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Ad - Friday, January 18, 1985 - North Shore News

Strictly personal

oH Sot

by Bob Hunter

No class act

L

IKE MANY OF THE PARENTS who are
NOT happy with the current state of the
public school system in British Columbia, |

happen to have a teenager going through the

machine right now.

As each semester dawns, it
seems to get harder and
harder to actually get results
back from the computers in
Victoria in time to register
for the next term.

Ground rules are liable to
change from year to year.

Tuition increases steadily,
but what improvement in ser-
vice do I see? ;

The process of enrollment
is anarchistic, chaotic and
wasteful.

Some teachers, at least at
the college level, have an
almost awesome casualness
about what, exactly, they’re

_ going to teach this time. If
there aren’t enough students
for a certain class, the teacher.
might shift his/her attention
to something else, while not
bothering to change the name
of the lecture. .

There is an air of
haphazardness about a
‘higher education’’
nowadays’ that suggests a
locomotive having jumped its
tracks and blundered into an’
open field:

‘Maybe it’s just that, not
very long ago, Canadians
took it for granted if you
could afford to go on to col-
lege or university, you were
guaranteed two things. First,
a job. Second, you could be
sure that you were acquiring
an education, for all intents

WV mall”
changes
roofline

A PROPOSAL to upgrade
Park Royal North shopping
centre got West. Vancouver
District council’s go ahead
Monday.

The shopping centre
facelift will essentially in-
vulve expansion of the pen-
thouse on the upper parking
deck of the mall.

Once completed, the pen-
thouse renovation will pro-
vide new escalator access to
the roof parking area.

Also, the plan calls for
three pyramid-style skylights
for the roof deck.

First '85 Meeting:
MONARCHIST
LEAGUE of
CANADA
Fri., Jan, 25, 7:30 p.m.
CHRIST CHURCH
CATHEDRAL HALL

‘ Burrard at Georgia
Guest speaker:
Cdr. Charles Brooks
C.D., RCN (Ret.
Subject: ‘On Her
Majesty’s Service” plus
film, Lord Mountbatten
narrating.
Refreshments
Collection
Interested? Do come!

and purposes, as good as ab-
solutely any education
available on the face of the
Earth.

That might not have been
the case, but it seemed that
way.

Both propositions are shot
now. The first is obvious, the
second probably less so. But 1
just simply wonder about the

dealers, in-
dustrialists, bankers and
businessmen behind the
Socreds who are so ticked off
with the job teachers have
been doing.

Of course there are good
teachers and bad. The pro-
blem is that hardly any
mechanism exists for weeding
out the bad. A closed shop is
a closed shop.

The one good thing that
has happened in education in
B.C., by the way, is that the
boots have come down on
basket weaving as a credit
course. The renewed em-

boiled car

“The good thing that has happened
in education in B.C. is that the boots
have come down on basket weaving

as a credit course.’

>:

quality of the education any
of my kids.are getting.

And while J have yet to see
how the public school system
has been improved since Bill
Vander Zalm started tinker-
ing an eternity ago (except in
one regard, which I'll get to),
it is perfectly clear to me that
teachers’ themselves are as
much to blame as the hard-

phasis on basics, so far as it
goes, is good news. If
somebody wants to. study
holistic pizza-making, let
them do so at nights.

_ The liberal curriculum had
reached the point where it
was a joke in any society ex-
cept maybe Rome during the
fall, if you happened to have
the right connections.

“f
}

In a world where Canadian
educational and industrial
superiority is going the way
of the Dodo bird, anybody
taking up space in a
classroom better have their
nose to the grindstone. This
country is in danger of
becoming a backwater in
terms of technological and
scientific skills.

It’s like the crisis in our
forests. For years — nay,
decades! — there have been
mutterings that we were wip-
ing the forest out. Now, sud-
denly, the fog clears and we
see that not only have we in
fact devastated an absolutely
incredible resource, but what
we have left faces relentless
competition from the Third
World and high-tech coun-
tries alike,

It has become one of those
famous ‘‘structural’’
problems.

In education, we face a
similar crisis. I think most
Canadians tend to
underestimate the nature of
the jungle out there in the
world of international trade.

. The competition is not just

savage, much of it is
desperate.

I sympathize with the lot of
a teacher under restraint. But
teachers brought a lot of it on
themselves in recent years by
adopting the insular attitude
of civil servants.

I think the government nus
been clumsy in the way it has
gone about trying to change

the system but then teachers -

have let their trade union
men«.‘uy get in the way of
their judgment, too. I
hope both sides wil! sit down
soon (like the Russians and
Americans did) and start to
get their act together.

B®
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