Education Quote by Estelle Morris

Morris lobs a neat double question that does what good political rhetoric always tries to do: make the status quo feel newly indefensible. By starting with “If bringing up the next generation is important,” she borrows a premise almost everyone claims to believe, then flips it into an audit. If we truly value children, the people doing the most intimate, foundational work of childrearing should look, on paper, like a prized national workforce: credentialed, well-compensated, and promoted with intention.

The subtext is a critique of care as an invisible economy, and of how quickly societies sentimentalize parenting while refusing to professionalize it. “Best qualified” and “best paid” aren’t neutral phrases; they’re the language of labor markets, prestige, and power. Morris is deliberately dragging parenting out of the private sphere, where it’s treated as instinct, duty, or “women’s work,” and into the public sphere where value is measured by training budgets and pay scales.

Her comparison to education and health services is strategic. Those fields already enjoy the moral halo of “serving others,” yet even they are constantly fighting for funding and status. By aligning parenting with those sectors, Morris argues that raising children isn’t a quaint background activity; it’s a public good with downstream effects on everything from inequality to mental health.

Contextually, it reads like a late-20th/early-21st century Labour-era preoccupation: childcare, early-years policy, social mobility. The intent isn’t just to praise parents. It’s to shame institutions into admitting they’ve outsourced nation-building to undervalued labor, then acted surprised when outcomes vary by class and luck.