I hope that the people of the Montreal riding Papineau keep electing Justin Trudeau. No, seriously, I wish for a very long political career for that pampered scion of the Trudeau dynasty.
Tag Archives: Education
Teachers should be teachers and nothing else
I used to be a difficult student. Not because I’d disrupt the classroom, bully fellow students or get into all sorts of scrapes, but because I’d usually know more than my teachers, which made me inconvenient. At parents-teachers conferences, therefore, my parents would be told by my teachers, “There’s nothing we can teach your son, but please tell him to zip it and stop exposing our shortcomings in front of everybody all the time.”
Teachers want the easy life without having to work for their rich benefits – fault of the unions
In my lifetime, teachers have always been unionized, but when I was in school, they still cared about actually educating us. Today, it’s different. Today, it’s the unions that call the shots, and all they’re interested in is increasing the already rich benefits for their members. Little Timmy can remain uneducated and illiterate – no skin off their noses.
British PM calls a spade a spade
Many of us in the common sense elite have at times despaired of British prime minister David Cameron and his increasing move to the soft centre, such as his refusal to stand up to the corrupt, morally and otherwise, eurocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg. But his most recent words of condemnation for the riots that erupted in several British cities have redeemed him somewhat. In fact, when it comes to the social ills in British, or any Western, society, Mr. Cameron has managed to pinpoint all the root problems.
When public schools cease to be public
The United States is in a bad way. Several analysts and commentators have said that Americans shouldn’t kid themselves: their country is in the throes of a depression. Obviously, there will have to be spending cuts but also tax increases. Without these two measures, America, as we know it, won’t survive.
Canada Votes: Ignatieff’s education policy is only cosmetic
Nothing matters in today’s world more than education. Education is knowledge, and knowledge is today’s weapon of choice to tackle every challenge or problem we encounter.
Ignatieff is right, education is important, so don’t knock him
If government were to be scaled down to its bare bones today, there are two areas that must not only remain intact but should actually be boosted: education and health care. Going to school and ensuring one’s health are things that, sadly, don’t come cheap. In the United States, for example, people have literally ended up on the street after being devastated by medical bills. In Canada, we can’t let this happen.
Education – so obvious people forget about it
Do you consider yourself educated? Literate? If so, then you’re one in a dwindling number of Canadians, as our standards are slipping, and they’re slipping fast. The percentage of functionally illiterate Canadians – they can read words but can’t understand the context in which they appear – is hovering around 50 percent. As a result, the number of workplace injuries and even deaths is going up, because people can’t understand simple instructions anymore.
Time for Ignatieff to make his mark
There used to be a time when an alternation of Conservative and Liberal governments was the norm in Canada. Actually, they were all, or almost all, small-l liberal governments, as the then-Progressive Conservative Party was really just another “Liberal” party by a different name. Even today’s Conservative Party has evolved into a “Liberal Lite” party, whose biggest “crime” is that it has poached only the worst traits of “liberals” – wastefulness and mismanagement of taxpayers’ money – rather than focusing on the positives.
Parents, lock away your kids – the Austrians are going nuts!
Remember how Canadians were incensed by the Liberals’ proposition to implement a national daycare program, which would have saddled taxpayers with even steeper bills than what they’re already paying and even larger deficits in the future? If you thought that was a silly idea – that is, to take such critical decisions out of the hands of parents who normally know better than government – you may have to brace yourself and swallow your heart medication in case you have a faint heart, because what you’re about to read will shock you so much that it could send you into cardiac arrest.
Situation in the U.S. is grim
Obama is no longer a symbol of hope - quite the opposite, in fact
Americans elected Barack Obama as president, because he represented hope, and hope was really all they had to go on at a time that saw the U.S. economy get flushed down the tubes, with people losing their homes and jobs all over the country.
When the economy south of the border first showed signs of trouble and politicians started talking about “stimulating” measures, I said, and wrote, at the time: Please, let’s not go there. The market is like an organism that has come down with a bad flu, but let it recover and find its own balance. This will fix the problem much faster and sooner than when government gets involved.
What would you pay for an education?
Britain has certainly seen better days. Now that the Lib-Con budget is out, and Britons are getting ready to tighten their belts, there’ll be a lot of major cuts to services and programmes up and down the country.
Apart from cuts to housing and child benefits, universities too will have to learn to do with a lot less. In fact, preparations are under way to close down entire departments. With the cap on tuition fees removed, universities will increase fees as high as they can or must.
Science degrees could run as high as £14,000, while becoming a doctor could set you back by £20,000 a year. Who, particularly in Britain, can afford such fees?
Britain is fast becoming a country of “neets”. Their numbers are growing exponentially, creating a virtual army of useless existences with no hope or future, bringing with it a torrent of social problems, as neets will spend their days doing drugs and committing crimes. This will come at a steep social and health-care cost to the country, which will find it difficult to compete in the Knowledge Economy of the 21st century.
That Britain is in dire need of both cutbacks and tax increases is beyond the shadow of a doubt. But while the Lib-Con government has decided to cut a lot of services and programmes that actually help and support people on a daily basis, other areas, such as health care, have been left untouched.
When given a choice between public/universal health care and public/universal post-secondary education, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the latter is more important. That doesn’t mean that health care should be privatized – oh no, not at all. But surely some areas of waste could have been identified to help with the deficit reduction.
The Times cites the example of Canada and its deficit-cutting programme in the 1990s, which was “more about what to preserve than what to cut.” Indeed, the Lib-Con government focused on what to cut, rather than on what to preserve or even improve.
Speaking of Canada, a new federal party, United Party of Canada, is the first party to support full coverage of education up to the first (undergraduate) degree, as a high-school diploma alone is no longer sufficient to make a living. Too bad that none of the parties in Britain has realized yet that the world today and tomorrow is shaped by the Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Society.
With jobless numbers still growing, investing in education would have been a sound and smart decision, as it would have opened the door to skills and training for a lot of people whose very lives depend on obtaining a good and marketable education.