School Dropouts
Sunday April 30, 2006
School dropouts reflect free market system
Even good things have their downside. Alberta, for example, has the country’s lowest unemployment rate, 3.4 per cent, about half the Canadian average of 6.3 per cent.
But to balance that, says Statistics Canada, Alberta’s school dropout rate is now exceeded only by Manitoba’s. Alberta also has the lowest high school graduation rate in Canada. Just over two-thirds of high school youth completed their high school education in 2002-2003.
Newfoundland used to be the butt of jokes about education. Five years ago, Newfoundland and Labrador’s dropout rate was over 20 per cent. Today, it is just eight per cent. Alberta is still 12 per cent.
The reason is simple. Almost anyone can get a job in Alberta these days. (A similar problem is beginning to afflict the Okanagan Valley, though not as severely yet.)
In an Edmonton Journal article, reporter Dave Howell described a student who lost interest in his Grade 12 classes, left school and got a job coating pipes used in the oil industry. Working 14-hour days, he earned $1,900 in two weeks.
In the oilpatch, Howell wrote, “entry-level labour jobs are plentiful for young men willing to work long hours and get dirty.”
StatsCan says that 68.7 percent of Alberta dropouts found work. That’s actually higher than the Canadian average for high school graduates.
In Fort Macmurray, even workers in Dairy Queen can earn $14 an hour.
Opportunity to make money
> ”A lot of students have the ability to go out right now in the oilpatch and probably make more money than I am making,” says Ron Lindsay, principal of a school in Wainwright, 200 kilometres southeast of Edmonton.
Myron Ganser, a farmer who chairs the East Central Alberta Catholic school board, calls the oil and gas industry a mixed blessing. “It’s hard… talking a kid into furthering his education and getting a trade or degree when they know they can make just as much money without it,” Ganser says of the current situation.
”Money doesn’t buy happiness. That’s the thing that you have to convince kids of.”
As you might expect, education authorities consider the dropout rate a crisis. Later this year, Alberta Education plans a series of roundtables with young people, to help policy-makers understand why students leave school early.
I can tell them why right now – students are bored. They see little practical application for what they’re learning. After all, you don’t need algebra and calculus to balance your chequebook. You don’t need ancient Roman history to drive a truck, or know chemistry elements to cook chateaubriand.
Not having children of my own still in school, I can afford to take a slightly different view from the educators.
What we’re seeing here is a classic application of supply-and-demand free market principles. In this case, the demand not only draws workers from other provinces, it sucks them out of the schools.
Taste of the real world
> Why should we assume that’s necessarily a bad thing?
Most teens are not in school because they want to be. They’re in school because they have to be. Indeed, I read somewhere that mandatory school attendance first came into existence to keep young people from competing for scarce jobs.
So let them out. With the educators’ blessing. Just as we did, not that long ago here in the Okanagan Valley, so that they could help pick apples on family farms.
Let those students discover what it’s like to drag themselves out of bed every morning do a tedious, meaningless, routine job day after day, with minimal prospect of advancement.
School principal Ron Lindsay asks his students to think about what happens when the boom ends. “You can do it for 10 years or 20 years, but when you’re my age do you want to still be doing it? And do you want somebody your present age telling you what to do when you’re my age?”
StatsCan indicates that, in the long term, unemployment for workers who have not completed high school is about twice that for those who have graduated – around 13 per cent compared to seven. Unemployment rates drop even further for those with higher levels of education.
I’ll venture that a few years from now, when the boom goes bust, Alberta will have one of the country’s highest rates of people wanting to return to school. Except then it will cost them to complete their education.
Lifelong education
So I’ll make a radical proposal. Every individual should be issued a certain number of education credits at birth, to be used an any time during their life. Some might use those credits for a conventional assembly line education, before starting employment. Others might use them to return to school after having been employed—after they discover the value of an education.
People don’t learn what they don’t value. For a few years, I taught business writing/editing to middle managers who hated English in school. They planned to be mechanics or engineers, foresters or accountants. They didn’t need English, they thought..
Then they got promoted. And instead of dealing with figures and formulas, they had to deal with people. And with communications. Now they had to correct the letters and memos of subordinates who hadn’t valued English skills either.
Suddenly, these managers wanted to – and needed to – learn.
So I say, make sure that young people are not harmed physically or mentally by the work environment, but let them work, if they want to.
Why not? We let them get killed in the armed forces at 16. We let them kill others with their cars at 16. We let them create babies at 14. They can legally vote and get stinking drunk at 18 while many are still in school.
So why is it a tragedy if they drop out and discover what life will be like for their next 50 years or so?
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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