Posts Tagged ‘education’

Why are politicians, media and businesspeople hyping the credit and financial crisis as if it were something they didn’t see coming? It has been in the making for decades, made worse since Canada signed away its economic sovereignty to the unelected World Trade Organization and NAFTA. For these reasons, Canada should be holding its own “Boston Tea Party” that the citizens of the United States are currently planning on implementing to protest massive government intervention in every facet of their economy.

This pipe dream of stabilizing Canada’s economy is not solved by shipping our manufacturing base, already less than a quarter of our economic activity, to countries where they utilize slave labour and manipulate their currency. Taxation is not the solution when the money really comes from our childrens’ futures in the form of tremendous debt. Indeed, this has been the staple of government policy since the early start of the 20th century; that is, Keynesian economics and government intervention.

No one should be opposed to fair trade, but it’s time to recognize “free trade” is fiction because every trading relationship is managed in some way. This is true because Canada and the United States have become the world’s dumping ground for cheap, slave-labor goods produced in places where there are low or no labor standards or social safety nets like the Western world has.
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Our major trading partners manage their economies to benefit their citizens, so why can’t we? Get our jobs back, put money in our wallets, let us spend it as we see fit and watch the economy grow again. Taxing does nothing but impede spending and discourages people from making proper investments and encourages outrageous financial scandals. The World Trade Organization was never voted on or discussed with the general working man or woman on “main street,” so who’s benefitting from job losses and the so called “knowledge based economy” which is really just a euphemism for unstable industries based solely on services which is nothing more than redistributing wealth rather than creating it.

You can’t spend your way out of a recession. You have to save and produce your way out of it.

What about this “Tea Party?”

The Boston Tea Party was a direct action protest by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and has often been referenced in other political protests.

They’re calling themselves the “Tea Party Tax Protesters” and already dozens of them have held events across the USA. The protesters say they’re fed up with excessive state and federal tax increases and they’re rallying to express their outrage and demand change (KKTV, 2009).

More than $2 trillion has been spent on bailouts and stimulus packages in the last year. In the $800 billion spending package, members of Congress had a few hours to read 1,000 pages of bill text. No one in Congress noticed that it authorized bonuses to AIG executives, which the House later voted to tax at 90 percent. Congress imposed a penalty on payments that it authorized! That should have been a sure sign that Congress was trying to spend too much money too quickly (Kansas City, 2009).

Written by EconoChristian.com with outside sources.

A personal account of the decline of manufacturing in the Western world is poignantly displayed in the following post. It seems that with the financial manipulation of countries like China, combined with their immense labor market, along with non-existent labor laws and environmental controls, will allow companies to displace middle class Americans and Canadians out of the manufacturing sector. The question is, what will happen when almost nothing is manufactured in America anymore?

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Economists and gullible financial analysts, not to mention mentally disabled laymen touting the end of manufacturing as good thing, miss some central points concerning losing manufacturing:

The key fact is that manufacturing is the back bone of an economy because this sector is the one which actually produces tangible items. Some might say that intangible items like financial services, computer programs, and the like are products, but the reality of the situation is that these activities can be done almost anywhere in the world by anyone. What will stop these industries from fleeing just as manufacturing did? Indeed, they would flee even faster due to their nebulous nature. We have seen are only in the infant stages of the off shoring phemonenon of industries such as financial services and computer programming by large multi national companies.

Some facts and figures:

The US global merchandise trade and current account deficits hit annual rates of $900 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, which amounted to 7 percent of US GDP, twice the previous record of the mid-1980s (as a result of which the dollar declined by 50 percent over the three-year period 1985–87). The deficits could reach annual rates of $1 trillion within the next year or so.

China’s role in the global imbalances is even greater than these numbers might suggest. A substantial increase in the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is essential to reduce the imbalances, but China has blocked any significant renminbi rise by intervening massively in the foreign exchange markets, buying $15 billion to $20 billion per month for several years to keep market pressures from pushing its currency up. China apparently sees its currency undervaluation policy as an off-budget export and job subsidy that, at least to date, has avoided effective international sanction (Peterson Institute, 2006)

Figure 2. Rising imports fuel trade deficit with China : Canada-China trade, customs basis

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Are the Chinese taking over the world?

I grew up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. I was the son of a steelworker. As a small boy, I watched in disbelief as Americans bought foreign products. Now that all the decent working class jobs have fled the country, people are beginning to wonder why they’re all so poor. As I hear more and more people complaining that they can’t make ends meet, I gloat in their suffering. They know the pain that both my father and myself felt when our jobs went overseas because Americans bought foreign products.

All this bunk about high pay, benefits, and the like is what caused the jobs to leave is complete rubbish. Despite the pay, benefits, and the like, companies of the past still turned a profit. They simply couldn’t compete with the cheap foreign labor (caused by currency manipulation and little or non-existent labor/environmental laws) and America’s myopic lust for cheap foreign goods. Since all the jobs are now gone and all that we’re left with is low paying service jobs, those products are so cheap are they? Why must companies have such huge profit margins? Shirts that cost eight cents to manufacture are sold here for twenty plus dollars. A pair of sneakers that cost a dollar to manufacture are sold for as much as 100 – 200 dollars all so some CEO and a few stock holders can have several million dollar mansions, private jets, and the like…
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“Education is the key,” many cry. The only education that this country ever needed was the one I got from my steel-working father, “buy American!” Not everybody is capable of getting an education. What we need more than education are working class jobs that afford the average person the ability to buy a house and support a family. Until this happens, we’re destined to have a lot of people on the dole.

I’m a prime example of how this country failed. I used to have a very good working class job. For over ten years, I worked this job. I could afford a house, support a child, and a wife. After losing everything to a foreign market, I fell into a very bad depression. It’s now lasted some fourteen years, and for the past six, I’ve been on Social Security Disability.

At one point, I cost my state 10,000 – 12,000 dollars a month for nearly three years as I sat in a state run mental institution. Why should I work for five to seven dollars an hour when I can sit at home and collect 400 tax-free dollars each week? I’ve tried college, but the depression is too great; moreover, if I do finish college, I’ll be a Registered Nurse. Do you really want somebody who’s embittered at the society that bought him out of a job taking care of our nation’s sick? Education…

I can’t wait to see this country completely fail!

Signed,
The Acerbate American

Why is this happening?

5. To bring about the end to all industrialization and the production of nuclear generated electric power in what they call “the post-industrial zero-growth society”. Excepted are the computer- and service industries. US industries that remain will be exported to countries such as Mexico where abundant slave labor is available. As we saw in 1993, this has become a fact through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. Unemployables in the US, in the wake of industrial destruction, will either become opium-heroin and/or cocaine addicts, or become statistics in the elimination of the “excess population” process we know of today as Global 2000 (Educate yourself, 2009)

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Written by EconoChristian.com with help from various sources.

The Korean private educational sector for the English language is definitely as tumultuous as the article below states it is. Having taught for a year over in South Korea, this author’s experience was very similar to the author’s experience below. It is hoped that more teachers will decide to thoroughly research the schools they decide to teach at beforehand, or decide to teach at a reputable school recommended by previous teachers.

Thu, January 05 2006 By Todd Vercoe, The Korea Times

There is quite possibly no more frightening a word to the foreign community in Korea than hagwon. This Korean word conjures images of overworked staff, contract violations, difficult working conditions, broken promises and, dare I say it? Outright lies.

The private language school boom in Korea began in the early 1990′s and continues today with a hagwon on nearly every corner. Certainly no one can find fault with parental desires of seeing their children educated to the best of their abilities and private institutes seem to address a need in an overburdened educational system. However, business owners with suspect educational credentials seem content to hire foreign staff with equally suspect educational credentials to pretend to teach (more like entertain) children in some kind of a babysitting service designed more to generate fast profit rather than quality education. There are, of course, exceptions. Many private institutes do genuinely atempt to give quality educational guidance to their students. Others, and often times it seems the majority, are more determined to squeeze the fast buck out of their “customers.”

That Korean parents settle for poor educational standards is sad, but not really the concern of this writer. The future of Korea a decade or two from now is much more troubling when the effects ofthe foreign community are felt in the business that Korea does with the world.

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The average foreign hagwon teacher is brought here to provide a pretty (often European) face to the teaching of English. That they have no particular qualification to teach, other than a university education, is no matter. And what are foreign teachers greeted with here in Korea? Contracts that are not honoured, salary obligations not met, health insurance not paid, requests to teach illegally, threats of punishments that breach immigration lawand on the dark side, sexual and physical assaults.

This of course is not only a Korean phenomenon. There are disreputable business people all over the world.One only needs to pause for a second to consider the nature of the used car salesmen in North America to find a comparable example to hagwon owners. There is, however, a major difference in that used car salesmen tend not to deal with a foreign community on a large scale.

Considering that the foreign teaching community is, to some extent, the elite of North America and other nations in that often the only requirement in getting a teaching job in Korea is a university degree. This means that all (legal) foreign teachers place in the top twenty-five percent of education. Only 23 percent of the people in Canada had a Bachelors degree or higher in 1998, 24.4 percent in the United States (2000 census). What then will happen to these educated elite, often in Korea only for a year to pay off student loans or to try to save money for further study, return to their home nation with details of maltreatment from their Korean bosses? What lessons will thesepeople take through their lives about Korean business when contracts are routinely ignored

How much will these future leaders of other nations want to do business with a country that can’t properly police a widespread industry? The website Dave’s ESL cafe is widely regarded as the professional educators resource in teaching English around the world. One simply has to read the forums to see the litany of abuse that foreign English teaching staff suffers at the hands of hagwon owners. EFL-law.com a resource site for teachers of English across the world reports reports that it receives far more complaints about Korea than any country in the world. In fact with the American and Canadian embassies regularly posting warnings against teaching in Korea, the number of foreign teachers in Korea has dropped from 13,000 in 1997 to 6000 in 2005. It is quite telling that on thejob posting section of Dave’s ESL cafe there are postings ESL cafe there are postings for 735 jobs in Korea and 825 for the rest of the world. Apparently, the word has gotten out against teaching in theLand of Morning Calm.

Recent moves at some universities in Korea have moved them into the realm of hagwons. Attempts to deny staff due compensation, violations of Korean labour and immigration laws, unfair dismissal and other unfair employment practices have also taught their foreign staff about the dangers of doing business with Korea. Even in the government run programs of EPIK and GEPIK one can hear reports of unfair business practices being foisted upon the unsuspecting foreign worker.

Student discipline including beatings still continue in South Korea

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When the hagwon boom in Korea is over and the young, educated, foreign staff have gleefully returned to their home nations to rise in business, academe and politics what will these people have to say about their experiences in Korea and about doing business with Korean firms? When the time comes a decade or two from now in a North American boardroom and someone suggests offshore manufacturing in Korea or another nation, it is difficult to find fault with the person who lived in Korea stating: “Don’t do business with Koreans, they don’t honour their contracts.” Only through strong desire of the government and the people of Korea can the long-term damage of this unforeseen problem be abated..

Related links:

• Don’t teach English in South Korea
• Don’t teach in Korea

Of course, always do your own homework!

The internet is rife with secularism and godlessness. This is part of the reason why EconoChristian.com was founded and frequented by many Christians, agnostics, and Atheists alike.

Pope warns of ‘a desert of godlessness’ in Good Friday address

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:13 AM on 11th April 2009

Pope Benedict XVI last night attacked the rise of aggressive secularism in Western societies, warning them that they risked drifting into a ‘desert of godlessness’.

He used his Good Friday meditations to compare deliberate attempts to remove religion from public life to the mockery of Jesus Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified.

‘Religious sentiments’ were increasingly ranked among the ‘unwelcome leftovers of antiquity’ and ‘held up to scorn and ridicule’, he added.

‘We are shocked to see to what levels of brutality human beings can sink,’ said the Pope at an evening ceremony at the Coliseum in Rome.

‘Jesus is humiliated in new ways even today when things that are most holy and profound in the faith are being trivialised, the sense of the sacred is allowed to erode.

‘Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard. Jesus continues to be ridiculed.’

The German-born Pope, who turns 82 later this month, prayed Christians would respond by growing in faith.

‘May we never question or mock serious things in life like a cynic,’ he added. He also condemned the oppression of women, saying there were ‘many societies in the world where women fail to receive a fair deal.’

‘Christ must be weeping for them,’ he said.

Computer viruses and anti-virus software are inextricably linked and are most likely a racketeering scam brought about by the software and information technology industries, according to overwhelming evidence. Indeed, one only has to question why there are so many viruses for the Windows operating system and so few for the Macintosh and Linux platforms.

It is common knowledge that ”Bill Gates wrote the first code ”virus” to break a program, in high school (yes it was probably an accident, but he learned from it). Thus, ”Computer Viruses” were born. He was also known as the ”Mother Of All Hackers (MOAH)” from when he exploited (hacked, stole, same thing) the ”Basic” OS running on Harvard’s Mainframe computer and ported it to the ”Altair 8800” that started him on his way to his billions of dollars.
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It is also now widely known that he duped his friend out of a hacked copy of QDOS (aptly named ”Quick n Dirty Operating System”) then renamed it various other names according to who it was being sold to. IBM PC-DOS, COMPAC-DOS, MS-DOS, etc. etc. Gates was fond of hiring young high school and college kids as code slaves for further writing of the OS. Bored, underpaid, overworked, mischievous, they began putting ”bugs” in the code. Hence we still have Microsoft computer ”bugs” today. Were they put there on purpose with Bill’s knowledge? Probably, as was the case with COMPAQ-DOS. Bill loved it when his company got paid more money the next year to write a fix. Thus, building in code to break, was born, and why much of the IT industry is based on perpetual work that the companies create for themselves, more specifically anti-virus companies.

Much like many shipyard workers in the past(and their bosses), were known to set logs afloat in the river channels of the old days; they called them ”Silent Messengers”! But they only used this practice when business was slow and – or they were about to lose their jobs. Does this justify it? No! You ever heard of the disgruntled ”Postal Employee” going postal? The same thing happens in every business. Many of the ”bugs” are just another form of ”Silent Messengers” of today; anything to make a buck, right?
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Indeed, according to a report from the New York times newspaper, a Russian company was recently (October, 2008) caught creating perpetual work for itself by creating the viruses that it sells anti-virus programs to its clients to eradicate. A hacker revealed that a Russian software company is behind a security scam to take money from spam and botnets. The hacker revealed via files posted online that Bakasoftware makes millions per year through an elaborate scheme that relies on email spam and indirectly controlling thousands of unprotected PCs. This could be the reason why so many people are switching to Linux and Unix-based operating systems including Macintosh computers; most viruses are targeted at Windows operating systems.

Is this type of perpetual work rampant throughout the IT industry, as well as other totally unrelated industries? For starters, the IT industry was originally touted as the solution to make the working life of millions of Westerners easier by freeing them from tedious and repetitive work such as copy editing, waste of paper, and so on. Interestingly, e-mail and PDF files were touted as methods for saving paper, but the reality of the situation is that paper consumption has actually increased at least 40 per cent since the advent of e-mail and electronic documents because most people prefer using hard physical copies instead of staring at a computer screen (Telegraph, 2001). While it is not being suggested that the paper industry colluded with the IT industry to increase paper usage, what is being suggested is that businesses and people in general are too quick to accept new ideas without first thinking of the policy implications.

The policy implications of the information technology industry are astounding because it is an industry based around change and constant updates as new technology is released. The IT industry is reminiscent of and old-school, organized crime protection racket. Traditionally, the word racket to describe a business is based on the example of the “protection racket” and indicates that the speaker believes that the business is making money by selling a solution to a problem that it created (or that it intentionally allows to continue to exist), specifically so that continuous purchases of the solution are always needed.
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Software is the epitome of this paradigm because users are practically held hostage and forced to purchase updates or new software because the tools (often physical, not ethereal in nature) they originially used were entirely replaced by computer code. So, until the time comes when the workers throw their sabo (shoes) into the looms (business machines) as the Luddites did during the beginning of the industrial revolution, it looks like companies to the likes of Symantec and other software companies be selling a lot of anti-virus programs.

Massive Profits Fueling Rogue Antivirus Market

In the cyber underworld, more and more individuals are generating six-figure paychecks each month by tricking unknowing computer users into installing rogue anti-virus and security products, new data suggests.

The Anti-Virus Industry Scam

One has to wonder how the anti-virus industry sleeps well at night. On one hand, it purports to serve the world by defending our computers and networks from any number of electronic critters and malicious code. On the other hand, sometimes its “cure” is worse than the problem its companies and products allegedly treat. Add to that a decades-old concern over business, market share, and publicity, and you have all the ingredients for a confused industry, product, and service. This situation regularly benefits the antivirus software industry and victimizes its customers.

Free Rock solid antivirus programs

You can easily and freely download complementary anti-virus software by a number of companies who do not charge much or anything for their software, and are rated much more highly than the more popular anti-virus programs out there. Offering a rock-solid protection AVG is THE BEST FREE ANTIVIRUS from this test. It has a very good definition update system,uses little system resources and a full time protection utility with “on-access” file scanner and e-mail scanner. The program doesn’t tax your system when scanning or when running in the background and always proved effective in our tests. This app’s interface can’t be described as beautiful, yet it is mostly simple to navigate. During the full system scan it has detected both of our major threats on the test computer.

You can download AVG Free Antivirus from here.

Democracy is a popular phenomenon currently embracing political and governmental systems throughout the world. An increasing number of countries are or have been shifting toward open elections, improved human rights, granting of free assembly, freedoms of speech, and other seemingly-Western concepts of how populations of people should be governed. We’ve seen this trend increasing in countries like Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union; Iraq, currently being forcefully converted to a democratic state with the aid of the United States; and it doesn’t seem to be stopping.
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Countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, and other traditionally-Islamic states have been seen as targets for Western-style Imperialism. Here the primary objective of the most Western states seems to be the acquisition of economic resources in the arrogant guise of freeing the worlds’ people under tyrannical governments often founded upon secularist, dictatorial regimes (the Iraqi War of 2003 would be a prominent example). Here we see the beginnings of conflict between civilizations.

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Samuel Huntington is one of the most popular authors of our time who’s contemplated the idea of a conflict between civilizations, particularly between Western and Islamic states. In his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” (1996) he argues that cultural differences between, for instance, Islam and Western cultural values are clearly in opposition to each other and that differences between these two cultures occur not along ideological lines but “civilizational” (ie. Western, Hindu, Islamic). He managed to determine that to understand the idea of conflict, we must comprehend the cultural cleavages and that culture must be seen as the centre of war.

Huntington (1996) argues that, because the Koran rejects the distinction between religious and political authority, Islamic civilization cannot easily coexist with democracy. In addition, Kedourie (1994) maintains that mass egalitarianism, elections, and representation are “profoundly alien to the Muslim political tradition” (Kedourie, 1994). Moreover, Shariah Law – to which the very foundation for the legal system borne for both secular and religious lives of Muslims – not only covers religious aspects of their lives but also many day-to-day dealings of life including politics, economics, and social issues.

Here we see direct conflict with the fundamental virtues of democracy wherein liberal democracy affords everyone to the same rights, freedoms; right to life, liberty, security of person; and that no one shall be held in slavery of servitude (United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). Islamic law, on the other hand, declare women to be essentially inferior to men; that immigrants or non-islamic people living in Muslim countries are declared inferior; those of the atheistic tendency are also thought to be inferior (violating freedom of religion under Article 2 of UNDHR); and lastly, Sharia recognizes slavery (which also violates UN declaration of human rights). How then, would those practicing Islam be able to peacefully co-exist with those exercising secular ideals as outlined in most Western-state constitutions and Charter of Rights? Given these short contrasts, those of Islamist and democracy-driven ideals cannot – and will not – be able to peacefully co-exist with one another.
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The first problem with the claim by some that Islam would be able to co-exist with liberal, democratic ideals would surely be the issue revolving around the separation of Church from State. Indeed, one of the fundamental bases of democracy has been the separation of the two because of the inherent problems when governments attempt to adopt non-secularist laws and customs. Given a country as the United States or Canada, where the populations essentially descended from immigrants of differing backgrounds, coming to a consensus revolving around which religion to adopt would have been a feat in itself. Claiming to officially support one religion over another would undoubtedly lead to accusations of discrimination in countries like Canada where equality rights are deeply entrenched1. The foundations of such ideas of separation came as early as John Locke and other philosophers of the enlightenment. Locke gave many reasons for this separation of Church and State in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration”: First, because souls are not committed to the state [magistrate] any more than other people; secondly, because the care of the spirit cannot belong to the state because its power consists only in external matters (not of the soul) (Locke, 1689).
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In summation, what he’s describing is the business of the state has no right to interfere with the conscience or thought of its citizens; a fundamental, liberal-democratic ideal. The Founding Fathers of one of the greatest democracies in the world defended religious freedom in adoption of a Bill of Rights where the rights of religious minorities were outlined, among other things2, to avoid discriminatory practices by Government. Looking toward Canada we see similar traits in the Court ruling of Canada v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd [1985] where it ruled that a 1906 statute required most places to be closed on Sundays did not have a legitimate purpose in a “free and democratic society3,” and was ruled an unconstitutional attempt at establishing a religious-based closing law. Here we see the successful separation of Church from State. Islamic societies, on the other hand, have had much harder times in separating religion from state operations mainly because the very idea of Islamic society is the integration of religion and state.

The separation of Church and State in Islamic societies, as it’s already been mentioned, is a much more difficult matter and only a couple states have been “successful” in implementing such strategies4. The reason Islamic societies have not been very successful in co-habitating with other religions is due to its’ inherently xenophobic and intolerant teachings toward other religions and beliefs such as those associated with the countries of Sudan, Libya, and Afghanistan (NY Times, 2000). From the perspective of Westerners, Islam presents a structurally intolerant religion (Hofman, 1998, p. 142) as demonstrated by the strict Shariah law that forms the basis of these societies.
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Undoubtedly, the usual Muslim view has been that Islam does not allow distinction between the temporal and the sacred or between religion and state that has been the defining feature of the secular West (democracy) since the beginning of the Enlightenment. Whereas Islam stands as a religion and fundamental way of life for those living under its rules, democracy and its propensity toward individual choice leaves much to be desired in the eyes of Islamists. Democracy could never be considered as such a strong unifying force than Islam could ever aspire to be.

Download the full report here in PDF format

How often have you seen job advertisements stating that some type of degree, diploma, or certificate is necessary? Performing a job or task often requires an applicant to have the pre-requisite knowledge or at least some kind of affinity and ability for the task and work being applied for. If this is so, why are so many job positions asking for so many qualifications?

Students across the world are beginning to question the necessity and value of college education as the cost of such training has risen by 110% over the past 20 years, median family income has risen by only 27% (New York: The College Board, 2001)[1].

Have you ever wondered if the requirement of qualifications and credentials has always been so prevalent? The reality of the situation is that back in the post World War 2 economy of the industrialized countries (Europe, North America, etc) there was a shortage of labour (people to take up jobs) so the qualifications necessary for these positions was often waived or learned on the job, and the employer paid training option was often implemented.

Contemporary Tight Labor Markets

Indeed, as Wikipedia points out, labor shortages were felt in [during and after WW2] agriculture, even though most farmers were given an occupational exemption and few were drafted. Large numbers volunteered or moved to cities for factory jobs. At the same time many agricultural commodities were more needed for the military and for the civilian populations of Allies (Wikipedia, 2009).

Before the war, there were not enough jobs to go around, hence the depression. As America geared up for the war and then got involved, two things happen which would have a great effect on postwar America. The first, to produce what was needed for the war, America’s manufacturing began to grow at a fantastic rate. Secondly, there was rationing, so as workers started making money again, there wasn’t a lot for them to spend it on. So, they saved lots of money.

With this tremendous boom there was a severe need for employers to fill positions which now require “qualifications” that were often learned on the job. Also, many new industries were created along with new job titles, so naturally academia and the college industrial complex jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on the increasing numbers of people looking for work as the economy tightened and contracted with the crises seen in the late 70′s to early 80′s and has not stopped since then.

It can be supposed that a certain element of this preference for a University degree is related to the local labor market conditions (supply and demand of people with certain qualifications), but the reality of the situation is that many people who come out of colleges are more suited for the working world due to the fact that it is more vocationally oriented training rather than the pervasive theory taught in Universities. It is true that Universities purportedly produce workers more suited for managerial or “abstract” thinkers, but it is more likely a matter of class and status and the epitome of the specialized economy’s need to compartmentalize people into specific roles.

The Rise Of Credentialism

University degrees were, up until recently (50 to 60 years), strictly an affair for the wealthy and well connected in society, while those at the lower rungs were relegated to community colleges and technical colleges. As many professions became regulated and bureacratized, Universities came into the fold as the necessary qualification to be completed to qualify for positions such as Nurses, Lawyers, Doctors, and other traditional occupations usually occupied by the wealthy of society and their offspring.

Back in the 1960′s to early 1970′s, high school graduates were able to enter teacher’s college directly from their previous level without having to attain a University degree in a specific or general subject. They could just literally become teachers out of high school and were encouraged to attain a University level qualification during their teaching career.

Similarly, concerns about the commercialisation of universities began to emerge during the debate of the late 1970′s about the safety issues surrounding the then-new recombinant DNA technology. The concern centered on the potential influence of the commercialisation of university research on the university as an institution (Kenney, 1998 & Science in Africa, 2002).
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According to a Statistics Canada report released a day after the 1998 “students’ budget,” students are paying more than ever for their university education. After inflation, tuition fees have leapt 62 per cent since the beginning of the decade, while family incomes have dropped by 5 per cent. Fees for undergraduate arts students increased in all provinces but Quebec. With yet another rise slated for the 1999-2000 academic session, students can prepare themselves for fee hikes well into the 21st century.

The sharpest rise in costs occurred in Newfoundland where, on average, students paid 18 per cent more than in earlier years. By comparison, Ontario had a jump of 10.1 per cent. In other provinces, the tuition surge ranged between 1.7 per cent in British Columbia and 8.3 per cent in Alberta. The national average was 9 per cent. Employment incomes of those aged 20 to 24 have fallen by 21 per cent during this period.

At the same time, average loans from the Canada Student Loans Program remained constant and because it has not kept pace with changing realities, students are left having to do much more with less. But youth aren’t exactly foregoing the post-secondary option due to the fee hikes. The proportion of 19- to 24-year-olds enrolled in university grew consistently from 1975 to 1995. That growth stalled in 1993 and then dropped slightly in 1996, but it is once again on the rise. So who is paying for these changes? Check out the numbers: the average undergraduate debt after graduation in 1982 – $5,260; in 1990 – $8,690; in 1995 – $17,000; in 1998 – $25,000.

Academics, teachers, and other so-called “role models” keep chanting the “need for formalized education to get a job” mantra because our economy apparently needs skilled workers, they say, but is the connection between formalized education and just “getting a job” that clear? Most people in semi-professional roles require skills such as exercising considerable judgement and certain specialized skills.

It would seem that before enrolling in and barely scraping by to complete a life draining 4 year degree, it would be more advantageous and cost efficient to offer more University or community college programs 2 years in length rather than the former. Indeed, many community colleges already offer 2 year programs that should be sufficient to compete for positions such as those offered in the business field such as marketing, business analysis and so on. After all, most of what you’re going to need to know is going to be learned on the job anyway.

The statistics and facts seem to be falling on deaf ears with childrens’ role models, teachers, and parents because in the last 30 years the percentage of positions/jobs requiring college/University education has more than doubled while the job responsibilities and tasks have remained the same or have been deskilled (ie. eliminated or replaced by new, argueably less skilled) by technology. Indeed, according to most “role models,” if students do not plan to pursue college education, they will often be threatened with flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately now that the degree obsession from employer human resource departments has expanded into society, lack of a college education often not make it past human resource departments’ clerks’ eyes (or computers).

Why would this be? Well, according to his book Executive Blues, G. J. Meyers warned of the “academic stench” that can often label an applicant “over-qualified” for many of the jobs available in today’s economy. Maybe what attracts employers to college graduates is their ability to sit for unbearable lengths of time at a desk staring at computer screens, or maybe it is the fact that after a college education that many students run up debts to which they will likely never repay in their lifetimes.

Where is the accountability?

In the Ontarian schooling system (in Canada), the Universities, colleges, and post-secondary institutions are empowered under an enabling act and are bound by provisions of different provincial statutes (ie. The Expropriation Act). In addition, because these institutions receive public funds directly in trust (by way of endowments), there are therefore restricted by the rules of accountability. This essentially means they are accountable to the public for demonstrating where the public funds were spent for the goals intended, and to see that it is spent in an efficient and economical manner. However, as all pundits of economics know, and what the economic and historic models show, is that government is not capable of being effective when power is taken away from individuals.
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This means that University administrations are supposed to be responsible for the management of the public funds they receive for collective purposes (very broadly for education and research), but who watches the watchers? Supposedly the board of governors serve this function, but the reality of the situation is that this board is largely a controlled aspect of University Chief Executive Officers’ preferences with no real stated process for reporting their effectiveness to taxpayers. Indeed, the MUSH sector (Municipal, Universities, Schools, and Hospitals) does not guarantee public accountability of funds with regards to University effectiveness (or lack thereof). This fact is so credible that even the Ombudsman of Ontario admitted it:

“Ontario has fallen behind in oversight of non-governmental organizations providing critical public services referred to as the “MUSH” sector – municipalities (except for the ability to investigate complaints about closed meetings in some cases), universities, school boards, hospitals, nursing homes and long-term care facilities, police, and children’s aid societies (Ombudsman, Ontario, 2008)

It would seem that the problem in education starts much earlier than previously thought; it starts in earnest during the grade school education paradigm where students are socialized into specific patterns of social and scholastic thought. The education system has been patterned after the “outcome based” education model where it promotes curricula and assessment based on constructivist methods and discourages traditional education approaches based on direct instruction of facts and standard methods.

Though it is claimed the focus is not on “inputs”, OBE generally is used to justify increased funding requirements, increased graduation and testing requirements, and additional preparation, homework, and continuing education time spent by students, parents and teachers in supporting learning. (Wikipedia, 2009). Could the outcome based education model be preparation for the post-secondary treadmill racket we call Universities and colleges? All signs would point to “yes.”

Some solutions

In his famous presentation, “The problem with rock tumblers: Why Canada’s education system is in urgent crisis and how to fix it,” Tod Maffin outlines the need for education reform from a system where students are encouraged to have their individualities nurtured, developed, and focused into specific areas of study and vocation. Under the current system of outcome based education as outlined above, students are thrown into a public school with over crowded populations, assigned over worked teachers, and expected to come out of this Marxist factory with direction in life.
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What Mr. Maffin compares this system to is a “rock tumbler” where “you take all the students at the beginning of the cycle and toss them into a rock tumbler. You turn on the switch and tumble them for about 12 years.” Essentially this system is meant to form all students into generalists who do not have the chance to develop their individual skills as they should. The nice stones that come out of the tumbler are like the students that come out of the current education system, which he believes creates a bunch of generalists. “Everyone comes out being able to do everything generally well … Few people come out doing one thing extraordinarily well” (Leader Post, 2006).

Parents realizing this disturbing trend are increasingly enrolling their children into private schools, or in many cases, are teaching them at home in an individualized, nurturing environment — guided by Christian or other religious teachings — often not offered in public schools where students of marginalized situations often find themselves ostracized by fellow students, which ultimately defiles their educational experience and dooms their educational future.

Indeed, the US Department of Education’s report “shows that approximately 1.5 million children (2.9 percent of school-age children) were being homeschooled in the spring of 2007, representing a 36 percent relative increase since 2003 and a 74 percent relative increase since 1999.[2] One private researcher estimates that as many as 2.5 million school-age children were educated at home during the 2007-2008 school year.[3]”
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Jesus calls on Christians of all denominations to call into question the current public education system that their children attends as secular schooling has been stripped of all value and meaning when He has been taken out of the curriculum. Without God or Jesus, students become lost in the wild of secularism and often adopt secular ideals. Phil Brennan of Newsmax.com has exposed this secularization of the schooling system stating that “”government schools must stamp out love of country and the family must be viewed as the enemy: ‘As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism’”" (Newsmax, 2003).

References:

(1) The College Board, Trends in College Pricing, 2001 (New York: The College Board, 2001).

[2]U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007,” December 2008, at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf (January 6, 2009).

[3]Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” National Home Education Research Institute, July 2, 2008, at http://www.nheri.org/Research-Facts-on-
Homeschooling.html (January 6, 2009).

Politicians, businessmen, and media conglomerates working together have been touting that they had no knowledge of the current depression and economic trouble. Somehow this should be hard to believe given the way in which the economies and financial systems of the world were slowly manipulated throughout the years. It has been in the making for decades, made worse since Canada and the United States’ politicians signed away their respective economic sovereignty to the unelected World Trade Organization and NAFTA; not to mention the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
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This pipe dream of stabilizing Canada’s economy is not to be solved by shipping its manufacturing base, already less than a quarter of its economic activity, to countries where they utilize slave labour and manipulate their currency. It also is not to be solved by the proliferation of Casinos and gambling houses which destroy the moral fabric of communities and eventually countries. Here is a brief history of how gambling came to be common practice in Canada:

A 1969 amendment authorized provincial governments to manage and conduct lottery schemes and authorized charitable groups to do likewise under license – the federal government still had control, however, and even had their own lottery. The provincial and territorial governments soon negotiated provisions that led to the introduction of further gambling options in Canada such as province-run ticket lotteries. Governments began to generate substantial revenues from their virtual monopoly on Canadian gambling and became interested in diversifying their gambling offerings. (University of Alberta Study)

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Why would a country with decent, primarily Christian people, decide to open state-run Casinos thoughout its lands without any thought of consequence? You can bet your bottom dollar the policy makers knew the harmful effects that gambling would have on a population, but were desperate for solutions to declining public revenues due to de-industrilization (loss of manufacturing industries; backbone of the economy) and were under the influence of powerful people hell bent on destabilizing the middle class industrialized people of the world. “Canada experienced a dramatic increase in legalized gambling in the 1990s, primarily because of governments’ need to increase revenue without additional taxation” (CMAJ, 2000).

The industrialized world is steadily losing its manufacturing base to countries with low or non-existent labor, environmental, or financial laws. China is such an example of a country where they regularly manipulate their currency, condone limits on speech, disallow private sector unionization, and have poor or non-existent labor laws. Workers work 12.5 hours per day, spend 16.5 hours in the factory, and have to work all night during delivery rush. “There is no overtime pay. Workers are paid on product count. After all kinds of deductions, the average salary per hour is 13 cents” (China Labor Watch, 2001).

How could this come to be?

There should be no misunderstanding here. No one should be opposed to fair trade, but it’s time to recognize “free trade” is fiction because every trading relationship is managed in some way. Indeed, in an ideal world there would be no governments and therefore no need for representative government and public collectivization which all countries eventually become when people of similar values and morals come together in common cause. Indeed, Jesus fought for human freedom and did not give up even after he was crucified and nailed to a cross. As Jesus Christ said to Luke, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his palace, his possessions are safe” (Luke 11:21).

One has to wonder if the de-industrialization; loss of manufacturing industries (and the subsequent decimation of the middle class); increases in drug trafficking and rises in crime mostly caused by a purposely faulty judicidial system; the increase in gambling and sinful behaviours such as prostitution (being legalized in some countries) and homosexual marriage; and the general acceptance of lies and deceit were deliberately planned out. Indeed, John Coleman, a famous historian and Christian, has stated this is the goal of the elite, satanist cabal steering planetary affairs. Indeed, he states point number five:
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“To bring about the end to all industrialization and the production of nuclear generated electric power in what they call “the post-industrial zero-growth society”. Excepted are the computer- and service industries. US industries that remain will be exported to countries such as Mexico where abundant slave labor is available. As we saw in 1993, this has become a fact through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. Unemployables in the US, in the wake of industrial destruction, will either become opium-heroin and/or cocaine addicts, or become statistics in the elimination of the “excess population” process we know of today as Global 2000″ (Educate yourself, 2000).

Who is responsible for this?

The respective governments of Canada, USA, and the other industrialized and developing countries of the world — supposedly represented by their respective politicians — rammed the World Trade Organization’s agenda down the collective throats of their respective peoples through the incremental global trade agreements settled on shortly after World War 2. If one were to do their research, they would find that there were no public consultations regarding the need for so-called free trade rather than the much needed “fair trade.”

The World Trade Organization’s website states that the WTO agreement was ratified in member nations’ parliaments and consultative bodies, but what they do not mention is that nine in ten (90%) Canadians believe that politicians are “likely to lie” when they make statements in the media about important issues (60% “very likely” and 30% “somewhat likely)* and therefore agree that government does not represent common peoples’ concerns. Where is the democracy in that?

What Jesus calls his followers to do is emulate the way he lived his life. That is, to emulate his love for humanity, God, and the ability to question what rules and regulations authority has put upon mankind. Jesus was a revolutionary teacher. “His ideas shocked and frightened the people of His day. He would probably do the same to us today were He here in person. The sad truth is that the teachings of Jesus are just as revolutionary today as they were when He was here, but we have overlooked their importance. Or, we have failed to make application of them to our lives” (The Examiner).

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I call upon all Christians of all denominations to print out and cast their signature(s) as well as persuade their community members and families to sign the following petition in WORD format.

PETITION

to the House of Commons

in Parliament Assembled

We, the undersigned citizens and residents of Canada draw the attention of the House to the following:

THAT manufacturing jobs are important to Canada’s national economy,

THAT Canada is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs every year,

THAT each week more manufacturing companies shut their doors,
THAT losing manufacturing jobs in Canada affects millions of Canadian families, who either work directly or indirectly in the manufacturing sector,

THAT the loss of these jobs will negatively impact the future economic prosperity of Canada,

THEREFORE your petitioners call upon Parliament to immediately develop and implement a plan of action to protect Canadian manufacturing jobs in consultation with all stakeholders including labour and the business community.

Special thanks to Mario Silva for the petition document.

* These are the findings of an Ipsos-Reid poll conducted between October 22nd and October 24th, 2002 on behalf of The Comedy Network. The poll is based on a randomly selected sample of 1,000 adult Canadians. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within (+/-) 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The margin of error will be larger within regions and for other sub-groupings of the survey population. These data were statistically weighted to ensure the sample’s regional and age/sex composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to the 1996 Census data.

You might be asking yourself how government could possibly hurt the poor. In the post World War 2 era, people have come to rely on government for social services including health care, schooling, infrastructure development, financial regulation, and so on. It would be pretty difficult for the regular layman to realize how government hurts the poor seeing all the so-called positives, but how many people actually think about how society would function without the hand of government? Would it work better?

The following may get a little technical, but allow me to try to explain some key points as to how government harms poor people. The point trying to be made is that government is not the almighty savior that so many people make it out to be and have been doing so for the past few generations. The truth is that many problems associated with the economy and social structures are often caused by governments and their regulations. One important point to remember is that government is supposd to represent the people. When’s the last time a politician has told the truth?
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Here are many different ways that the government hurts the poor:

1. Skyrocketing taxes contrain the poor directly by raising their living prices.
2. Minimum wage laws damage employment opportunities for low income earners.
3. When government puts itself first, the poor always suffer.
4. Poor people are treated like second-class citizens over creditors.
5. Relief for low income earners won’t cover their mortgages.
6. Regulations on imports raise prices for low income earners.
7. Low income earners pay property taxes even if they rent.
8. Poor people suffer when government spends wrecklessly.
9. Social programs and government spending meant to help poor people ends-up hurting them in the long-run.
10. The schooling system is messed-up for poor people by not focusing on vocational education to get them jobs.

Here is a break-down of each point mentioned above:

The minimum wage laws in many Western countries have been a contentious issue for generations. The poor people have been brainwashed by government propaganda into thinking that it benefits them by allowing them to buy more and become similar to their higher-income neighbors. The fact is that no matter what politicians tell you, the minimum wage disables employers from hiring more workers due to increased labor costs; it also raises inflationary pressures by increasing product prices which disables the poor from buying more than previous to the government increasing their wage.

Government often ties the hands of the poor when they tax them to death and puts the bureaucratic machinery before them.  Taxation strips property (money) from the lower-class (not to mention the upper class) and gives it to bankers to pay for debt.  The solution here would be to utilize some form of flat-tax or negative income tax system which guarantees a certain level of money for people making under a  certain amount.  This kind of system is working in places like Belgium.

Banks and governments work together to strip poor people of their assets when they are in arrears.  What should be happening is that the politicians should help the poor people to pay the  debt instead of helping the banks destroy their lives.  The ultimate solution would be for banks not to loan money to people who cannot afford it!

We always hear the middle-class protesting the loss of jobs to other countries, correct? While this is an honourable deed, for sure, the real problem here is that governments over-taxate companies and populations and makes it too expensive to manufacture products.

Also, governments like the Peoples’ Republic of China, whose government manipulates its currency and financial systems, create incentive for American companies to leave the USA.  In the short-term, the prices are cheaper, but in the long-run, when your children grow up, their jobs and infrastructures will be so badly degraded that there will be a need for more government intervention, also known as “government stimulus.”  Sound familiar?
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The most important societal defect which government greatly attributes to is the schooling system.  By the way, did you realize the word “system” is a root latin word for “sewer?”  You could we say we have a sewer system right now.  Going on, everyone knows our public educational system wreaks of corruption and mediocrity.   Some blame unions, while others blame administrators who take money from the “system” when it should be going to teachers who actually do the real work of educating our children.

This may be debateable, but it is the opinion of this author that the real reason we have so much waste in the schooling system is because we have many so-called teachers who have “useless” subject areas and the fact is that the unions are literally forced to hire these people with non-productive teaching subjects.

Ask yourself:  where are all the math, science, chemistry, language, computer science teachers? They’re all working  for the private sectors making much more money than they would if they were teachers.  Why don’t the school boards and governmental institutions make it more enticing for graduates and experienced workers in these “in demand” fields become teachers?

Enrolling your children in private schools, as well as having them home-schooled may be a much better bet in the long-run for your childrens’ sakes due to the fact that they will get much more individualized, attention-focused education rather than the “rhyme and rote” system the Marxist factories we call public schools today.
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One local college is saving students money by offering text book rentals. Metropolitan communinty college is one of t he few schools in the US offering text book rentals and the savings are astronomical. With the costs of text books triplling in the past 20 years, students have come up with a brillian way to reduce their tuition and book-buying costs. Indeed, Textbook prices in university bookstores increase annually by about 6 percent per year, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

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San Mateo California Community District, which includes Skyline College, the College of San Mateo, is one of the few institutions nationwide to have adopted a textbook rental service in 2006. The program is funded by large state grants, but also solicits private donations to build a large bookstore inventory, according to the bookstore’s Web site.

The difference between renting and buying is astronomical. The school saw a high-toll on the high cost of typical books, so they saw this new book rental idea as a novel way to reduce educational costs and making education more accessible. At the end of the semester if the student wants to keep the book, all he/she has to do is pay the difference and balance of the book.

The method most students used to deal ith high book costs in the past was that they would either photocopy the books, buy them and return them before the end-date, and/or photocopy them and then resell them or share the costs with their friends.

Perhaps this would be an ideal business opportunity for those of the entrepreneurial spirit among you? Starting-up a business in many countries is a cinch and obtaining permission to re-sell books should not be a problem in most jurisfictions. Setting up a shop near a school campus would probably be your best bet in maintaining a steady client base of students who seek low-cost textbooks.

The typical method to reduce costs for students these days is to resell their books after they have read them to their student-union-managed bookstore where they often find books up to 80 per cent off their original cover price. The other alternative is to loan the books from the library, but having only a few copies of the books on-hand lends to long line-ups at the library for the exact same copy, and this leaves a majority of students without necessary course material.
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Technology has come a long way in making educational material accessible to students especially with the introduction of electronic books or “E-books” where they are never printed to paper but only made available on the computer in digital format.