Your nurse is Filipino. Your doctor is from China. The engineer building the bridge is from Nigeria.
Because sometimes whether a homegrown citizen has access to a quality education depends on whether or not they can afford the tuition. How far they’re allowed to take it depends on how long they can afford to stay out of the workforce.
Because education, done properly, is a full-time occupation.
Education may not be one hundred percent free in every country, but other countries take education much more seriously than we do. Education is seen as a necessity, where we too often treat it like an entitlement.
We’re still coasting on the fumes of our postwar supremacy, when much of the rest of the world was either in shambles or still trying to industrialize.
When the world gained access to cheap, instant information through the internet, it somehow made most of us dumber while much of the rest of the world got smarter.
The cost of feeling superior, I suppose.
In other countries, show enough aptitude and your ride to higher education can be free or close to it. You might even get paid to go.
But here, in all the wealth of our country, students fight for scholarships that will only partially fund their education at universities that have come to rely on higher foreign-student tuition rates as part of their business model.
And then you wonder why your doctor comes from a country the name of which you can’t pronounce.
Which also says something about the state of our education.
My kid came home from his first day of Grade 12 this week to tell us that his school was operating with $100,000 less in its operating budget.
Teachers are not allowed to distribute paper.
He’s now spending half the time in math class copying lessons into his notebook instead of being handed the lesson by his teacher.
Because, oh yeah, apparently we’re also trying to move away from having all work done on devices.
So we’ve somehow arrived at the point where we don’t want kids doing everything on screens, but we also don’t want to give them paper.
Couple that with Doug Ford’s OSAP cuts, and no matter how much his government spends on TV ads, it’s hard to believe they aren’t, in fact, waging war on education.
Personally, I’m at a junction in my life where I’m trying to pivot, update some skills and join the workforce in a new way.
One thought was to upgrade some of my teaching qualifications.
For me, that comes in the form of ABQs—online, more or less self-study courses that consume all of eight or nine weeks.
I’m signing up for Intermediate English so I’ll be qualified to teach at the high school level.
The cost?
Seven hundred and thirty dollars.
And I’ll only be qualified to teach up to Grade 10.
To get my Senior qualifications, you guessed it: another seven hundred and thirty bucks.
So I’m already a certified teacher. I already have an English degree and a Bachelor of Education. I want to become more qualified to teach a subject we apparently need people to teach, and the privilege of adding two relatively short qualifications will cost me almost fifteen hundred dollars.
We don’t even support the teachers trying to teach our kids in the system we broke.
The fact that we have RESPs should tell you everything.
You better start squirrelling away money as soon as your kid is born, like you’re paying a mortgage or saving for retirement, otherwise they don’t stand a chance.
Think about how insane that is.
We’re telling parents that alongside housing and retirement, they need to spend eighteen years building a fund so their kid can afford the education increasingly required to compete in the modern economy.
In one of the richest countries on the planet.
So next time you complain about immigrants taking all the good jobs, just remember why that is.
They didn’t take the good jobs. We stopped preparing our own kids to get them.