A simple prescription for a sound education
Education and its funding seems the easiest way to get people's passionate attention. Those interested usually complain about the lack of funding. Those complaining are often involved in the system.
My question is seldom appreciated. However, here it is: how much of what you learned in school did you really use in your working life?
(I could have used typing. But in their wisdom, educators then had decreed only girls would need to know... Those in charge now have no better crystal ball to tell them what the future holds.)
I won't embarras my wife by admitting here at which grade I left school. Yet, I never felt less of a person than those people I was in charge of, even if they sported more than one university certificate. Once a person knows how to read there is no reason why s/he could not pick up what's important. Either for work or life, and at their own pace and convenience. Yet, reading is one subject not taught very well in school.
One of my favourite examples is how one person had "taken" three years of French at university and another had worked in Montreal as a dishwasher. Guess which one I hired, all other things being more or less equal? That's right. Taking French is not the same as learning to speak it.
Nothing is more useful to learn early, however, than how to balance the books. We all need to do it. Yet, our complainers in the system are constantly exposing their inability to handle exactly that—how to pick and do away with what's not essential!
Once they have figured it out they should concentrate on what is really important, like reading, writing, how to make change and what happens when you do not live within your means.
Ziggy Eckardt
Burnaby
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