Dear Editor
Re: Cost of Supreme Court ruling could be huge: board chair, Trending, Nov. 18.
I wonder who is hiding behind “Burnaby Capitalist”? He (or she) consistently demonstrates the value of a poor education. Or maybe he didn’t pay attention in school. Or maybe, and this seems most likely, because he makes his political agenda clear, he is deliberately spreading misinformation, and truth be damned.
B.C.’s worst distortion of the truth is pointing to the high-quality Finnish education system, and blaming our teachers for not doing it like that. But our teachers do not create the structure of our education system. Our governments do that, and mostly they work hard at dismantling it, in particular by underfunding it. This shows up in various ways, such as lack of maintenance, cuts to support staff and wages, large class sizes, and so on. All of this has been extensively documented. And that does not even include the regular law-breaking by the B.C. Liberals.
As to the high salaries earned by teachers, they are decent, but not particularly high, as professional salaries go. Furthermore, many teachers work for a lot less, and with zero job security. The reader should research the term “contingent academic labour” to understand this. The real agenda that B.C. is pushing is that almost everybody should work for peanuts. Not including athletes, movie stars, lawyers, or capitalists, of course. Well guess what? It’s been done, and it has the effect of destroying local markets. That is, people can no longer buy stuff, and then product can no longer be sold, and so the “free market” destroys itself. Which is fine, except that en route, countries go bankrupt, and people starve.
Victor Finberg, via email
