Now that the National Post has wrapped up it’s series on “Canada’s Biggest Mistake”, I figure that us Blogging Tories can add in our own takes. If you’re interested in participating, I ask that you leave me a comment (I don’t read them much these days anymore, but I’ll make an exception here) and I’ll post a link to your take; hopefully we’ll have a nice little collection by the end of the week!

Keeping track of all the National Post entries, I have to admit that all the big ones were covered: The Charter, multiculturalism, abortion, The Tragically Hip (actually, that last one didn’t appear, but it should’ve!). The topics covered by Post columnists had the common theme of being either the cumulation of, or source of the social ills we experience today. As I got thinking about this, I quickly came to think of our “biggest mistake” as being something which is a cause, not an effect and furthermore, our biggest mistake should’ve been the biggest cause of things that has hurt us as a nation since.

Once I got into this frame of mind, the riddle became simple: government education! You have to go back a’ways to find a time before we had such a system, but as Ontario’s last election showed, we’re still paying the price for it today. If you take any other problem that we’ve had in the last 100 years since the advent of “public” education, you’ll find that an argument can be made that the government’s meddling in our childrens’ upbringing caused it: Poor performance in the world? Government education. A narcissistic and euthanasia-bent society? Government education. The crumbling of our ability to govern ourselves? Government education. You get the point I’m sure. There’s also the more minor results (relatively speaking) like the over-bearing and scofflaw unions that now indoctrinate our children year after year, or the massive debts that our provincial governments have accumulated because they got tangled in the teaching domain in the first place.

The one thing that makes this mistake unique from the others explored though is that it isn’t unique to Canada. The United States, western Europe, and Australia have all been duped by the allure of having big government pay for every little boy and girl’s enlightenment. If it weren’t for the sparsely populated elitist, religious and cultural private schools consistently out-performing the government systems in the western world, we wouldn’t even have a way of knowing just how much we’re failing our kids. It does present an opportunity for Canada as well though. If we were to take a leadership role in the 21st century by revitalizing and reinvigorating our school systems, doing away with political controls and the presumption that parents aren’t the best decision makers for their children, it would take practically no effort for us to excel to the head of the pack and become the best-educated most potential-blessed nation on the Earth. We’d become the new Japanese, as it were. It’s all something to think about, both from a contemporary and from a visionary point of view. Who knows, our kids might even learn how to properly do their taxes in a couple of generations!