“You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”
When I heard Ontario Premier Doug Ford say this, I didn’t just feel annoyed. I felt unsettled.
Not because I disagree with the importance of practical careers, but because of how easily entire areas of education were dismissed without being named, without being understood, and without being treated as legitimate in their own right.
It was the tone of it, the certainty, the assumption that some forms of learning simply do not deserve the same space, funding, or respect.
And what makes that more frustrating is that I do understand what he is trying to say. Trades matter. Healthcare matters. We need people in those fields, and we need them to be supported. That has never been the issue.
The problem is not that those areas are valued. The problem is that their value is often used to justify the quiet dismissal of everything else.
Because education is not a competition between disciplines. It is not a ranking system where one form of knowledge has to lose in order for another to matter.
But that is how it starts to feel when people in positions of power speak about it this way. When funding decisions are shaped by these attitudes.
When students are made to feel like their education only counts if it leads somewhere immediately obvious, immediately useful, immediately profitable.
There is something deeply frustrating about the way the humanities and the arts are spoken about in conversations like this, as if they are optional, as if they exist outside of what is considered essential.
As if their value only needs to be defended when everything else has already been justified.
But these fields are not vague or unnecessary. They are where students learn how to write clearly, how to argue thoughtfully, how to understand history beyond memorization, and how to engage with ideas that do not have easy answers.
They are where you learn how to analyze language, how to recognize bias, how to question the way something is being presented instead of simply accepting it.
They are also where we learn how to understand people.
Literature asks you to step into perspectives that are not your own. History forces you to confront how the past continues to shape the present.
Philosophy teaches you how to think through ethical questions that do not have simple solutions. Gender studies and sociology ask you to look at systems of power that often go unnoticed until you are taught how to see them.
None of this is abstract in the way it is often made out to be. It shows up in how we interpret the news, how we understand political decisions, how we recognize when something is being framed in a way that benefits certain people over others.
It shows up in how we communicate, how we question, and how we respond to the world around us.
That is why it feels so frustrating to hear these areas of study reduced to something dismissible. Because what is being implied is that they are not essential.
That if they do not lead directly from a classroom to a job, if they do not produce something immediate and measurable, then they can be treated as secondary. Optional. Even unnecessary.
But not everything important works like that.
Some forms of education do not move in a straight line. They do not give you a clear answer for what comes next. Instead, they shape how you think, how you understand, and how you make sense of the world over time.
And that matters.
It matters because without those skills, without that kind of thinking, we become more likely to accept things at face value.
More likely to take statements from people in power without questioning them. More likely to miss what is being left out, what is being simplified, what is being presented as obvious when it is anything but.
If we do not have people who are able to critically think about what is being said, about what is being prioritized, and about what is being dismissed, then we lose something much bigger than any one discipline.
We lose the ability to question people like Ford in the first place.
That is what makes comments like this feel bigger than just one remark.
They reflect a way of thinking about education that narrows its purpose, that reduces it to outcomes instead of understanding, and that overlooks the importance of the very fields that teach us how to think critically about the world we are living in.
And that is what I cannot ignore.
Because this is not just about what students choose to study. It is about what we are told is worth studying, what is supported, and what is slowly pushed to the side.
And once that starts to happen, we are not just limiting education.
We are limiting the way we understand everything.