Letters: Sask. should embrace oil industry helping to expand education

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About Mr. Tank’s andMr. Mandryk’s articlesabout oil/gas related elective course offerings in Saskatchewan, we wonder if the bigger picture of choice in education and opening doors for all learners in the province wasn’t missed in their articles.

Is this “handing over education,”as Mr. Tank notes,or giving some a hand up, so they can have lives and careers that contribute to our country?

We’d ask both these fine writers to be open to the idea that Saskatchewan should be opening doors and offering opportunities to students at all levels, rather than allowing dogma or “the way it was done for 60 years” kind of thinking to take away chances for learning and development.

Do you like your Korean, Japanese or German car or other product? Chances are good that it’s the product of their mix of systems of education and private industry partnerships.

Countries like Japan, South Korea and Germany focus on offering their students (high school, vocational and university) as many opportunities for highly skilled training, apprenticeships, corporate partnerships and training as they can — because they know they had to!

How about we as a province focus on student-centred education and put the politics of an election year aside? Mr. Tank correctly notes the dismal reading and math scores in his article and we as a province should be most focused on these incredibly concerning results.

If basic literacy and math skills aren’t there, it doesn’t matter what courses are offered!

Mike Sluchinski and Cathy Cha, Saskatoon

Educate instead of changing street names

I am against the “cancel culture” andchanging the names of streetsbecause the person did something in the past that is socially unacceptable today. I think people should be educated about the bad (and good) these people did by adding information and links to online explainers on signs for people to find about the history.

Then new municipal buildings, streets, etc. should be named honouring people from past cultures that should be recognized. Going back in history, there all kinds of groups that were mistreated by different governments.

In regard to thecontroversy about a councillor using profanity,I do not consider that disrespectful unless the citizen was called a “(expletive) idiot” or told to “(expletive) off.”

Besides, I would bet the citizen wasn’t exactly respectful. If people have problems with stuff city council does, they should speak up before those decisions are made or find out the process to reverse the decision.

I am more offended about the stupid statements people make like sayinga new libraryis an important factor in the community when, in fact, it is going to turn into a glorified homeless shelter. The homeless issue needs to be dealt with in a way that concentrates on their needs.

Gary Crawford, Saskatoon

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