Passion Power

The greatest charity of all is to give someone a job and there’s a million of them out there. According to Statistics Canada there are 997,000 vacant positions in the second quarter of this year, the highest quarterly number on record. The working class aren’t working but why? The working class perform essential work. They work in restaurants, cook, serve our food, clean, work as cashiers, take care of the sick and the elderly. We devalue the working class yet who will build your house or fix your steps or mow your lawn or deliver your food or look after you when you’re old? Every trade is desperate to hire workers, but nobody seems to want the job. Parents understand that getting into the trades is the way to go but good luck convincing our kids of that. They look down on their hard-working parents. They want the highest pay possible for the least amount of work. Kids listen to social media influencers and are looking for get rich quick schemes. Who hasn’t fallen for that at...

In Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind, he writes how good intentions and bad ideas are ruining a generation of kids. He said that safetyism, trigger warnings and safe spaces are counter-productive and that stressors are a part of life. We must prepare the child for the road not the road for the child.  Over protection equals bad consequences. We must give kids the freedom to develop their anti-fragility and when we don’t challenge ourselves physically and mentally, we deteriorate.   When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. My sister-in-law has parents that come in with their teenager for a job interview. Last week, a school principal sent home a letter wa...

Support your frontline. That’s just good business. I hope the 76 school boards in Ontario figure out soon that it’s the schools that need the money and resources not the obscene amount of administrative office buildings full of staff that never see a kid’s face in a day. School boards have taken all the fun out of teaching. Enough of the online tools! Enough of the forms. Forget the make work projects, new rules and protocols. Make forms easier--not harder and supplies a cinch to get. Encourage fields trips and special activities and squash the 28-page document that needs to be filled out before they can go. We send our kids to school trusting that they will learn, have fun and be safe. Unfortunately, now a days every school has a drawer full of pills. Where’s the nurse? Every school has delinquent kids, where’s the security guards? Every school is filled with anxious and depressed kids, where’s the counsellor? Every school has neglected children, where’s the social wor...