Any Canadians please read

[shadowmare]

I recently started a petition stating that one must complete their highschool education before saying audios to highschool forever. I believe that crime, and poverty can both be fought against better then any police force by ensuring that teens stay in school for at least 4 years (I'm in Ontario, it may have a different system elsewhere in the country). I've had several aquaintences who dropped out of school to push drugs or begin a life of prostitution. They are showing no signs of wanting to come back either. An education is absolutely vital, and a good example to show future generations, starting in Canada...

Here is the link
http://www.gopetition.com/online/30440.html

[LOLseph Stalin]

I just signed the petition. :) Education is also a very important issue to me.

[Rusty Shackleford]

does it matter if you are not a Canadian? i also believe education is a vital part of social upbringing.

[shadowmare]

does it matter if you are not a Canadian? i also believe education is a vital part of social upbringing.

I suppose not if you want to sign, but the scope I was originally intending was just for Canada, I have a meeting with my local MP in a couple weeks and wanted to give them this

[Rusty Shackleford]

oh ok, well, i will sign it anyways. good luck!

[shadowmare]

Thank you :)
You should start a petition for the country you're from. You ceratainly have the right idea that education is a vital aspect of society

[ZeroNowhere]

Hm, so does this mean we'll have to get out in middle school instead?

[Hoggy_RS]

what about people who leave school before graduation to pursue different careers. Its common in Ireland for young people to leave school to do an apprenticeship(plumber, electrician or what have you). Be kind of unfair for them to be forced to stay in school if they didn't want to go to college. Maybe this isn't common in Canada.

[LOLseph Stalin]

what about people who leave school before graduation to pursue different careers. Its common in Ireland for young people to leave school to do an apprenticeship(plumber, electrician or what have you). Be kind of unfair for them to be forced to stay in school if they didn't want to go to college. Maybe this isn't common in Canada.

I'm sure leaving for apprenticeships would be an exception because people in Canada do that too. This petition is specifically referring to people who drop out and pursue no further education.

[Prairie Fire]

So crime comes from people being un-educated?

So, here you attribute crime to being the result of individual decisions, and the capitalist state should step in and curve the bad decision making abilities of the youth?

Never mind the simple fact that it doesn't matter how much or how little education you have if there is no employment (employment has been steadilly decreasing the world over, especially in this recent crisis of capitalism).

If there are few jobs available, it doesn't matter how many degrees, diplomas and certificates you possess, you will still not be able to meet your needs. If you are unable to meet your needs, you will look for alternative ways to meet them.

Most of the rust-belt in the USA is a good example of this, as all of the jobs kind of dried up after the cold war, and coincidently these places have high crime .

Racine, Wisconsin has an official unemployment rate of 10.8%; coincidently, they have a crime rate that is consistantly higher than the national average (except in cases of assault), and they also surpassed the high crime rate of Compton,California in terms of burglary and theft (2006 figures). Even based on the "official" estimate, of the crimes that are reported, and of the inaccurate way of measuring un-employment that the American bourgeois state uses, there is still a clear correlation between crime and poverty.

A Marxist-Leninist would make the analysis that most property crimes (and even violent crimes as well,) are generally manifestations of the general society at large and it's inadequacies.

A capitalist, or one who still clings to vestigial traces of their ideology, would make an analysis that crime is a result of the youth lacking a high school diploma, because they made the individual choice to drop out.

To the capitalist ideologue, society is not accountable to those who comprise it, and the material conditions of the times play no part in the proliferation of crime.

I generally don't quote Bob Avakian, but this is pretty good(NOTE: this quotation is primarily in regards to false solutions presented to black americans, but it has good points on why education is not the answer to the crisis of society and the conditions that lead to crime):


Why Education Is Not the Answer

People say: “We need to get educated, that’s the problem. Yes, we don’t get the resources the white schools get. But if our children would only study harder—and if we would do better at turning off the television more often—then they could learn and get ahead.”

This mixes up some important truths with some very wrong conclusions. The truth is that this system has consistently denied a good education to Black children and continues to do so today, beginning with the execution of slaves who taught other slaves to read. Today, most African-American children are confined to prison-like inner city schools which get much fewer resources and in which the true history and dynamics of society and the world are covered up, and there is little if any attempt to instill critical or creative thinking. These schools send African-American children the message, in ways spoken and unspoken, that there is no real future for them in this society. And it is a further crime of this system that many Black youth then end up “buying into” the system’s lies that they are inferior, “turn off” to their own potential to learn and, in so doing, turn away from the wider world of knowledge and science.

But suppose every single Black child somehow DID get an education that enabled them to think critically and to master the skills involved in different kinds of mental labor. Would millions of today’s poor then be able to get good jobs and climb out of poverty? No. Even if you could somehow eliminate discrimination short of revolution—which in fact cannot be done—so long as the system of capitalism is in effect, people are employed only if some capitalist can make money off their employment. By that standard, there is not a “demand” for that many technical jobs and even many of those jobs are being shifted to parts of the world where people are forced to work for even lower wages....

...Education as “the way out” turns people’s eyes away from the real problem and even leads them to blame themselves when it turns out to be yet another false hope.


So, aside from the sillyness of petitioning the government of Canada (if they don't listen to over 70% of Canadians who want to withdraw from Afghanistan, they aren't going to listen to a minor petition campaign), this raises a lot of questions:

* Why is it an individual responsibility to make sure everyone gets an education and not a social responsibility?

* Can proliferaton of educational credentials really help workers as a whole, in an economy with massive unemployment and few new positions created, especially for the youth?

* Why are people dropping out of school?

* Does the curriculum of capitalist schools provide the education needed by the youth for the world that they are about to enter?

* Why are you calling for education to be an obligation rather than a right?

* Why do you posture the struggle against crime and poverty as being solved by either education or by a police force?


So, your petition, and the analysis guiding it, are pure bourgeois narrative.

You believe that education is an individual responsibility, rather than a social one. It is obligation of the individual to go to school, and the only role of the state is to keep them from leaving.

You believe that somehow education will alleviate crime, presumably by helping a persyn to be more appealing for an employer to hire, and therefore somehow giving everyone an education will end crime.

In essence, people need to stop "choosing" to be criminals? :rolleyes:

Never mind that in a society divided by class, where employment/a living is not a right guaranteed to the people, and where workers are pitted against each other in a shrinking economy, there will always be unemployment no matter how much education and credentials the masses of people recieve.

So your "solution" is to arm the working class with the credentials to fight each other for shrinking employment opportunities, and we'll sic the pigs on those that don't succeed.

The working class should not exist as a pool of labour for the employers (bourgeoisie) to pick and choose "good workers" from, and the primary perogative of the labourer should not be to become a more acceptable and appealing labourer at the expense of the rest of their class.

The working class, in order to alleviate itself from poverty (and therefore crime as well,), needs to rise up and seize political power, and weild said power in order to accomplish their own objectives and meet their own needs.

The solution to crime can only be found in the emancipation of all workers, and the building of society on a new basis towards a classless society.

[shadowmare]

Interesting views, but I assure you that I'm no sympathiser for the Capitalists. Nor do I believe that having an education immediately makes a person a "Gladiator" used for the Capitalists entertainment.

However I see kids handing in homework written in leetspeak, using instant messenger lingo in essays that are worth 40% of their overall grades, and dropping out just because they feel they are too good for anything that might be taught at said school.
I personally am against that, and believe that by removing the ability of dropping out of highschool "Just because I can" will help. It gives the student one or two extra years at least to mature beforehand. There will of course be exceptions like for example pregnancies or the death of a family member and the need to take on a full time job. But I didn't have enough room to fit that in the original petition unfortunately.
If, by some odd chance this actually IS brought to the national level, I would certainly bring that up.

Again I enjoyed reading your views on the matter though

[ZeroNowhere]

When did maturity become a synonym for servility, and why was I not made aware?

[originofopinion]

Signed It, Education and Environment are the top priorities for Canada.:)