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Just before Christmas as I was packing my house to move I saw this teacher’s dash for cash tweet. What we have here is teachers entertaining a crowd at a hockey game as they fight for $5000 in $1 bills to pay for school supplies.

I’m not the only person to find this disgusting, but it shows what the values of a society are and while this was in the United States, I don’t think that Canada is any better. We just haven’t yet put our contempt for educating children on display as they did above.

The school my children currently attend has a total budget of $1200 for over 200 students in the library. That’s to purchase any supplies the library needs and purchase any books the library wants to update their resources. That’s also less than I spend a year on my personal books.

If we really value reading in children, why don’t we put our cash behind purchasing books for children to read at school?

But one thing we don’t do is make police pay for the supplies they use to oppress citizens. Recently in the midst of an unprecedented flood in BC, the RCMP was dispatched to a land dispute between First Nations and an oil company. Enforcing the rights of this company was more important than getting more feet on the ground to stop the destruction of the Fraser Valley.

Police also continue to arrest journalists after being told they need to stop arresting journalists. The RCMP even knows that their own funding isn’t the issue when they see funding cuts and say it won’t affect service at all.

Yet society continues to put more police funding ahead of giving our teachers a break and decreasing class sizes. Teachers bring in their own supplies, parents bring in school supplies, and people donate so that kids can have playground equipment or more books.

I wonder how much less violence would be enacted by police if they had to pay for their supplies the same way that teachers have to pay to keep educating children? I’d bet that it would be much less.

Links

Matt had an interesting post on the Dunning-Kruger effect and I wrote some more thoughts on it along with 2 reading recommendations.