HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1993-11-24, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1993. PAGE 5.
Empires' fate
depends on
education?
Heaven help us!
"The students are used to being entertained.
They are used to the idea that if they are just
the slightest bit bored, they can flip the
switch and turn the channel."
Teacher quoted in New York Times.
I was raking the leaves the other day when
a neighbour called me over. He handed me a
crumpled piece of paper. "What do you
make of this?" he asked. A childish ballpoint
scrawl limped across the page. It looked like
something you might get if you gave a
chicken LSD, dipped its feet in an ink well
and turned it loose on a piece of foolscap.
The first three words seemed to read "I hay
went" ... ihen the note degenerated into
undecipherable hieroglyphics.
"I can't make it out" I confessed. "What's it
say?"
"Beats me" said my neighbour. "It's a note
that Charlie left by the telephone."
Charlie is my neighbour's son. The whole
occurrence would be unremarkable if
Charlie was seven years old, a victim of
Parkinson's Disease or a terminal heroin
addict. In fact, he is a resoundingly normal
18 year old. And he graduated from high
Cuba
falling
apart
Cuba has been something of an anomaly
in the western hemisphere; it is a communist
country in an area which is noted far more
for right-wing regimes and while other
nations in the vicinity are getting their
economic act together and gradually
increasing their standard of living, the
Cubans are watching their economy slowly
fall apart.
During the last 25 years the island has
been held together by a police state and large
dollops of money from the Soviet Union. It
should be pointed out that it was Cuba that
brought us closer to war with the Kremlin
than at almost any other time during the
Cold War when Krushchev tried to sneak
through missiles to the island only to be
euchred by the U.S. President John
Kennedy. It was a close call; one that could
have gone any way.
However, as the Soviet Union fell apart,
so did its financial support of Cuba start to
wane. The $100 billion that the Kremlin had
pumped into the economy went down the
drain when the financial payments came to
an end in 1992. Cuba, in effect, was left
hung out to dry.
Can you imagine what it would be like in
Canada if, during a very short period, all our
trade with the United States was to
disappear? For Cuba it is even worse, for a
good 85 per cent of its commerce was with
the Soviet bloc nations, including all the oil
needed to run the Cuban economy. At the
same time the main crop of the island, sugar,
has fallen on hard times. Last year's harvest,
at some 4.2 million metric tons, is no less
than three million tons less than it was two
school last spring.
With excellent marks in English.
How is it possible that a kid can be
simultaneously ready for university and
unable to write a legible, literate telephone
message? I don't know, but I know that
Charlie is no isolated case. Most of the
teenagers I know can't even talk. Not in
sentences. Not without stuffing every chink
in their conversation with "y' know"s and
"like, ummmm"s and "rilly"s.
I know, I know. I sound like a bring-back-
the-birch, why-in-my-day Preston Manning
geek. But it isn't just me, folks. Listen to the
words of Sabina Petrecchia. Consider the
testimony of Elodie Felton, Ask Nils Nonner
and Kika Schossland.
Who they? Teenagers, Schoolkids. From
Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Brazil,
respectively. They spent the past year
attending classes as exchange students at a
high school in southwestern Ontario.
They couldn't believe what they saw.
Sabina, from Rome said "School is very
different in Italy. There is no such thing as a
spare...we do homework from four to five
hours every day, not half an hour or an hour
like here."
She also points out that Italian students go
to school six days a week, spend five years
in high school and take 13 compulsory (look
it up, children) subjects each year —
including math, science, Latin, philosophy
and English.
years previously. Foreign currency holdings
have all but disappeared, with one of the few
sources being money brought in by foreign
tourists (including Canadians) who go there
to take advantage of the low prices, sun and
sandy beaches.
Telephones and electricity are still
relatively inexpensive but nobody is quite
sure just how long they will work during the
day. A recent visitor to the island told me
that there was little point in Milling anything
for the meat since it might thaw out in the
refrigerators due to the lack of any
dependable electric supply. Rationing is in
effect but even that has been reduced and
some people are forced to do with one meal
a day.
As long as the Soviet Union was paying
the bill, nothing was done with any real care
for cost or efficiency. Even the famous
health care system, touted by the Cubans as
being one of the best in the world, is ragged
around the edges.
The Cubans leader, the famous Fidel
Castro, whom many supported while Cuba
was the pride of the Communist world, has
finally faced the fact that reforms have to be
made. He is, unfortunately, far too late for
any changes to do the job that has to be done
in the near future. Even Cuban economists
admit that market forces have to be allowed
to play a role and they have been busy
studying Vietnamese or Chinese reforms.
These may all be for naught since Castro,
fearful of losing control, has put thumbs
down on any such "radical" reforms. Instead
he is putting his hope on such things as
increased foreign tourism, marketing of the
island's biotechnology and opening up the
banking systems to foreign banks. You can
get some idea of the immensity of the task
when I tell you that no less than 85 per cent
of all foreign exchange earnings come from
sugar, and we have already seen what is
happening to that product.
One interesting step has been to legalize
Elodie, who hails from Lausanne: "It's
incredible to me that (Canadian) students
shout and talk in class. We could never do
that in Switzerland. The teachers are much
more strict." And how does she find
educational standards in Canada?
A joke. She says Canadian homework
assignments are a snap.
Kika Schossland, who normally attends
high school in Recife, Brazil was shocked by
the boozing among Canadian high schoolers.
"Students here smoke and drink a lot more
than in Brazil" she observed. "They
(Canadian kids) go to parties and get drunk."
For Nils Nonner, a 17-year-old exchange
student from Stuttgart, cars were the big eye
opener. In Germany, he explained, high
school kids driving cars were seen about as
often as unicorns. In Stuttgart, students get
around on bicycles, public transit or by foot.
Nils couldn't believe the sea of student-
driven chrome and rubber surrounding the
average Canadian high school.
Nils has a point. The high school in my
home town is getting set to level a mature
grove of pine trees and messing up a park to
provide still more parking for students.
Parking? For students? Isn't that why we
subsidize fleets of school buses?
Twenty-five hundred years ago the great
philosopher Aristotle wrote: "the fate of
empires depends on the education of the
young."
If that's so, then heaven help the empire of
Canada.
the dollar. However, this is something of the
right thing for the wrong reason for Castro
has in mind getting the thriving black market
under control. He has not overlooked that
the American governments allow Cuban
exiles to send $1,000 a year to relatives in
Cuba. To take advantage of this, a ban has
been lifted on Cubans shopping in dollar
stores, naturally after the government
doubled all the prices. Having a family with
generous purse strings is most defmitely a
status symbol in Cuba.
Castro's failure to take the blame for the
current economic fiasco may well prove his
undoing. However, how much more
suffering must the Cuban population endure
before he is either overthrown or sees the
handwriting on the wall. Perhaps 1994 will
provide the answer.
Looking backward
Continued from page 4
Frank Elliott as the new Worthy Matron.
Members of the Hullett council were
acclaimed for the coming year. They were
Reeve Hugh Flynn and Councillors Leonard
Archambault, Joseph Hunking, John Jewitt
and Charles Scanlon.
The Wingham Body Shop was looking for
a licensed auto body mechanic. The pay was
$2.50 per hour.
Snowmobile suits could be purchased
from R. W. Madill's for $25 to $29.
Shimmering party dresses, available in
both junior and misses sizes sold for $19.95
to $29.95 at the Needlecraft Shoppe in
Blyth.
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Bieman and Mr.
Clark Johnston presented a short program of
addresses and musical numbers at the annual
supper and ladies night at the Belgrave
Community Centre.
Stewart's Red and White Food Market
held a 99 cent sale. Items on sale were 10
packages of Jello powders, five cans of corn,
four-100ft. rolls of waxed paper, four rolls of
paper towels, three-48 oz. cans of apple
juice, five bottles of Pepsi, nine tins of
tomato soup and four loaves of bread.
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
Remembering
Camelot
Where were you 30 years ago'Nov. 22?
I remember quite clearly sitting in a Grade
4 classroom at Eastdale Public School when
the news came to us that John F. Kennedy,
the young, charismatic president of the
United States had been shot.
At the back of our room was a television;
though I don't think we were watching it in
the beginning, there must have been an
announcement made or someone brought it
to our teacher's attention, because we heard
some of the bulletin. I will never forget the
look on her face as she turned towards us. I
didn't understand it then; it was a look like
nothing I'd seen in my tender years; but now
having seen it too many times since, I
recognize it as shock, horror and grief. Like
many others she wept in stunned disbelief.
However unlike many others she was in the
unenviable position of trying to explain this
tragedy to a room of innocents.
As her tears flowed, so did those of mine
and many of my classmates, while we
listened to her tell us of this man and his life,
his promise. With his dashing good looks,
his war time heroics, his vision for America,
he and his family were likened to the fabled
Camelot. Canadians too, it seemed, were
enchanted by the enigmatic politician.
At nine we were perhaps too young to
fully comprehend what his loss meant in
terms of the hopes of Americans, but we
sensed something very significant. It was not
only our first real exposure to the poison of
hatred, but it was a potent dose of reality for
many adults, who had believed in the fairy
tale dream as well.
Three decades have passed and in that
time, we have grown up. JFK was not the
perfect prince, it seems. Stories allude to the
imperfections of life in Camelot, to the
president's womanizing and weaknesses. For
many of us around in 1963, these don't really
shadow the light that shone around the man,
however. We remember his strengths and as
adults who err, tolerate his mistakes. But for
another generation growing up with the
other image, the charisma of JFK is not as
clear.
Sunday night PBS was running a
documentary covering the tragic event.
Watching footage of adults sobbing our 21-
year-old said after a few moments, "I don't
get it. How can anyone care that much about
a politician?" As a history student, these
things shouldn't be out of his realm of
understanding, but to someone who grew up
with Prime Ministers Trudeau, Clark, Turner
and Mulroney you can imagine it's not an
easy thing to explain.
The best I can come up with is 'the times'.
In an era when the country and world
seemed beset by senseless violence and
hatred, by racism and war, here was the man
who would bring everyone together.
Let the word go forth that the torch has
been passed to a new generation of
Americans.
His passion for his country, his fairy-tale
life inspired romantic, ideallistic hope in
people.
Ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country.
His tragic death exemplified the hatred,
the divisiveness he refused to accept. Thirty
years later as I try to explain what it was like
I can't help wondering if it would have been
very different, for Americans primarily, but
the rest of the world as well had Camelot
been able to reach its "happily ever after
ending."
rthur Black
International Scene