Bake sales? Count me in! Huge bars of chocolate? Why, I’ll take a dozen! Magazine subscriptions? Sure, sign me up for Ontario Bulb Fancier and Herp Hut: Canada’s Reptile Journal!

When the kids were little, I came second to no one in my efforts to raise money for my city’s schools, as long as I didn’t have to show up somewhere and actually do something, like talk to other parents or be in a gym, which still gives me phys-ed hives.

But a report this week in my local paper, the Toronto Star, tells me that school fundraising has become less a local irritation and more a huge pulsing regional blob.

Parents are now being pressured to the point where they yearly raise more than half a billion dollars for Ontario schools. Where once it was just me, bulk-baking my completely over-the-top six-layer cookies at 10 p.m. for a child who has just casually mentioned that the special Tasty Treats Table is tomorrow (with that “please don’t embarrass me in front of my friends” look), now it’s genuinely big business.

The money pays for playgrounds, team uniforms, textbooks, computers, library books and field trips. One school region even accepts money for buildings and swimming pools.

You don’t raise that kind of money with guilt, as we did before. You do it with competitive fundraising, which in wealthy neighbourhoods is a grim neighbour-versus-neighbour contest. May the wealthiest parent win.

Seeing it in black and white boards

The Colbert Report recently had Wendy Kopp on as a guest. She is the founder of Teachers for America, which sends people with a college diploma into schools in poverty-stricken parts of the U.S. so that they can teach poor kids, or as Kopp calls them, “groups disproportionately impacted by the achievement gap.” The audience clearly thought it was a wonderful idea. Awww, isn’t that sweet.

I, on the other hand, was aghast.

I hadn’t known that poor kids in the United States didn’t have schools and teachers and blackboards and such. Things are so bad in that weird private-affluence-and-public-squalor nation that they’re allowing a bunch of unqualified college kids — no, they are not teachers in any sense of the word — into classrooms so that school boards don’t have to hire actual teachers paid for by the citizenry. I don’t mean Appalachia, I mean Washington, D.C.

Call me naïve but I was shocked. So was Colbert, who asked, “Why do we need Teach For America if we have No Child Left Behind?” but that was a very Canadian question, I thought, and it clearly mystified Kopp, who has devoted her life to fixing the symptoms of a problem without understanding its roots.

But I am being smug. Canada is heading in the same direction as the U.S. Relentless volunteerism is a symptom of an increasingly deprived school system. Yes, in Canada, any parent would be enraged if their child had a sixth-grade “teacher” whose qualifications were a 2.5 GPA college degree in Showing Up and a criminal record that Teach for America can live with. What defines a teacher in Teach for America? Someone who isn’t a teacher.

Canadian view

Of course it isn’t that bad here, and parents should lift their voices in songs of praise to powerful teachers’ unions that would never allow that sort of fake-teacher nonsense. But there’s a price for ratcheting up the demand for parent dollars. When schools take money from parents, it means schools in rich neighbourhoods get swim teams and terrible schools in poor areas get chalk. The money is no longer being spent on frills like recorder lessons and sports uniforms. It now pays for basics.

All this is part of the world view dreamed up by the neo-cons. I call it a world view because it never seems to have a human view of the world as it is actually lived in by humans. The neo-cons’ chief weapon, apart from fear, is the demonization of taxes.

Government is here to organize society and its big projects, like infrastructure, global co-operation, health and education. For that, we pay taxes. But the political right has whined for so long about vicious, punitive taxes that the frightened feds have downloaded responsibilities to fearful provinces that dumped them on traumatized municipalities. The system has broken down. Governments encourage charity because it suits their purposes.

No level of government wants to be unpopular in a world where only neo-cons are heard. All three levels boast that they haven’t raised taxes. But they have, by stealth. We now see little taxes and fees proliferating: on parking, garbage collection, car licensing and the use of public swimming pools. We see schools unable to provide the basics of education because provincial governments are too frightened to ask taxpayers to pay their due.

What taxes are for

Turning “tax” into a dirty word is transforming education into a charitable mission, an option rather than a necessity.

I tire of money being raised for charity for purposes that have nothing to do with charity. You can’t walk through a museum now without every hallway named after some guy who made his pile in real estate or mutual funds.

Schools are public institutions. They belong to us. I don’t want them to start looking like the Royal Ontario Museum with its pointy aluminum chunks named after a mutual fund guy (or “wealth creator” as his online bio phrases it) called Michael Lee-Chin. Does the poor man not know that this eyesore is going to get a famous and nasty nickname attached to it and he’ll have to leave town?

Obviously taxpayers don’t want credit for the ROM disaster — “Obedient Ontarians’ Crystal Mess” won’t fly — but it is our museum. We paid for it. I don’t want children going to the Pay Per View Portable at RCSS: Rogers Cable Secondary School.

It’s a slippery slope and we have begun a disastrous slide.

This week

John Lanchester has never failed me. His first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, published 11 years ago, began the food fiction craze (although his was about food as poison). His second novel, Mr. Phillips, about a day in the life of an office worker, encouraged a lot of hard and clever thinking about modern workplace hell. His new book, Family Romance: A Love Story, is a memoir about his parents. For after his mother’s death, he discovered that she had lived under a false name, and had lived a secret life.

Here’s what genius is: Lanchester’s mother lied about her age. It doesn’t sound like fertile material, does it?

But this is why good writing is all that matters, is the seam of gold in a rock face of bad books. The memoir is entrancing, easily as good as Vikram Seth’s memoir, Two Lives, of his aunt and uncle who, again unpromisingly, were somewhat odd. After you read it, you will feel âe¦ reverent.