6 — Sunday, April 19, 1992 - North Shore News NEWS VIEWPOINT Political priorities cut to North Vancouver Schoo} District 44’s 1992-93 budget should ye asking North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA David Schreck about the state of education on the North Shore. The cuts announced on Tuesday by the District 44 board include a host of school programs and 139 teacher and other staff positions in the district. The elimination of all of the above and the rest of the $10 million will largely come at the expense of educaZice quality in the district. And the people who ultimately suffer from ercded education quality are not the teachers, the board administrators, the trustees or the parents; they are, instead, the people who ultimately suffer when the Pave upset with the $10 million education system in any school district falls victim to grasping teacher unions, in- efficient administrators, ineffective school trustees: the students. So we come back to David Schreck and his priorities, which he has frequently outlined when responding to other area issues. Schreck was Jess than enthusiastic, for example, on the issue of proceeding with the $20 million highway overpass at Westview Drive, because he said he had other priorities, and one of those was education. Now that the education system in his riding is taking a severe pounding, parents should be finding out what Mr. Schreck’s real priorities are. NEWS QUOTES OF THE WEEK “The one I enjoy the most is when I go into the bank with a cheque with the name Purdy's written on it, and the bank staff will say: ‘Do you have any free samples?’ Pl reply: ‘If you give me a sample of yours, I'll give you s sample of mine.’ ’’ Director of production opera- tions for Purdy’s Chocolates Tom Cinnamon, on requests for free samples. “TF don’t treat his (Kieran’s) col- umn as a piece of news. It's a piece of mischief.”’ West Vancouver-Garibaldi MLA David Mitchell, on a Van- couver Province newspaper col- umn by Brian Kieran that sug- gested Mitchell was after Liberal leader Gordon Wilson's job. “I keep saying to my kids, ‘My God, aren’t we lucky? We could be living in Lebanon.’ Instead, here we are in the middle of a huge forested area. We can con- struct our own laws up here. We live by doing what we think is Display Advertising 980-0511 Distribution right — there’s not many places like that left in the world.” Rivers Lodge owner George Ardley, on living half the year at Rivers Inlet on the B.C. coast. “It’s lawomover time.” Ken Kelsey, secretary-treasurer of the Pacific Shooters Associa- ticn, on other sources of urban noise, after a Vancouver man complained about noises from shooting in the Seymour Demonstration Forest. 986-1337 Pubiisher Peter Speck Managing Editor . . . Timothy Renshaw Associate Editor Noel Wright Advertising Director . . Linda Stewart Comptroiter Doug Foot North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and qualified under Schedule 111, Paragraph tll of the Excise Tax Act, is published each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday by North Shore Free Press Lid. and OE distributed ta every door on the North Shore. Second Class Mail Registration Number 3885. Subscriptions North and West Vancouver, $25 per year. Mailing rates avaitable on request. Submissions are welcome but we cannot accept fesponsibility for unsolicited material including manuscripts and pictures which should be accompanied by a stamped, addressed envelope. Newsroom V7M 2H4 Rea! Estate Advertising 995-6982 Classified Advertising 986-6222 Fax TUE ONCE OF OMT AMD WEET WANCOUVER north shore: North Shore 986-1337 ; 985-3227 985-2131 MEMBER Subscriptions 985-2131 Administration SUNDAY + WEONESDAY - FRIDAY 41139 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, B.C. SDA DIVISION 61,582 (average circulation, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday) Entire contents © 1992 North Shore Free Press Ltd. Ali rights reserved. Throwing bucks at education won't better it CANADA’S EDUCATION system has many folks deeply worried these days — mostly over alleged underfunding of schools by myopic governments. Underfunding is the very last thing they should be worrying about. Canada already spends more than amost any other industri- alized country on education, yet has more illiterates than any of them and one of the worst dropout rates — in B.C. some 30% by Grade 12. Today, one Canadian in five produced by our schools can’t read or write well enough to func- tion in any but the lowest skilled jobs. As a result, we now lag alarm- ingly behind countries in the global marketplace with much better educated workers. By and large, as a tool for training young Canadians to cope with the 1990s onward, our public schools score a dismal F-minus grade. The bright kids who survive and suc- ceed do so despite the system, not because of it. This is less the teachers’ fault than that of THEIR teachers — the dreaming education theorists divorced from the real world. The real, ego-bruising world, ruled by competition, is one of winners and losers, where the fit survive and the least fit suffer. Today’s education gurus bend backwurd to shield school students from any direct contact with this nasty truth. The goal of education is to impart ‘‘self-esteem.”’ Ifa kid ‘‘feels good about himself,"’ his education is a success — regardless of what he learns or doesn’t. Telling him he’s failed at some- thing (even only temporarily) is a no-no; it hurts self-esteem. Hence the modern educator’s horror of standardized tests. Canada is almost alone among advanced na- tions in having no mandatory na- tional or even provincial exams. B.C.’s ‘*Year 2000”" program ac- tually removes potentially ego- damaging grades. Bright kids, especially those with caring parents, will figure out the true-life score for themselves, of course, and eventually enter the real world ready to meet its much tougher challenges. But for others, the harsh blows it suddenly deals to their long cosseted self-esteem can have sorry consequences — negative at- titudes to hard work and com- petitive pressure, low-paid dead- end jobs, resentment of success by others, consolation in drugs or alcohol, and — in extreme cases — efforts to gain ‘‘self-esteem”’ by crime. Genuine self-esteem comes rae PAUL MCELLIGOTT... how to. run a railroad. oel HITHER AND YON from knowing how to pay the . price of losing as well as enjoying the fruits of winning, because real life is a mix of both. That’s the most important lesson of al! young Johnny has to learn. All the extra school taxes in the world won't teach it to him. eee POSTSCRIPTS: A unique Silver Anniversary Thursday, April 23, with the opening of West Van High’s spring musical, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, the school’s 25th annual producticn. Invited as guests are the casts and crews of all previous 24 shows — especially the first, H.M.S. Pinafore in 1968 — who should arrange with Peter Vanderhorst or Dave Barker at 922-3931. Curtain at 7:30 p.m. and this op2ning is a- “2 for 1” tickets evening for“: everyone ... Wanna know how to_. run a railroad? BC Rail prez Paul McEiligott will tell you how at the. Thursday, April 23 North Van . Chamber of Commerce lunch, © 11:45 a.m. in the North Shore Winter Club — reserve at 987- 4488 by Tuesday... And happy _ . birthday today, April 19, to West" Van Kiwanians Alex Brokenshire, Gerry McDowel! and Frank - Wilson. WRIGHT OR WRONG — La- ment of the Twenty Somethings: Thrift is a great thing. Too bad _ our parents didn’t practise more” of it. ALEX BRCOKENSHIRE... Kiwanis birthday boy.