Monday, September 8, 2014

Bad Gas

Oh the deep, dark rabbit hole that is this provincial Liberal Government...

How did I miss this announcement in April? It appears Christy Clark wants to reconfigure the education system to prepare a generation of students to become employees for the Liquified Natural Gas industry she is currently building.

I must admit, sometimes the state of the world overwhelms the shit out of me. In the last couple years, for the first time in my adult life, I've had to bury my head in the sand to keep from being swallowed up by it all.

I've missed an awful lot going on in my own backyard.

Many of you probably know about this new education plan. But it's news to me.
Directly from Education Minister Fassbender regarding the future of this province: "Poets are still welcome in British Columbia's plan to re-tool the education system from Kindergarten to post-secondary institutions, but more welders would be nice."

Give the articles below a read when you can. The new education plan is clearly related to the Cisco drafted education case study previously released. But last April's education announcement spells out Clark's Machiavellian agenda quite clearly. And it's ugly.

There are obvious concerns about investing in the LNG industry (another fossil fuel) that will release "millions of tonnes of harmful greenhouse gas emissions into the sky" (CP). But catching children early to entice them to want to work in this industry and then changing the entire education system to train them to do so is deeply unsettling to me.

I am in support of presenting a wide variety of employment options for school age children, trades included. But I don't want my seven year old to be a cog in the government's LNG assembly line training program. I don't want him to receive a corporate driven education which trains him to work in one industry. I want him to change his mind a million times a school year about what he wants to be when he grows up. Because he's seven. 

In this new plan, particularly if Christy Clark announces a voucher system to privatize education in this province, children in public school will be trained to fit the corporate worker bee bill while private school students will receive the education that prepares them for a wider variety of choices in life.  All kids in this province should be educated to access those options.  Not just the families who can afford to pay for it.

How did I miss this? If you have too, please read this and circulate. Widely.

Yours truly,
Enid-Raye Adams
AKA, The Happiness Detective

1 comment:

Sébastian Hell said...

Yeah, they're trying to do this here in Quebec as well, forming kids to go mine 'up North', for foreign companies who will suck the grounds dry and leave nothing but dirt and pollution behind.

The kids in private schools will be trained to be the foremen and accountants, but after the 20 years have passed and the resources are expired, all classes of people employed there will end up with a big dirty mess and generalized unemployment.

It's 1899 all over again.