My generation has been fortunate enough at least for those who have wanted to pursue a post secondary education, to have not had it so hard as students today.
We had a family unit of father and mother in whose home we lived and which allowed us to focus on studies for betterment in a future working life. If the family coudn't afford the cost, we worked and pursued part-time studies and distance education through a pioneering Bombay University. I feel sorry for some students in Canada who having realized the necessity of an education while in their workplace, now go to college or university full time while at the same time holding a job and raising a child or children either with a working husband or as single mothers, burning the candles at both ends. Many of them are succesful in ending up in good positions but some finish with numerous mental challenges. It is easy to pass judgement saying they have jobs and want to end up financially comfortable. They don't have to study except for the desire to earn more money to live up to the Joneses. That simply isn't true. Society has become extremely complex from the time we knew it and jobs just disappear leaving you by the wayside if you don't have the education and skill levels that are constantly increasing to meet the globalisation wave that was started to make companies more efficient and profitable so that they could create higher paying jobs. However what has really happened is that the process has not created jobs but just made the rich richer and the poor poorer. The middle class as we knew it is slowly eroding and with it the values of honesty, character and caring for others that we saw all around us and therefore took for granted when we were growing up. As Mervyn Lobo is fond of saying, now it's all about "just follow the money" (and of course bugger the rest). Roland. Sent from Samsung Mobile
