> Ed,
>
> At 17:08 06/10/02 -0400, you wrote:
> (EW)
> <<<<
> I guess it boils down to a question of what education is for and what it
is
> expected to do. Because the job market can change quickly, perhaps what
is
> most needed is a sound but nevertheless general education that gives
people
> the flexibility to move with trends in the labour market or with
> discoveries about themselves as they proceed through life (I started as an
> artist and turned out to be an economist - Egad!!).
> >>>>
Keith:
>
> Fascinating! I, too, desperately wanted to be an artist when I was at
> school. Drawing was by far and away my best skill but I was deflected away
> from art as a future job by school and parents. I realise now I should
have
> kept to this because, if there's one thing I could always make a good
> living at, it's being an artist. Indeed, when I went through my mid-life
> "passage" (to use Gail Sheehy's expression) in my early 50s -- a washed-up
> industrial chemist with no future job prospects -- I automatically fell
> back on art and after some sketching and selling on-the-spot-portraits and
> architectural drawings on the streets of Bath started my own architectural
> art business which then grew to over 20 staff in a couple of years. I
don't
> have that many staff now for reasons of long-term security of the business
> (there's a recession coming!) but even now, if I wished to, I could simply
> walk down a flight of stairs to my architectural business and easily earn
> about four times the rate of the pension that I now draw from it. But, as
> it happens, I regard writing as a more skilled activity than art, and this
> is what I like to do when I'm not dealing with my music business.
Strangely
> enough, the other thing that I loved to do as a very young child was to
> make booklets -- that is, stitching or stapling pages together and
> illustrating/writing them. (We couldn't afford a stapler but I used to pry
> them out of magazines and re-use them.) Amazingly I find myself repeating
> this operation also! This time with respect to my music business. In
recent
> weeks I've been much involved in setting up a physical operation for
> binding and distributing music octavos (in America, not here). So I've had
> a second childhood twice over!
>
> I must now be brief in commenting on yours:
I don't know what attracted me to the graphic arts. I had some talent and
was rather bad at everything else I was expected to learn. What I found
when I went to my art school (now the Emily Carr School in Vancouver) was
that there is a large difference between "talent" and "real talent". There
were only two people with the latter in my first year class, and I was not
one of them. At least one of the people with real talent became a
professional artist but, to the best of my knowledge, neither of them hang
in our national gallery.
Out of recognition that I would never become the next Picasso and tired of
my pseudo-Boheme life, I went back into mainstream education, got motivated
and became a professional economist with limited talent in that field. I
can abide being of limited talent in economics, but I could never do so in
the arts. A different temperament applies there.
> (EW)
> <<<<
> Turning out millers in six months may be a great accomplishment, but those
> millers may be stuck in a year and half when something happens that
renders
> them irrelevant. We've had something like that happen in the Ottawa area,
> known as "Silicon Valley
> North". Ever so many people trained as computer scientist or technicians
> only to be confronted with devastating negative turn-around in that
industry.
> >>>>
>
> I disagree. I believe that when someone learns a skill to a reasonably
high
> level then the skills and confidence it engenders is transferable. This is
> why I believe that every schoolchild should be able to learn a real
"adult"
> skill from puberty onwards if they want to. (Some children -- the more
> academic types -- will not want to, of course.) I don't know how you can
> teach children to be "flexible" (the constant refrain of educators these
> days) unless you give them the experience and confidence of learning a
real
> skill (even if it's not a modern job skill). I'm wary about teaching
> flexibility -- that's an abstract noun, not a skill.
I would suggest that kids learn in many different ways. I have four kids.
The three older ones from my first marriage all have university degrees.
Two have graduate degrees, one in climatology and the other in geology. My
older daughter, who was by far the quickest of the three as a child, did a
degree in marine biology and then decided she really didn't want to do that
(too male dominated!) so she did another degree in nutrition.
My present daughter is finishing high school. She has a record of being
very strong in some things but very weak in others. Getting her to do
something practical is like pulling hens' teeth - unless she wants to do it
of course. I remember urging her to learn to type a few years ago. No
response, absolutely none! Then a couple of years ago, she got interested
in the internet. She now types with amazing speed, designs websites, and
does all kinds of things she had absolutely no interest in before. Moral:
You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink - not until it
has a reason for doing so.
Incidentally, there may be something of interest to geneticists in my
daughter's typing. Like her mother, a very fast typist, she uses only two,
or times four, of her fingers. Both of them type much faster than I do by
using all ten.
Best regard, Ed
Ed Weick
577 Melbourne Ave.
Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7
Canada
Phone (613) 728 4630
Fax (613) 728 9382
