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An education needed, indeed

To train is to acquire skill. An education involves critical examination of the issues around that skill...

Dear Sir:

Fred Hawkshaw, in his March 4, 2015 letter to the editor, which was a critique of the benefits of the college well illustrates the need for a good education to complement training.

Of course industry requires trained workers, ideally enabled to reliable certification by whatever means work. Were an education to accompany the training, it would address truths inconvenient to industry, such as, to follow Mr. Hawkshaw’s example, graft, environmental litigation, global warming and ocean acidification, and the parent problematic, carbon use and abuse.

A particular lesson would concern how the present government (and watch for changed government to retain), so heavily invested in the carbon economy, now censors the science that Mr. Hawkshaw rightly pleads for in an education.

To train is to acquire skill. An education involves critical examination of the issues around that skill, especially industry advocacy, as the controversy around Mr. Hawkshaw’s well-chosen example of Enbridge illustrates.

Training gets us our daily bread. Education makes us aware of how that bread is made. Not to know that your meal is poisoned will not do.

Dr. David Heinimann,

Terrace, B.C.