Kids, Not Cars: What Our Priorities Say About Education

What does a government move quickly to protect?

That question sits underneath a lot of public conversations about education, even when nobody says it out loud. We hear there is no room, no flexibility, no capacity. We are told to be realistic. We are told systems are under pressure and hard choices have to be made. But then we watch hundreds of millions appear when the priority is industry, optics, or economic urgency, and suddenly the limits do not seem quite so fixed after all.

That is part of what I mean when I say, kids, not cars.

This is not really about cars. It is about priorities. It is about what a society reveals when it decides what deserves urgency, protection, and investment. If Ontario can absorb the writing off of $445 million in old Chrysler debt, while school systems are expected to normalize deficits in the tens of millions, then we are no longer just talking about budgets. We are talking about values. We are talking about what gets framed as essential, and what gets treated as something that should simply learn to do more with less.

Education is a service industry. It is built on relationships, support, human capacity, and care. The work is not abstract. The work is people. It is young people arriving at school with needs, strengths, fears, questions, identities, and a right to be taken seriously. It is educators trying to create spaces where learning, belonging, and growth can actually happen. And yet when education is under strain, the language shifts quickly. We start hearing about restraint, efficiency, control, and limitation. Students start sounding less like the reason the system exists and more like a problem the system is struggling to carry.

That shift should make all of us uncomfortable.

Students are not numbers on a spreadsheet. They are not a line item to be managed down. They are not an inconvenience to adult systems. They are young people with rights, voices, and futures, and the quality of their school experience is shaped by every decision a system makes about what matters most. When funding pressure shows up, it does not stay trapped inside a report or a boardroom slide deck. It shows up in classrooms. It shows up in support staff stretched thinner. It shows up in fewer interventions, fewer relationships, less capacity, and less room to respond well when students need schools to be places of steadiness and care.

This is why I keep coming back to the idea that public education is a public good. Not in a vague or nostalgic sense, but in a practical one. Schools are where children learn how to live with other people. They are where students test their voice, build identity, experience fairness or unfairness, and begin to understand what it means to belong to a community. If we say that matters, then our decisions should reflect it. If we say children matter, then the systems around them should be built in ways that prove it.

That does not mean schools do not need accountability. It does not mean every financial reality disappears. It does mean we should be honest about the cost of our choices. When education is treated as a place to absorb pressure while other sectors receive speed, flexibility, and protection, children carry that strain. So do the adults working closest to them. And once that becomes normal, we risk accepting a version of schooling that is more concerned with managing scarcity than serving students well.

For me, this connects directly to the broader work of student rights. A rights-informed approach asks us to look past convenience and ask harder questions. Who is being served by this decision? Who is carrying the burden of it? What does dignity look like here? What does meaningful support look like here? What would it mean to build schools that are not just efficient, but humane?

Because that is the deeper issue.

It is a challenge. It pushes us to ask whether our public systems still remember who they are for. It reminds us that the success of education cannot be measured only by what a system can cut, contain, or control. It has to be measured by whether children are known, supported, heard, and given real conditions to learn.

If we believe public education matters, then we have to stop talking about students as though they are too expensive to care for properly. We have to stop treating school communities as the place where every strain gets downloaded. We have to stop confusing endurance with investment.

Kids, not cars.

If our decisions say otherwise, then we should be honest enough to admit what our priorities really are.