Education prescription misses mark
Re Post-secondary education needs a shakeup, Opinion April 6 We have lost all sense of equilibrium if we buy into changes being recommended in post-secondary education by Ken Coates.
He insists that the essential purpose of our educational system is to funnel our young people to the right place in the marketplace so they might “get an economic foothold.” Ironic when one considers that Canada’s private sector spends some 40-per-cent less than other developed countries in employee training. It seems corporate tax cuts of almost 50 per cent over the last 30 years still do not allow for such inane responsibilities. Better to co-opt the publicly funded educational system, so that eventually no training costs need be incurred in the private sector.
Coates gives no examination of society’s broad needs in a complex and clearly volatile world. Surely we can regain a degree of balance and recognize that any education shakeup must not compel us to prostrate ourselves to the vagaries of market needs while forgetting the countless and complex factors it takes to develop educated citizens with a real quality of life in a stable society.
I am dismayed by the simplistic assumption that we would have a booming economy and a healthy Canada if we just prevented education from being “student driven” and changed it to mould students into that frenetic and futile race to feed the marketplace.
It is a fundamental disdain for the concept of democracy that Coates would effectively remove choice from individuals as to how they might become educated and live their lives. Better, he suggests, that the choice be dictated by the already ubiquitous influence of a marketplace that has no value system beyond the next quarterly shareholder statement, and instantaneously “unemploys” highly educated staff at the drop of a dollar.
We are, frankly, running scared and letting the market have us believe that the structure of economic systems is pristine and solid and beyond scrutiny. We must simply trust that all will be well if we just submit our youth and our post-secondary systems to the dictates of the unassailable strength and integrity of such systems. Can education have any other purpose? Is there anything to fear? Bob Sutton, Camlachie, Ont.