Inspired by what they heard during the symposium, ministers released a joint declaration today announcing three principles that will form the basis of future action:
- Education and training must empower Canadians to acquire the skills they need for success in the job market in a flexible and dynamic environment.
- Partnerships and alignment with business, labour, education, and training providers are key to ensuring synergy between education and skills training systems and Canada’s labour markets.
- Access to accurate, relevant, and timely labour market and education data is essential to support Canadians to make smart career choices, as well as enable government and business to make evidence-based decisions in planning for the future.
Our schools used to be better than this.
Now we also seem to have sunk to the desire to do no more than create the next efficient underclass of workers.
Sigh.
Dewey warned about this nearly 100 years ago:
Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom. -John Dewey, 1916
