Fresh from a men’s retreat titled Man in the Arena where more than 300 men were challenged to get into the arenas of life, I didn’t need to look far to see a prime example of someone doing just that.
Next Saturday is local election day in B.C. when voters elect municipal councils and school boards. Into the traditionally low-key race for school trustees this year come two new political entities running on a common platform: returning school boards to a place where parents are not an afterthought in the education of their children.
In Abbotsford, Partners in Education wants to make sure the next Abbotsford school board has candidates who will “respect parents as equal partners in the education of their children.”
Meanwhile in eight school districts around B.C., ParentsVoice BC is working to elect trustees “who will put the needs of students and families first.”
The entry of organized parents into local elections is what “entering the arena” is all about. Many of us follow and fret over political concerns at the world, national, or provincial levels. But we live locally and it’s there we have the most influence and where our actions are most consequential.
It’s in cities and schools that we meet neighbours and parents. It’s there we encounter councillors and trustees, people who have influence over police, teachers, and librarians. It’s the very principle of subsidiarity in our midst – local individuals managing local matters where their sphere of influence is greatest.
ParentsVoice and Partners in Education are showing what it’s like to enter the arena as a political entity. Parents have watched for years as unions, bureaucrats, special interest groups, and individuals with goals other than children promote their agendas, shutting out, ignoring, and trampling over parents’ rights.
Naturally, the vested interests don’t take it well when parents step up. Local media have been covering ParentsVoice BC the way international media have reported on Italy’s new prime minister Giorgia Meloni, as dangerous extremists.
Media accounts have presented the parent-first candidates as having “conspiratorial views” with “past ties to the federal Conservatives.” They’ve tried to tie candidates to antisemitism and presented comments in The B.C. Catholic about the need for “more Catholics to get interested and engaged in local politics” as though they were an alarming manifesto.
They’ve tried to estimate the cost of candidates’ pledges, and they’ve listed any candidate ties they find concerning – a step forward in journalism that they don’t take when it comes to trustees with links to labour or special interest groups.
The reference to entering the arena in the men’s retreat comes from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. “It is not the critic who counts …,” he said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Roosevelt’s remarks are as apropos today as they were a century ago. Until we care about what’s going on around us, where we have responsibility and influence, school boards will remain in the hands of those who support the latest trends and echo the virtue signalling of activists whose agenda is not children, all while the media fawn over their every step forward and pillory anyone who objects as intolerant and cancellable.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
