I wrote a letter to the PG Citizen years ago, and it was to do with the teacher shortage in Prince George. Twelve years later and nothing has changed. My letter all those years ago, was more about who we were hiring and why. More to the point, in a changing world, the school districts were clinging to hiring qualifications that no longer met the requirements relevant to those changes.
Take trades, a once thriving industry with companies engaged in apprenticeships, young people training for four or five years, being paid while doing so and providing the numbers needed to maintain the trades required for manufacturing, resource extraction, and construction. To go into what has happened to trades in B.C. would require more than a letter but it isn't good.
The education bubble that is school, post secondary school, teach at school, is all about degrees, yet we all know how many degree-holding baristas are out there. The notion of education leading to success as the only route is wrong. It doesn't help that in secondary schools, pre-trades and trade programs are often being taught by degree-holders and not tradespersons.
If you want to teach nursing, carpentry, mechanics, or millwrighting, hire a nurse, carpenter, mechanic, or millwright. Having 'Mr. Smith', a guy with a degree in French literature teaching auto-shop because he has a spare block, is not how you prepare several generations of students to enter into the trades, an area that is in extreme jeopardy with very few trades-people available.
The BC Teachers Association finally agreed that trades with four to five years of apprenticing is now equal to a degree. I would argue superior to an undergraduate degree. Getting proficient people into a teacher qualification program to get them teaching technologies, software design, trades, entry programs for everything from technical jobs and apprenticeships, to administrative positions, and medical jobs in the dental and hospital vocations, is now necessary. Nursing used to be a two-year program at CNC, now, it is four years at UNBC, why? Money.
University is one route, but we also need skilled workers and they need to be taught by experts in their field. I would not try to teach chemistry, it was not a subject I took at university. Why then, the arrogance that a mathematics, English, or history teacher has the right to enter into teaching trades?
Academic hubris is ruining our future.
Michael Maslen
Prince George
