Ontario Opposition Leader Tiny Tim Hudak has come up with another of his white paper policies. The subject of this one is education and return on investment. If you have read this one, please raise your hand,
Seeing no hands raised, it should be noted that this so-called white paper is almost unreadable. If you attempt to read it on-line, you are in for a technological treat in just finding out how to read it. After you have finally figured out how to do it, you will find that the effort is not worth it. It is a pedantic, badly written, boring document with nothing new to say. It cries out for enforced standards in the English language that would allow us to pillory the miscreant who did such a disgraceful job of editing.
To be fair, the document is nicely designed with excellent type selection and good quality pictures. Now if it had just said something worthwhile.
The essence of the document is that Timmy wants to tie student loans to marks. Get good marks and Timmy’s professorial police will approve your next semester’s student loans. Mind you, in Timmy’s Brave New World (sorry Mr. Huxley) most students will be directed to the labor force and streamed through the community colleges for faster trades training. He is not about to support mediocre university students who try harder.
Timmy’s penchant for cost savings is evident in the document as he searches for areas of left-wing waste. He is determined that he is going to save us money—no matter how much it hurts us.
Some of the white paper is believed to be authored by Cambridge-North Dumfries MPP Rob Leone. A former assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, he says he wants to fund institutions of higher learning based on the jobs won by their graduates. That is certainly an unusual idea and many people are interested in learning how he expects to be able to do that.
Timmy must be disappointed that his white paper has not won universal applause since being released earlier this week. No doubt some are still trying to read it and many more have given up. It is surprising though to read a document about higher education written in language that should be easily understood by someone with a grade eight education. Maybe Tiny Tim is just defining his market.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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