Educational discourse

The system of education that we currently reside in is a farce. Students are sent through the system, obstentably to learn the skills necessary to survive in the working world. And yet we don’t, not really. We get taught how to prepare for university, that golden hall in which we shall all meet our professional fate and become the automatons we were destined to be. The problem is that its not working, people still drop out of our “free” education system and admission rates to university and college is going down, not up. The reason? Because there’s no flexibility in our system. Our system of education is completely designed so that everyone gets the same education, so that there can be no complaints of differential treatment between different people. But its become a hindrance, not a benefit. We need to accept that there really is a difference in the skills and interests of our students, and thus the high schools need to start offering more courses that exist outside the typical realm of academia. In a perfect world, we could all become lawyers or doctors or whatever we thought we would be when we were little kids, but in reality there needs to be people who build houses or fix cars or pick up the garbage or any other thing like that which precious few people in the world ever wish to be. There needs to be more incentive for people to want to enter the trades and to inform our young people that university is not the only way to a future of wealth.
The best way to start this is right in the schools. Courses need to be added to the technical and artistic parts of the system, and rather than being expelled to the fringe as “elective” courses, it should be required that people take at least one course from both tech education and home economics. Also important is the financial incentive; many people who do want to take a trade and learn that trade are unable to because there is no way to finance their training. Rather than obsessing over getting scholarships to university bound academic students, schools and governments should actively aid young people who do wish to be carpenters or mechanics or any other labour intensive career.
This isn’t to say that I want to abandon financing for university students. Quite the contrary, I believe that governments should ensure that anyone who wishes to go to a post secondary institute be given the funding needed, as people with university degrees earn more money and thus pay more taxes, and are also less likely to be on government welfare due to their specialized skills. Once again, too many people are being left behind due to an inability to pay for their future, and thus people who otherwise have the necessary skills are stuck in life doing something that is a waste of their potential.
There have been estimates made that it would cost less to finance every single student going to university than it would to continue funding our engagement in Afghanistan. It seems like a small price to pay for future success and material wealth in Canada.