Dear Editor,

Education and, in particular, the funding for it, seems to be the easiest way to get peoples’ passionate attention. Those interested usually complain about the lack of funding. Those complaining are often involved in the system. But every parent also watches out for their children’s fair share of the spoils.

My question is seldom appreciated. However, how much of what you learned in school did you actually use in your working life?

(I could have benefitted if I knew how to type. But in their wisdom, educators then had decreed only girls needed to know… Those in charge now have no better crystal ball to tell them what the future holds.)

I won’t embarrass my wife by admitting here at which grade I left school. Yet, I never felt less of a person than those people I was in charge of, even if they did sport more than one university certificate.

Once a person knows how to read, there is no reason why s/he could not pick up what’s important, either for work or life, and at their own pace and convenience.

Yet, reading is one subject not taught very well.

One of my favourite examples is how one person had “taken” three years of French at university and another had worked in Montreal as a dishwasher.

Guess which one I hired, all other things being more or less equal? That’s right. “Taking” French is not the same as learning to speak it.

Nothing is more useful to learn early, however, than how to balance the books. We need to do it all life long.

Yet our complainers in the system are constantly exposing their inability to handle exactly that: how to pick and do away with what’s not essential!

Once they figure it out, they should concentrate on what is really important, like reading, writing, how to make change ,and what happens when you do not live within your means.

If nothing else, they would not hurt themselves by voting the HST off the table “just to show them!”

They would also not be surprised to see one of the first consequences: the film industry showing their flexibility.

Ziggy Eckardt, Burnaby