growing push toward job-oriented school-
ing. Academic courses are being de-
emphasized at community colleges; voca-
tional and career programs will, it
seems, get the major share of available
money for the foreseeable future.

In fact I'm alarmed, because this trend
doesn't make sense educationally or
economically. It looks like a response
| to an expecially silly kind of philist-
inism.

-|-One local conmentator suggested recently
that courses in the creative and perform-
ing arts are a costly luxury to be en-
joyed only when years of grinding toil
have earned us enough to throw away on
such fripperies.

Another writer in the B.C., Teachers’
Federation magazine criticized Kwantlen
College for being so foolish as to ad-—
vertise for a philosophy teacher, of all
things, when what we really need is no-
| nonsense training for employment.

Pretending to be hard-headed, such crit-
icism is really only thick-headed, such
premise is that wealth comes only out of
a drill press or welding torch; all else
is idle self-indulgence. The new philis-
tines haven't noticed that culture, in
all its aspects, is big business in Can-
ada and likely to get bigger despite the
depression.

The federal government spent a billion
dollars on culture last year, just prim-
ing the pump. Ontario culture now gen-
erates more revenue than Ontario mining.
More people in B.C. buy tickets to musi-
cal and theatrical performances than to
sport events.

Quite apart from the actual artists,
think about the jobs created through
artistic activity: the technicians, ©
tradesmen and professional who work to
produce films, plays, television shows,
recordings and concerts.

| wrights.
enter the culture industry, academic and

 

Mad Hatter Pago 4

Push is on to 'Deemphasize' Academics (cont)——______,,

Canadian publishing creates a demand for

paper, for word-processing systems, for
typesetters and salespeople. As a side
| effect, culturally active communities at-

tract new enterprises, cultural and other-

wise. AU.S. estimate is that each del-

lar spent on the arts generates at least
two more spent for food and shelter by
visiting spectators.

The launching pad of all that activity is
the schools. It is in the schools that

most of our future Toni Onleys and Glenn

Goulds are learning the basics of their
careers. Our future authors are in class,
reading Jack Hodgins and Margaret Laurence
and thinking: I can do that, too. The cute
kid who played Dorothy in your school's
production of The Wizard of Oz may have be-
gun an acting career that will make her
famous around the world.

Sure, most kids who study music in school
won't end up as rock stars or chamber mus-
ics virtuosos; not all the kids in wood-
working class will be carpenters or ship-
But for the many who eventually

arts courses are really vocational train-
ing. And all our kids deserve the chance
to explore as many different vocationa:
choices as we can make available in the
schools.

So the push to downgrade academic and arts

courses is misguided, to say the least.

In a high-tech, information-hungry and .in-

creasingly leisured world, skill in cui-

tural activities will become more highly
prized and more highly paid.,’ We might even
regain the heights of Elizabéthan England,

where anyone who couldn't both play and in-

strument and write a poem was dismissed as
a hopeless klutz.

As it becomes harder to draw the line be-

tween vocational and academic courses, we
may have to redefine education as something
quite different from training and remind
oursleves that we need both,