Tony Wilson, a prominent Vancouver lawyer and a renowned expert in franchise law, wrote a stinging and long-overdue lament to the legal community about how our society values lawyers and undervalues teachers.  The column appeared in a broadly distributed publication of the Canadian Bar Association (BC Branch) last month. 

Mr. Wilson’s commentary has become a discussion piece in the legal and educational communities.  Good for him for putting his platform and position to good use.  Here is a flavour of the article:

[Why] is it that society pays me (and you) buckets more money to draft contracts, close business transactions or defend insurance companies than those who are responsible for educating the most important people in our lives?…

It’s all too easy to be seduced by our own sense of self-importance, just because we’re paid a lot of money, or we know how the levers of power work, or because others put a value on the legal profession that, dare I say, is sometimes out of proportion with other vocations and callings. In many ways, teachers are more valuable than lawyers, because unlike us, they don’t talk about changing the world. They do it day by day. Child by child.

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