EDUCATION: IS IT ALL A POLITICAL SCAM?

Worse yet is education or the lack therof simply an excuse for governments who neither can nor want to maintain full employment? Is it a simple way to blame the victim when there is "unacceptable" unemployment, along the lines of "Oh if we had more better educated young people then their unemployment rates wouldn't be so high." Last Tuesday's Waterloo Region Record carrys this story titled "Sandals untroubled by weak test scores, graduation rate".

Education Minister Liz Sandals seems capable of ignoring Waterloo Region's bottom third graduation rates in Ontario as well as our elementary students being in the bottom half for English and Math across the province. Furthermore she appears to justify this by suggesting that the University of Waterloo's excellent reputation somehow negates the prior issues. Talk about comparing apples to oranges.

The reality is that far more young people are going farther in school than ever before. When I entered and departed university we would be lucky to have two Grade 13 classes with a half a dozen Grade 9 classes. Nowadays a degree in something is becoming the norm to the point that employers are all about credentialism in order to weed out applicants. An office job requiring brains, common sense and hard work does not require a Bachelor of Arts degree.