Last week Hillary Clinton did an interview on 20 / 20 with Diane Sawyer. I caught parts of the interview but I must have missed the comment that sent the Twitter feed alight: "Bill and I left the White House dead broke." The next morning on Good Morning America Hillary appeared on the show to explain her comment. Robin Roberts wanted to throw her a lifeline and so said something along the lines that: "Surely she could understand the backlash to the comment that they were dead broke. There are people who really are dead broke and surely the Clintons understood the frustration of individuals who really know poverty and that the Clintons have never known poverty." It is at this point that I think people would have expected Hillary to say, "Of course, you're right. We have never known poverty." She did not say this and what she did say is worthy of our attention.
What she said is that she understands and empathizes with those who find themselves in debt. She and her husband left university with high student loans but because of the education that they received it was possible for them to get out of debt. Her education allowed her to walk through open doors that would otherwise have been closed. Now certainly you can argue with Clinton's characterization of being "dead broke" but you should take notice that whatever the circumstances of their lives are now in 2014, they have known what it is like not to have financial resources. The moral of the story: education was the ticket.
Many years ago a colleague of mine was on a radio program. The radio interviewer tried to take my colleague to task over his salary: "Weren't university professors paid more than adequately?" (The interviewer was a bit brasher than that but this is was the gist of his question). My colleague answered in his usual wry manner: "I wasn't born with my PhD." In fact, it was his education that had given him the opportunity to make a good salary. My point is that education is the key investment in long-term prosperity. Period. And the worst of it is that we know this to be true.
One cannot help but to raise this point in the context of the current dispute over education in this province. And it really is a dispute over education not simply a dispute between government and teachers. The commitment we make to education says just about everything about what we believe are our children's prospects for the future. And I don't just mean paying their teachers adequately. I mean investing in school infrastructure and in active learning. Our children spend at least six hours a day in school. They need an environment that fosters creativity. We cannot keep pretending that teachers can do more with less.
The investment we make in education is an investment not just in our children's future but in the future of civil society. We are educating citizens as well as workers and entrepreneurs and artists.
Why is it that we have made public sector employees the scapegoat for austerity? I would argue that it has become easy politically to make this case. It is easier to appeal to taxpayers by saying that someone in the public sector is getting a better deal than people in the private sector. It is easier to get a vote if you say, "I won't raise taxes and I will cut public spending" than it is to say: "Let's raise taxes and spend the money in our schools."
There is no question that it is easier to create rhetoric around the "hardline" approach than it is to have an honest discussion with voters / taxpayers about what sacrifices are needed to invest in the long-term.
We have an odd propensity to want the very best for our children without the foresight to see that collectively we are their only hope.
As I have mentioned in this column before, I write my articles on Thursdays. As I wake up on Friday morning to discover that the Ontario Liberals took the election with a majority, I wonder if Ontario voters were specifically rejecting the message that public services can be cut in the name of austerity.
