Education on Education

Education on Education

It’s not as though I haven’t raised the issue before. I’ll keep harpin’ on this ‘til somebody pays attention. I’m talkin’ about post secondary education of course an’ who pays for it. For starters, let’s figure out who benefits from it.

The graduate students benefit of course, you say. Oh REALLY? Well let’s see now. Firstly, they get to have some letters of designation behind their names. Then they have the benefit of massive student loans that they have the opportunity to repay within a given amount of time. They also have the opportunity to put out a gazillion resumes to companies that are ambivalent about hirin’ them in the first place even at a wage that puts a crimp in their ability to repay the student loans AND buy the groceries too.

Oh wait a minute. That don’t sound like a whole lot o’ benefits to the graduates. They bust their butts for about four years to end up forty thousand dollars in debt an’ a whole lot o’ information in their brains that nobody’ll buy. How is that a good investment o’ time an’ effort? Goin’ to University is more or less like playin’ the lottery. In the first place you gotta decide what you want to become so you can take the appropriate courses. At age seventeen you’ve more or less decided that your parents got no brains anyways so they can’t help you (except for meals, a bed, an’ spending money etc.). An’ the school system has got no statistical basis upon which to steer their students neither. It’s not like in Europe where you’re guided into a trade or discipline by the time you’re fourteen or so. An’ the job fairs that go on for high school students are just a pack o’ lies designed by industry to create a pool o’ graduates to choose from in four years time, should they still have a requirement then. An’ governments, well they always win. First of all there’s the debt you gotta repay which means you somehow gotta get a job of some sort, which in turn means you gotta pay taxes. I remember a pretty renowned architect years ago whose first job after graduatin’ was as a shoe shine boy. Well he had to pay the bills, didn’t he?

There’s currently 1.2 million university students in Canada. What they all oughta do is quit their studies an’ line up for social assistance – well either that or all become drug dealers to get by on. That way, they’d be lookin’ after theirselves much in the way the government an’ industry does. Let them all hire foreign workers to do the jobs Canadians should be doin’ in the first place an’ pay the price as well. Do the math. That’s a pretty hefty bill to pay. Mind you, for Mr. Harper to get industry to pay for anythin’ other than his election campaign is outa the question. The government an’ industry could use an education on the priorities of education in this country. At least that’s how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin’.