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CONTENTS

Routine proceedings

Committee of Supply: Ministry of Education estimates.

On vote 158.

Mrs. Wallace –– 3885

Mr. Mussallem –– 3890

Mrs. Dailly –– 3891

Hon. Mr. McGeer –– 3893

Mr. Cocke –– 3896

Hon. Mr. McGeer –– 3897

Mr. Nicolson –– 3899

Mr. Barber –– 3902

Ms. Sanford –– 3907

Hon. Mr. McGeer –– 3907

Mrs. Dailly –– 3909

Hon. Mr. McGeer –– 3909

Mr. Nicolson –– 3909

Hon. Mr. McGeer –– 3909

The House met at 8 p.m.

Orders of the day.

The House in Committee of Supply; Mr. Schroeder in the chair.

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

(continued)

On vote 158: minister's office, $133,168 - continued.

MRS. B.B. WALLACE (Cowichan-Malahat): Before the supper recess I had been talking about learning disabilities in children and various other subjects, and I have indicated that I wanted to talk a bit about the core curriculum. I want to deal with the core curriculum, not as a politician sees the question nor as an overall provincial thing. I want to just talk about two of the school districts in my own constituency and what the educators and people connected with the school system in those areas are saying about the core curriculum.

One of the meetings which the minister arranged to discuss this was held in the town of Ladysmith. In attendance at that meeting were both the principal of the Ladysmith Secondary School and the principal of the primary and intermediate school. The meeting was reported in the local paper and it indicates that both of these gentlemen said that they hadn't found a core curriculum goal outlined by the provincial Ministry of Education, which is not now covered in the school curriculum. This was the opinion of the principals of both the elementary and the secondary schools in that area. They said they don't foresee any major changes in their schools after the curriculum is introduced in September, and they also agree that the curriculum changes could be coming when the ministry completes the specific curriculum requirements.

Well, Mr. Chairman, I think this bears out the point that has been made in this debate - that there is no real major change being instituted in the so-called core curriculum. It's something that's there. It's been done. These teachers go on to say that in general, the teachers can't see that there's too much difference between these goals and what is happening now. The goals here are generally being met. We've had a core curriculum since education started. They used to call it the three Rs; now they've just expanded it a little.

It's part of the existing system and it moves to meet the times and the demand - hopefully, it does move. I have some concerns when the minister talks about what must be learned. I hope that the minister is not going to go back to the stage where we used to be, where we find that those less fortunate youngsters whom I was speaking about earlier with those learning disabilities are forced to meet certain demands or certain criteria, and if they don't meet those, they're segregated, cast aside - that there is no place for them in this new concept, if it is a new concept. You know, if this core curriculum is going to do that, then there is far more harm in it than there is good because there really is no change for the better according to those teachers in the Ladysmith area.

I have a letter here which was written by a parent who attended that meeting and I think it's worth reading into the record, Mr. Chairman, in part at least. It says:

"Last night I attended a meeting sponsored by local schools to discuss the pamphlet, 'What Should Our Children Be Learning? - Goals of the Core Curriculum.'

He goes on to say:

"I suspect the meeting was typical of many held throughout the province. It was well organized and well run, but not very informative. Most of us knew no more about the core curriculum when we left than when we went.

"One area which did appear to be significantly different from the present was that of the arts and humanities, which received scant attention. Goal M5 is actually quite funny when it suggests that such activities as painting, paper sculpting, weaving and playing music are helpful because they build upon small motor-activity skills."

"Small motor-activity skills" - is that the stress this minister is putting on those cultural activities, those creative activities? That's what the pamphlet on the core curriculum says.

The letter goes on:

"Unfortunately, this is about the only place in the pamphlet which mentions these activities. This rather takes the humour out of the situation. Perhaps, however, it indicates the basic problem of the core curriculum concept -namely, the assumption that activities are valuable, educational and necessary only as they lead to the development of some skill which can be marketed."

I think my correspondent has hit the nail on the head, Mr. Chairman. I think that is what is in this minister's mind. He's concerned only with the dollars and cents and the bread-and-butter programmes in education. He is not concerned with those broader concepts which lead to a better quality of life and make for a fuller, more meaningful life among the citizenry of this province.

I want to go on to another school district. This is

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Cowichan, School District 65. This is a review that they have done in that district, Mr. Chairman, not as a result of this minister, not as a result of the core curriculum. It was done before that was even heard of. It was a review undertaken by the local school board relative to language skills. The district language review committee was formed in October, 1976, composed of volunteer teachers representing grades I to 12. The prime purpose of the committee was to review the present language programme at all levels and to recommend strategies.

This committee was set up and it was given some terms of reference - the things that they were to look into. They were to range from years I to 12 and the subjects that they were looking at were things such as: to print and write neatly and legibly; to learn to write vocabulary; to use the mechanics of writing; to write sentences, paragraphs; to improve writing skills through a variety of experiences. It goes on with: spelling, figures of speech, correct usage of words, syllabification, and so on. The whole gamut is run in this, with recommendations and some studies done to see how they stacked up and the skills they had acquired. They came out well, Mr. Chairman. It is already being done. It's already there. The core curriculum is nothing new, except perhaps it is narrowing in, zeroing in, and it's going to infringe, I am afraid, on the rights of some of our people who do not fit into those must-be-learned categories. That is the only comment I wish to make about the core curriculum.

I want to move on to another point that has come to my attention. This is in the field of continuing education. There is a concept, and it's one that is held by the United Nations educational organizations, and it is one that is gaining acceptance, I believe - that every citizen is entitled to 12 years of tuition-free education. Now that is certainly here for young people who go through and finish school in their teens, but we have a great many adults coming into the school system. Some of them are enrolling in day school and many school boards are accepting adult pupils in day school tuition free. That concept is being accepted.

But what about the adult who works and cannot attend the day classes? I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, that this is working an inequality and a hardship on the person who must go to night school, evening classes, because they are having to pay the tuition whereas the person who is able to attend a day class is getting that tuition free. If we here in British Columbia are willing to accept the concept that every citizen is entitled to 12 years tuition-free education, then I would urge the minister to move in the direction of making that available, whether it be daytime or nighttime, and those adults who wish to upgrade themselves should not be penalized by having to pay tuition if they, in fact, have to attend night classes rather than day classes.

I want to talk a little bit about the community colleges and the concern I have that there is no longer the autonomy left with the community colleges to decide on the kinds of courses they can offer. The original concept was that those colleges could, in consultation with the local authorities and with the local people involved, provide the kinds of courses, with assistance from the provincial sector, to meet the local needs. But there seem to be more and more strings being attached, Mr. Chairman. There is more and more earmarking of what the budgetary moneys are for. I am concerned about the loss of local autonomy in those community colleges.

I'm also concerned about the way in which we are deciding on our apprenticeship programmes. As the minister is well aware - and certainly in Malaspina College with which I am familiar - there are two sources of applicants to those apprentice programmes. They allocate 50 per cent of the openings to Canada Manpower, and 50 per cent is filled through the B.C. Ministry of Labour's apprenticeship programme.

Those two different programmes have entirely different criteria for selection. Canada Manpower simply sets up a minimum standard and anyone who reaches that minimum standard gets their name on the list; then they simply go down the list in chronological order to fill the number of slots that are available. I understand the apprenticeship programme under the Ministry of Labour - and I note the Minister of Labour (Hon. Mr. Williams) is listening with great interest - is on a basis of t o p -notch abilities, the likelihood of getting employment, the one most qualified. It's a single-shot deal. Once you're on there, you're either accepted or not. If you want to be considered again you have to re-apply and be re-assessed and so on

So there are two different sources feeding into this programme with two entirely different standards. Unfortunately, there's a great lack of planning and co-ordination regarding whether or not the programmes being offered are really the programmes that do have jobs available once the training is completed.

The number of people who are taken into these programmes is based on the capacity of the college -the number of students they can take in a given programme. It does not seem to have very much to do with whether or not there are jobs available once those apprentices are trained.

I have a letter here which I received some time ago, as a matter of fact. I don't know whether this person has now found a job because I haven't been able to check back with them. It's the same story that's going on, and I think it's an example that indicates what is happening. In this particular instance this woman writes that her husband was

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receiving unemployment insurance. He continued to go to Canada Manpower here in Victoria looking for work.

Canada Manpower offered him - he didn't ask - a six-month course in welding at Camosun College. He was offered this and supposedly there was going to be a huge demand for welders in British Columbia. He agreed to take the course. It was a full-time, eight-hour evening course. He diligently applied himself to the course; he went five nights a week. In order to do this it was necessary to get an extra vehicle for him to get there because his wife was working and she also required a vehicle. All through the course he and his classmates were tantalized with tales of how much money they were going to make, how they were really going to have a good job and be all set.

The course was completed in March, 1976. Once this particular person graduated he went once and sometimes twice a day to the union hall to try to sign up for work in this much-demanded field of welding. After three weeks he was taken on at Yarrows shipyard. He was thrilled. There was a small child in the family; they had lived on the training allowance, which is a very limited allowance. Now he had a job! It lasted three weeks. Then he was laid off along with the rest of his classmates who had also been hired. Since that time until the time of writing this letter, which was a few months ago, he had still not been able to get a job at welding.

Now this is a big investment to put into people like this. We pay them an allowance - small, granted. We pay their tuition. We do lots of things to help these people. But we're training them for jobs that aren't there. It's false encouragement; it's just not good enough. We need to get some more planning so that we are training those people for jobs that are available. It has to be long-term planning, Mr. Chairman. It has to look at the total concept of where we are going.

There has been a great deal of discussion on the floor of this Legislature and throughout this province on environmental concerns. We're heading in a direction where we are going to need people trained in those areas. If we are talking about sewage treatment facilities, for example, we're going to need specialists in the field of water treatment to do those kinds of jobs. We're going to have to look ahead and decide and plan in that direction so we do have positions available for these people once they have completed these apprenticeships that we encourage them to take.

It's very false hope to encourage people to take this training and hold out the incentive that there is going to be a job at the end of the training, and then find that there is no job in three weeks or something. That is just not where it really should be in the field of providing a livelihood for them and their family after they have taken this training. With those remarks I would hope that the minister would be prepared to reply.

MRS. P.J. JORDAN (North Okanagan): I'll try not to be very long because I know the House is anxious to get the minister's estimates through. He's been giving such excellent comments and replies.

I have been asked to mention to the member for Cowichan-Malahat (Mrs. Wallace) from the member for Omineca (Mr. Kempf) that they're crying for welders in the north, which brings up the very significant point that we have to recognize that it's simply impossible for the people of British Columbia to guarantee all jobs of all specific interests and professions in all areas of the province at all times. It's still incumbent - I think the members will agree - upon individuals when they choose a vocation or profession to recognize that from time to time in their life, if they want to pursue that specific vocation and profession, they are going to have to move around the province, particularly in areas like heavy-duty welding.

I would say, because I have a vested interest, that physicians as well are going to learn that they may have to move around the province. But I don't think that we should give young people the impression that there is any guarantee of a job or that society has a responsibility to guarantee them the job. In the location that they choose, it's a matter of trying to provide the climate and the training opportunity for those people to make a choice and then for that type of job, hopefully, to be available most of the time within the province as a whole.

Mr. Chairman, I had one or two points that I wanted to make. I don't intend to go into great detail and quote a lot of statistics, and if I'm repeating anything that happened in the House when I was away today, I apologize and will immediately move from that subject, but I would like to mention for a moment the problem of the gifted or exceptional child in school. There is much concern for the child who needs remedial help, and certainly many suggestions have been made, but the gifted child in our school has a peculiar difficulty: first in that they have not always been totally identified across the province, although there is now a volunteer organization working in this area; and secondly the difficulty of meeting this type of a commitment within the school system. I would like to suggest to the minister that we have an overview of this problem - not with a view to implementing programmes necessarily within the school, but to go to a contractual approach, hopefully within the community, utilizing benefits that already exist.

It's been said that in medicine, for example, in the medical schools today they don't count on the top five students to produce a physician. Usually you

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have one student of a very high IQ who will ultimately end up with some form of emotional problem - the tendency for suicide is higher in these areas. One might retreat into a very remote type of specialization in research. You look to the next level for your producing researchers, producing physicians and those who are going to meet the need of the commitment of that particular profession.

In analysing those thoughts one has to recognize that often people with a very high IQ - the exceptional students - may be advancing well beyond their years in one sphere but may be very, very far behind in another sphere. Often these people have interpersonal problems - they have difficulty relating and are often quite ill at ease socially. So in trying to meet their needs within the school we should examine each student on an individual basis. In order to enrich their programme, if they seem to be relatively equal in terms of their development with the other students, then they might be through contract taken into a surveyor's office where they would learn other skills that don't necessarily relate to what their own particular bent would seem to be. If they are reasonably well-rounded in their personality and compatible with their age, then they might go into an area of occupation on a two-hour basis within their area to advance the skills they already have.

In other words, we would look to a three-pronged approach through contracts within the community: (1) to develop a broader approach to their skills; (2) to complement the academic skills that they're already interested in; (3) to examine their personality and put them in an area where you might be able to help them develop this side of their overall character in order that their academic skills don't advance too far ahead of their personality abilities.

I can't see that it's justified to try to incorporate all these programmes within the schools, and 1 think to look to a contractual area, which might even be through some teachers. . . . There may be teachers within the system who have an ability to relate to the private sector or to government and who might wish to form their own small company whose responsibility would in fact be to help develop this type of training programme for exceptional students.

I'd like to touch just for a moment on teacher training. I recognize that this is a matter that is very much of interest to the universities themselves and is a prerogative that they consider very much their own. 1 wouldn't take exception to that, except that I believe we must recognize that teachers have a very important role to play in developing future attitudes and future capabilities of the children in our school district as well as the adults, and that the selection of these people is extremely important. 1 really would like to see a total overview of academic teacher training in our province, but I'll leave that for the moment.

I think we have to address ourselves to a more intensive screening programme for young people who want to enter the teaching profession at the early stages of their entry into that training programme. This should be done in a positive way, not a negative way. If a young person wants to go teaching and is borderline, then obviously we shouldn't be encouraging them into this profession. We should be trying to encourage them into some other. I think that if they're even two-thirds of the way through their training programme, if they show signs of not really being able to cope with the situation emotionally or don't have the skills, then we should do everything possible to channel them into another area of interest.

I also feel in this area that somehow we have to overcome this idea that if you can't do anything else you should go into teaching, or that teaching is an easy route where you get a good income and lots of time off. This is tending to attract people who might well serve a greater use to society and to themselves in another profession and may in fact be very damaging to the teaching profession itself.

There is a need for overviewing teacher effectiveness and skills within the school system. Again, this should be done on the basis of a positive approach, not a negative approach. I believe we have to recognize and come to grips with the fact that a person who is a very effective teacher the first few years of her life may in fact not be effective in the later years of her life, and that's not peculiar to teaching. We should have a co-ordinated programme between the federal government - likely Canada Manpower - the provincial government and the B.C. Teachers Federation where there is an overview of the effectiveness and skills of a teacher.

, If in fact they're not willing or able or are growing tired of the performance of their job, then it should be a matter of honour to help them find another form of vocation or training or profession or a means of earning their livelihood. It tends to be looked on as a disgrace now if a teacher drops out, as it does in many other professions, when in fact that teacher who is dropping out might require more courage to do that and also may be doing a greater service.

1 believe if we could look at this in a positive way, if we could come up with avenues of alternates for them, we would be helping many people who today are teaching and after 10 years would really like to do something else but feel locked in by pension plans. All of us have some difficulty in trying to strike out in a new area after a secure period. 1 would hope the minister would give this some consideration.

Again, and I've spoken on this before, 1 would like to see in the contractual' negotiations between teachers and school boards less emphasis on a dollar return and certainly more emphasis on fringe

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benefits. One of the fringe benefits 1 feel there should be is an option to take a leave of absence perhaps every seven years. I'm not talking about sabbaticals. 1 don't believe that these should be a year away with pay. They should be a year in which they would maintain their fringe benefits and maintain their seniority in terms of the system but have an opportunity to work at another job. It might be ditch-digging, it might be driving a Cat, it might be practising law - any number of things. They could refresh themselves to allow themselves to step back and take another view and a less pressured view of the province and our country. I believe the majority of them would come back to teaching with a new approach, probably more enthusiasm for their job of teaching and also with new skills that they had acquired. If they want to just lie on a hill and look at the stars, then that should be acceptable too and there would be no complaint from the public because in fact they wouldn't be being paid while they're away.

I'm sure much has been said during the afternoon on education opportunities for women so I won't say too much there. 1 would like to suggest that 1 believe there is a need for a women's co-ordinator or a co-ordinator of women's studies. I am not convinced that this should be a full-time position. I would like to see it entered into on a contractual basis again, for a six-month period with an option to renew for a year. This person, in my view, should direct her attention to the college and the adult education level. We've met the needs of many women in this area in terms of some programming and we have had an excellent response around the province from women who want to upgrade their skills or who just want to take part in an educational programme, or a young woman who feels she wants to get out of an evening. She's quite happy at home, she has her family, but she wants to be involved in the educational scene.

What 1 suggest is that there are many women out there who haven't been reached yet, and who are the more difficult to reach. We've skimmed the top of the easy ones. Now we have the job of reaching those who, for one reason or another, can't come forward. It might be their own feelings of insecurity, they may be uncomfortable in education, or they may have unhappy recollections of their days at school. There are still mental blocks to educational institutions; I'm sure we are all aware of that.

1 believe this person should not be a highly academic person. He or she should have a good training and background but I believe also be very practical. They have to be able to relate to all types of women and women of all interests, particularly those who are in the home and those who have been in a job for years and don't quite know how to step out and move ahead. They should also be able to relate to the older single women. 1 suppose one shouldn't stress "single" because there are a lot of women in their 40s, 50s, and perhaps early 60s, who are married but who would like to go into the employment field or who would like to take college programmes. We must reach them.

I believe there must be more emphasis placed on employment training programmes for the older woman - the woman who is 40 to 45, 50 to 55. They simply have nowhere to go at this time. If they try to work through Canada Manpower they are considered too old. They have no experience and no skills. They tend to filter into the work force and often become very competent in their jobs, but because they have no background training and no little pieces of paper and are not as aggressive as perhaps their sisters or brothers are, they tend to get the lower-paid jobs or are underpaid for what they do.

I would ask the minister to set up a special person to liaise with Canada Manpower, and with the colleges and the vocational schools, to direct themselves to this particular problem. It has been a cry we have heard for years and years and years. Many of us have spoken about it, but it is a cry that has never been answered. The first time it was really answered was when the deputy minister, Dr. Hardwick, speaking for the minister about six months ago, listed four major areas of concern in education for those in need. One was the area of women, and he made particular reference to the older woman. The response to this comment was very dramatic. That should be the evidence that we need, as a government and as a ministry, to recognize that there is this need out there. It is not a vocal need. It doesn't identify with the Status of Women and it doesn't identify with action groups. That is why it is there - because it hasn't got that ability to identify. I would urge the minister to look into that matter.

The other thing I would just like to say is that these programmes for women don't necessarily have to be heavily financed. They are often more in need of just a little bit of seed money which can be given through adult education or through the colleges themselves. There is a tendency, and I say this with the greatest respect for the academic interests within the college areas, to see academia take priority over what in fact is the initial intent of a regional college, which is to respond to the community and the needs within that community, whether they are academic or not.

The last point I'd like to make, Mr. Chairman, is that through the years there has been a great deal of assistance given to students in all areas to help with their training. I'm not a person who believes in free education right down the line. I feel there has to be individual initiative. In the area of textbooks and equipment, the students going to vocational schools and colleges have an advantage in that their textbooks and equipment are generally supplied. Students going

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to the universities don't have this benefit.

I did some calculation on this about a year and a half ago, and I believe it came out to a sum of about $200,000 that would be needed to assist students in the universities with the cost of their textbooks. Often they can make the money for their tuition and their accommodation and their entertainment, and then suddenly, out of the blue, comes that ghastly bill for their textbooks. That is just the straw that breaks the camel's back. I don't feel that it would cost the ministry a great deal and I do believe it would be of benefit to the students. It is one way of recognizing the initiative that they do show. It is a very costly initiative in achieving a higher education in the academic world.

MR. G. MUSSALLEM (Dewdney): Mr. Chairman, I listened with a great deal of pleasure to the hon. member for North Okanagan and I commend her for what she said. I still remember a very fine booklet she put out when she was a member of the executive council some years ago. It was called "Women and the Law." I think it was an excellent booklet and I commend it to all in this House. I think it should be revised and reproduced. It was very worthwhile. I take this opportunity of asking for it again.

I rise in my place, Mr. Chairman, to address you and to say that there is one great gap in our educational system. I'm not qualified to speak on it in depth; I recognize that.

MR. D.G. COCKE (New Westminster): Yes, you are - more than anybody I know.

MR. MUSSALLEM: But the gap is there, nevertheless, and the gap stands around the fact that we are oriented in this province - and I'm sure many other provinces and jurisdictions are - to purely academics. Therein lies the failure of our system because 80 per cent of our children will not be academically inclined; 80 per cent will rarely see university. Yet our whole system is geared to these. Every mother's son and daughter is aimed at the university door because it has status. I certainly believe, and I think the time is well nigh here, when we should recognize that the factor of status should not be the issue in education but the factor of making a living should be.

On this issue I ask the Ministry of Education to make a turnaround to the point where they will gear the system to the 80 per cent and not to the 20 per cent. How do we do this? The way is simple. It is almost a complete contradiction to the hon. member for Comox (Ms. Sanford) . In my opinion, it is done by making the effort through the high schools in our province - somewhere along the line, which capable people have to judge - of training all our people with mechanical or productive skills.

A mention was made of welding. Yes, let's have lots of welders, many more than we need. They don't have to be welders but that person has a skill. They could be in electronics or in appliance repair or horseshoeing or any of these things - auto mechanics or body repairs or the hundreds of, mechanical jobs and earning jobs that can be done, and which we could arm our children with. They could say: "I'm ready for a job. I am able to do a job." It gives them pride and distinction.

But with that job we have no status. "How far did you go in school?" If they have gone to grade 12 they say quietly: "Grade 12." If it is before grade 12, they would sooner not tell you because it has no status. Some of our leading businessmen and some of our leading people in this country did not even reach grades 10 or 11. We want to bring status to the system but not necessarily to the degree.

1 suggest to the hon. minister - and 1 think this is the time I should be saying it to him - that we should take it upon ourselves to develop practical training for all our children who will take the training. Let the 20 per cent of the academics go on if they wish. We need the researchers; we need the doctors and dentists; we need all these people, yes. But they are such a small group of our society. We should need them and make it great for them. But we must gear our system to the 80 per cent who will not go into these great halls of learning.

I appeal to him now, and I think it is high time, to develop the system within our system of taking care and teaching all our children practical skills. When that day comes, we will not come to the point where, when we build a pipeline, we'll be scurrying all over the world looking for welders. If we build a factory that requires special skills, we import the technicians from the United States or from Ontario, when they should be here. They're not here. And why aren't they here? Because we never trained them. We need them now. The cycle goes up and the cycle goes down but we can never plan for it.

In my constituency there is an excellent programme going on - heavy machinery training - in connection with Pacific College. The only trouble with it is that we've trained too few there. That's a great programme but it's a closed programme. You get in there only for certain reasons. I will not enumerate them now. But that should be wide open to everyone who wants to take the training. I commend the minister on Pacific College. It will be a great college, but it must be expanded and we must, above all - and this is the key to what 1 say -somehow have a diploma or parchment when that person or child leaves our schooling system. Wherever the child should leave, he should have some kind of a status, a parchment that he can hang on the wall, so that he can say: "I have attained this part of my education. 1 am capable in this score. Hang it on

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the wall." Because you'll see an engineer, and there many of them ...

MR. COCKE: Are you training people to deal with bankruptcies, George?

MR. MUSSALLEM: We're not training them to deal with bankruptcies.' No. But we train them not to be in bankruptcy when they are capable and able. Bankruptcies are caused, if I may tell my honourable friend, by wishful thinking, by careless forecasting, by the lack of understanding and by misfortune. All these cause bankruptcies and they should not be sneered at. My sympathy goes out to persons in bankruptcy. It is a sad time in a person's life and it is a thing that we should not jest about. A person who is bankrupt is 10 times as bad as a man losing his job. Imagine - jesting about a bankruptcy! You do not jest about that.

But I say we should give our people and our children something to hang on the wall, no matter where they leave school at; something which they can be proud of. It doesn't have to be an engineer. Why an engineer? My son has an engineer's certificate; he's very proud of it. But why shouldn't he be just as proud of a welding certificate had he only gone to high school? My brother is a lawyer. He's very proud of putting his parchment up. Why should he be that proud of it? Why is it necessary to attain this high goal of going to university?

MR. G.V. LAUK (Vancouver Centre): Don't attack your brother. He's a fine man.

MR. MUSSALLEM: I'll attack him. I told him one day that we should have lay judges. I said it in this House. He wrote me back and what do you think he said to me? He said: "George, you're rattling like a bunch of loose axe handles." That was his letter to me.

However, I want to tell you that we have to give status to degrees lesser than a university education. We should encourage this status because people will work and drive for status but they are not proud of attainment. A doctor has a parchment. Yes, he's worthy of it, of course, but why must it be only doctors and lawyers and engineers? Why them? Why only researchers? I say that we must make a turn-around in our educational system and give status to the ordinary people of our country. Give status to the men and women who cannot attain that high academic level,

I pose this to you: we're a peculiar society because when somebody can add and subtract rapidly, because they can do academics with skill, suddenly these are the brains. I'm telling you, a workman is just as intelligent. A radio repairman is just as intelligent. A carpenter is just as intelligent. You ask a researcher to mitre a joint and see what happens. It would be some joint. You see, it requires a different intelligence, a different stage in the mind. Yes, we laugh. We say: "Yes, but an academic has got brains." What are we talking about? Oh, yes, they have brains, but what I'm saying here is that most people have brains. There's nothing unusual about that, but everyone ...

AN HON. MEMBER: Some politicians excepted!

MR. MUSSALLEM: ... is a little different.

Interjections.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please, hon. members, I am interested in what the member has to say.

MR. MUSSALLEM: Yes, I hope you are listening, Mr. Chairman. Everyone is a little different. What we must give status to is the less-than-university degree.

I say to the minister now, let us move along these lines.

MRS. E.E. DAILLY (Burnaby North): I want to assure the member for Dewdney, who just spoke, that we were not laughing. As a matter of fact, I think he was making some very good points. I really do. If I may carry on just briefly, I think the point he was making about treating everyone according to their own abilities and their own talents and their own values is what the whole school system should be based upon, from kindergarten right through. I certainly agree entirely with that member in that respect.

I would like to get down to some very specific questions to the Minister of Education. My first question specifically deals with the $80 million announcement. Now I note that back in February, in the spring session, when the budget came down, during the budget debate the Minister of Education, in discussing the provincial budget in relation to his share as the Education minister - and I'd like to read back his remarks at that time - stated: "There is enough money in the provincial budget to develop practical new concepts in post-secondary education, making special reference to technical and vocational training."

Therefore, when the budget came down, Mr. Chairman, the minister informed the House that this new budget which he presented, and which we're now dealing with in his estimates, provided enough money for this new vocational plan of which he has yet to explain the specifics to the House. My question to the minister is simply this: if your budget, when you drew up your estimates, specifically provided for this new vocational programming which you are intending to move upon, why then do you want the $80 million

[ Page 3892 ]

for this new programme in addition when you actually stated the money was already put into your budget?

I think you owe it to the members here, and to the school trustees and the teachers, to explain why you are taking the $80 million and putting it on top of this budget which you already said had enough money in it to provide for your new programme. I think we deserve an answer from the minister on that - a very specific answer. We are not going to go over old ground again from yesterday, Mr. Chairman, but I think it's quite clear that the school trustees of this province feel they have a right to a share of that money. I also believe that they have. I don't see why you are putting this on top of this additional expenditure which you had already provided for.

I'll be awaiting with interest the minister's explanation. If you're going to use another $80 million on top of this extra amount in the budget, I think you also then - and this comes to my next question, Mr. Chairman - owe it to the members of this House, and to all those who are interested in the educational process and your programmes, to say just exactly what this master plan is which has been announced very carefully and which the public has been told could be controversial. It's a master new plan for upgrading vocational programming throughout the province, and yet no one knows anything about it. The school trustees have not been consulted. As far as I know, the community colleges have not.

I hope the minister when he stands up will be able to tell us that he has had consultation, that he isn't moving on a personal whim of his and that he will spell out to the House tonight exactly what this new plan is.

After all, we're debating his estimates. It's difficult to pass his estimates when he doesn't explain his policies in detail. Apparently the money is in the estimates and yet we are being asked to vote for something that we don't even know what we're voting on, Mr. Chairman. We certainly intend to wait a considerable length of time to get some of these answers from the minister. Those are the first two questions on which I'd be very interested to hear the minister's reply - vocational training, the money, and what you're planning to do.

There's another area, Mr. Chairman, to the hon. minister, that I'd like to discuss and pose a question about, and it's in the whole area of teacher certification and teacher training, which of course is something which, I think, we all agree is of great importance. We understand there was a study, and we know it was an in-house, internal study which has taken place in his ministry. I believe when the minister was questioned about it quite a number of months ago, he seemed to imply he knew very little about it. Well, the months have passed and I'm sure by now he has checked up to find what is going on in his ministry, particularly in this vital area of teacher training. I think we'd be most interested, Mr. Chairman, to have the minister explain to us tonight exactly what his and his ministry's plans are in this area of teacher training.

From what 1 can understand from the internal report - the little bit we've been able to pick up on our own, because it certainly wasn't made available to me personally anyway - I understand it is quite a change in the whole area of teacher training. It has the universities concerned, it has the teachers concerned and I'm certainly sure the trustees are also concerned because they have not had an input as far as 1 know. So 1 hope the minister will be able to tell the House just what his plans are in this whole area of teacher training.

I'm particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, that this minister, despite what he said earlier this afternoon, does not seem to be consulting. 1 won't say he doesn't "seem" - he is not consulting with the major groups of this province who are so vitally concerned with the decisions in education. I think it's very sad, because there was a major attempt to involve people and to involve the trustees and the .teachers, the home and school, community college associations and other interested groups in major decisions. Yet to date we don't see too much of that taking place. We understand there have been meetings. The minister says, "I've met, others have met, " but we're not talking about just meeting. We're talking about sitting down and discussing what your ideas are. Then, of course, as a minister, it's your responsibility to make the decision. We understand that. But surely you can place before these major groups some of your ideas. Yet to date most of them have been left in the dark. So 1 hope the minister will stand up tonight and tell us what programme he has in mind, if any, for changes in the whole area of teacher training and certification.

The next question 1 have, Mr. Chairman, is back to the basic estimates and the moneys which we see allocated for various sectors of the minister's ministry. The question I would like to ask the minister is: Are there any moneys listed in the educational estimates before us to take care of the new legislation that the government hopes to put through this House which will involve assisting independent or private schools in this province? I don't see how we can very well analyse this budget of the minister's and make decisions on whether we approve or disapprove of the moneys which are to be spent unless the minister can inform us if there are any specific moneys in his estimates for the implementation of Bill 33. When the minister answers this - which I certainly expect him to - I'm asking if there are any moneys at all in his departmental estimates which will be used for the implementation of this legislation if it is passed.

[ Page 3893 ]

The other question I have for the minister tonight is on the matter of the recent problems which took place in Trail and Courtenay over the arbitration procedures. I know the minister and his deputy are well aware of that because of the frustration which took place, the frustration of the actual arbitration procedure which is laid out in the Public Schools Act. I'm sure that the minister and his deputy were not too happy with those situations there and I'm simply asking the question: Are you planning to bring about some revisions in the Public Schools Act so that we do not find such a situation developing again in the school districts?

I have a number of other questions for the minister but as I think the ones I have posed might take a considerable time for him to answer, I would very much like to sit down now and hear some replies from the minister.

HON. P.L. McGEER (Minister of Education): Mr. Chairman, in answering some of the members I will have to go back fairly far this afternoon and try and catch up on a good many hours of comments from the opposition.

~ I'd like to start by going all the way back to the member for Oak Bay (Mr. Wallace) , and I'm sorry he's not here right at the moment.

MR. G.S. WALLACE (Oak Bay): I'm small, but I didn't know I was that small.

HON. MR. McGEER: Oh, yes he is! My apologies.

I regret to say that there is no job description for counsellors in our schools. That is a most unhappy state of affairs. At the present time Mr. Carter of our ministry is chairing a committee on counselling. It is a major deficiency.

I am sorry that I can't do a great deal for the member with respect to correspondence he had had with principals and superintendents in Burnaby. Unfortunately, these people are not employees of the Ministry of Education; they are employees of the school board of that area. It is one of these shared responsibilities that the ministry has with local school boards. They become the employers of the teachers and all the supervisory personnel, with the single exception of the superintendents where, in large districts, they are locally employed and in smaller districts they are employees of the public service. In the case of Burnaby, both the individuals the member mentioned are employees of the local school board.

With respect to the actual material that he referred to, I am aware of the fact that in a number of our schools absolute garbage is being offered through these counselling classes. I want you to know it distresses me every bit as much as it distresses the member- Where the ministry's advice is asked on matters such as this - it is my understanding some of it comes from, of all places, professors of education at UBC - we advise people to reject it, not to include it in their courses and not to answer the questions. Unfortunately, we do not control - as the members opposite have on many occasions urged us not to control - what goes on in classrooms every minute of every day. There are these local options.

If you are going to have meaningful roles for trustees, as the member for New Westminster (Mr. Cocke) eloquently recommended earlier today, then of course you have to have local options. We say through the core curriculum there are these things that must be learned, and I suppose by that we really mean it must be taught because we are quite aware of the fact that everybody can't learn at the same speed. Finally you get down to those things which a local school district may offer at its option.

As a ministry we certainly make no bones about material that we consider garbage. I would include this with it. If our advice is asked, we'll give it. We will specify those things that we consider to be essential and hard-core. We will continue to offer the opportunity for local school districts to exercise their judgment and for local school boards to exercise their local autonomy. We have no intention of emasculating school boards and trustees. We have every intention of consulting them fully, as both the members for New Westminster (Mr. Cocke) and Burnaby North (Mrs. Dailly) have suggested.

The member for Comox (Ms. Sanford) asked about North Island College and she predicted the answer I would give, namely that the employees of North Island College are employees of the local college council. I have met with both the North Island College council and the people who would like to be the faculty. I think you've got to leave it on that basis because, as you know, North Island College has not seen fit to establish permanent, continuing faculty in that area. That is simply something that has to be worked out between the college councillors and the people they hire.

It would be inappropriate for the ministry to attempt to deal with all the college faculty in every one of the 14 colleges in British Columbia. That is what you have local college councils for. We have it set up - and this is nothing that was invented by this government - whereby local school districts have an opportunity to appoint people to the local college councils and where the ministry appoints some of the members.

I know that the member for Comox recommended to me a year ago an individual who should be appointed to the council. I think it was an excellent recommendation and she was appointed. We appoint some and they come from the local school boards. They just have to make those decisions. As I see it, if we attempted to interfere, we would make it worse rather than better.

[ Page 3894 ]

The member for Cowichan (Mrs. Wallace) talked about learning disabilities, and we have a task force in the ministry that is looking into that question at the present time. We agree that it's an important aspect of our total educational programme that has to be dealt with. I can assure you that it is nothing which is being overlooked in any way.

It seems to me there were some other questions that you dealt with but I can't find them.

[Mr. Veitch in the chair.]

AN HON. MEMBER: She was talking about the free tuition for 12 years.

HON. MR. McGEER: Well, certainly we agree with that as a very sound suggestion.

That was a very eloquent plea on the part of the member for Maple Ridge with regard to all those loose axe handles in our courts. I want to assure the member that the approach of the ministry is exactly as he suggests. We want to take every youngster and give him a marketable skill as a sort of duty, if you like, of the Ministry of Education before they seek their fortunes in the world.

I quite agree with the member that the academic side has been overvalued and overemphasized. I would like to say something to the member, and I can say this as a former academic and perhaps get away with it. So much is done in the academic line and so little in the marketable skill line because teaching the academic line is much easier. It really is. Therefore you can go ahead and discuss how it was in the time of Socrates, teach medieval history and so on, and it doesn't change. And really, that's relatively easy to do. You'll find that if you just make money available for education helter-skelter you can expand all those sort of things without any trouble at all. But when it comes down to providing hard skills for people - the sorts of programmes that we hope to get started in Haney in a bigger way - it really is much more difficult.

It won't all come this year, I'm sorry to say to the member for Burnaby North (Mrs. Dailly) . That's going to be spread over a period of time. But we said quite clearly that we want this to be made available for precisely the purpose of expanding the skill areas so that people, when they finish the programme, can get out and find a job.

I want to tell you that the hard part is not finding the students to do it or finding jobs for the students who've done it; it's getting people to teach those skills and to break down the resistance that you always run into when there are jobs waiting at the end of the line. It's a prize, and for that reason it's just not quite as simple to organize as it is to double a class in English or history or. mathematics or whatever it might be. I agree with the member for Maple Ridge.

That was a very fine book on women in the law; I agree with the member for North Okanagan (Mrs. Jordan) wholeheartedly about the need for us to give a little bit more challenge to the gifted youngster, just as we've got to give special educational attention to the youngster who has a learning disability. She made a suggestion about the possibility of allowing them to develop in their community by programmes outside of school where they might work in the community. All I can say to that kind of a suggestion is: hear, hear! We do have one programme in the Victoria area which takes youngsters out of high school and gives them a work experience programme so that they spend some of their time working and some of their time attending school. If there were any way that we could expand that programme in every community in British Columbia right into the high school years, it would be a tremendous advance.

Some of the most successful programmes we have in our universities do precisely this. In the University of Victoria, for example, they've got what they call co-operative programmes between university and industry in chemistry, math and physics. But there is no reason why it couldn't go right down to carpentry, autobody mechanics and so on. I would passionately hope that we could develop more of those programmes in our high schools.

We are considering the idea of developing a school-leaving certificate at the end of grade 10 so that people can have their little achievement to put up on the wall. But after that, we recognize that we're beginning to get much more serious about providing these marketable skills. If they remain on in high school or if they get on to specialized programmes that are much more practical, if that's the direction they're going to take; or if they go into things like an international baccalaureate or advanced academic standing if they're going on to university for those who want to take another route....

Whether it's one or the other, what we are attempting to do is to get good articulation between the final years of our secondary school and our post-secondary system - that is, the technical institutes, the universities, the colleges, and so on -so that People don't waste years re-inventing the wheel, in an academic sense, and there's plenty of that today. This is why I made a speech about a year ago - saying that we had to get on with this - which, I'm afraid, was widely misinterpreted in the press. Nevertheless, we have had these articulation committees working in this past year. I think that we'll be seeing substantial results from that effort in the next few months.

In our post-secondary system, we are keen to emphasize pre-employment programmes, which is another way of saying we want to give people a chance to learn a skill so that they can get out there and not only be an employee for someone else, but

[ Page 3895 ]

better yet, be a self-employed person. Even better yet, if we can organize our educational programmes just a little bit better, they can be employers. Nothing would be of greater pride or benefit, as far as the educational system is concerned, than to graduate employers. That's the greatest thing we could do. It takes just a little bit of extra effort in the way of imparting skills. As everyone knows, a much larger percentage of people in our population have got the instincts....

MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. minister, could you turn your mike around a little more? Hansard is not recording all of it.

HON. MR. McGEER: That's very disappointing to hear.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I don't think that means that you start over again. (Laughter.)

HON. MR. McGEER: Mr. Chairman, just to recap this last little part, which perhaps is worth saving for a little bit, if we're able in the way in which we teach people to give them the kinds of skills that would allow them to be employers and thus provide jobs for others, we'd have made a tremendous advance in education.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. minister, could you pull the microphone up towards you more, please?

HON. MR. McGEER: I'm sorry I'm having trouble with this little part because 1 think it might be of great benefit to my friends opposite here in the socialist party, to say that if we could only find a way in education of teaching people to be employers, that would be the greatest thing that we could do. In our population there are far more people who have the native skill to employ others, to be employers, to provide jobs and to stimulate the economy than take advantage of those inherent abilities. If there is a fault with our system that leads to unemployment, it's the fact that we are not teaching our youngsters to be employers.

So that's what our pre-employment programme is going to try and emphasize. This is where part of that $80 million that we managed to get from Ottawa will be spent. The member for Burnaby North (Mrs. Dailly) asked for the complete plan to be laid out. Mr. Chairman, I'm sure you would interrupt me if 1 were to spend the rest of the evening going into all, the details of all the plans of the Ministry of Education. 1 just want to give a little bit of a soupcon here and there to the member for Burnaby North, assuring her that we're going to use this money to teach people to employ others; to get on with pre-employment programmes; to stress marketable skills; to upgrade all of our post-secondary programmes; to improve the articulation system between secondary and post-secondary; and to help with in-service training of teachers. Yes, Madam Member, we are giving careful consideration to the problem of teacher training. We think that there could well be improvements in the system.

I agree with the member for North Okanagan (Mrs. Jordan) that selection is an important part of this. As a former teacher herself, the member for Burnaby North will know that there is something that can't be measured in marks on examinations. In being a teacher there's that inherent skill and instinct in it all that makes the great teacher. Selection is important, and perhaps not enough attention has been paid to that in the last few years.

We are giving consideration to the programme, and obviously all of the things that we do in the way of reform in the educational system will be done with consultation on the part of the teachers and the trustees. That's why I meet with them, not every day, but at opportune intervals. The deputy minister meets with them regularly once a month to bring them abreast of the thinking of the ministry and to get the benefit of their views. That will be a continuing and, we hope, very fruitful method of consultation. I think it's going to bring good results.

Naturally we're very pleased, as 1 said yesterday, to have this little extra money from the federal government. We wish it were all at once. We wish it were possible to do all the things that we want to do in education and still give the tax benefit that the school trustees are so anxious to have. But, Mr. Chairman, if we were to accept the proposition of the school trustees and merely take all of the money we get from Ottawa and put it into tax reductions, then you can imagine how far we would get in our pleas to get further adjustments in the matter of moneys for post-secondary education.

While we're very pleased, and 1 might say more than a little proud, in this ministry for having brought into the educational system in British Columbia, this year alone, $100 million more than was originally anticipated, 1 remember the people opposite scoffing at us a year ago when we said we were going to attempt to get some of this money. We're pleased that it's here. We wish it could be all at once. We think that if we were to follow the school trustees, that would be the end of our efforts to recover even more from Ottawa, besides the fact that we would be short-changing the students of British Columbia.

It seems to me the member for Burnaby North (Mrs. Dailly) asked one other question about arbitrations and the money for the independent schools. First of all, on 'the independent schools, no, there's no money in the budget for this. Money for independent schools will be in the budget next year.

[ Page 3896 ]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. minister, that is covered by legislation and, as such, is not acceptable in Committee of Supply.

HON. MR. McGEER: Finally, on the arbitration procedure and the problems that occurred in Trail and Comox, the member asked if I was unhappy about this. The answer is: you bet I am. I'm dreadfully unhappy about it, and 1 hope that problem never ever occurs again. We'll be keeping a very close eye on it.

MR. CHAIRMAN: 1 have the honour to report that you are being received loud and clear by Hansard.

MR. COCKE: Mr. Chairman, I think Hansard and the rest of the House, and those who are interested in the gallery, would like an interpretation of what the minister said. I think I can do that relatively succinctly. He doesn't know where the hell he's going.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Oh, oh!

MR. COCKE: That's precisely what he stood up and said. He doesn't know what he's going to do with the $80 million. He doesn't know what he's going to do about anything that he was asked about. I've never seen such a dreadful performance from that member and that minister in my life. What rubbish! We asked him a few simple questions - just a few simple questions - and he gets up and he dances around. What does he say? We're going to teach people to employ others. What a wishy-washy, nothing statement! It's impressive, you know, for those on that side of the House who feel they're marvellous entrepreneurs. If that's the case, why aren't they back entrepreneuring instead of sitting in here?

Mr. Chairman, first and foremost, I'd like to see the minister stand up and say how he's going to solve the unemployment problem that we have today with his education process - employ others. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. You know, 1 do respect the minister for having had some native skills and intelligence, but he certainly didn't exhibit any of those tonight. 1 know that he's suffering a fair amount of paranoia because of certain things that have been going on around him, but I surely expected much more.

Well, Mr. Chairman, the minister told us that there will be money for the inspector and his staff in next year's budget. I'm not going to suggest where the inspector might be found. Maybe by the time we get around to that notorious bill we'll all know a little bit more about that.

I would like to ask some other questions. I would like to ask, Mr. Chairman, whether the minister has any plans regarding declining enrolment. What are your plans within the ministry to deal with this enrolment in terms of efficient use of staff? What about retraining? The minister suggested earlier today a problem in this respect. It would strike me that the minister should stand up tonight and tell us what he is going to do about this particularly important area.

There is declining enrolment in some areas. I understand in Prince George there is still an increasing enrolment. There are some other areas like Delta where there are increasing enrolments. But in New Westminster we had the largest high school in the province in terms of numbers of kids. It was a short while ago, and I'm am not sure if it still is. I was hoping that no other high school that big would ever be built. I've been watching it lately and there has been a declining enrolment not only in the elementary, which is probably across the province, but declining enrolment in secondary as well.

That brings us to the problem. Is he going to tell us what the ministry is thinking in those terms and what they might be thinking of with respect to dealing with the problems that are obviously going to confront the ministry? He's going to have problems about empty classrooms and empty schools. He's going to have problems around the need for retraining departmental staff and he's also going to have a problem with respect to distribution of teachers, et cetera.

There are another few areas that I would like to cover also, Mr. Chairman. One is about teacher certification training. What are the minister's plans with respect to the certification and training of teachers? We've heard some vague suggestions and I'd like to hear some specifics with respect to that particular area.

I would also like to hear the minister express himself on the federal AIB programme. One of these days, before too long, I am told, the Anti-Inflation Board and the anti-inflation programme in the country is to be phased out. For that matter, it may terminate within the next few months. If and when it terminates, what will happen to collective bargaining for the teachers? Specifically, what will happen to collective bargaining rights of teachers? I think it is important.

There are grave concerns out there, teachers having heard reports from the minister and others that would indicate to them that their situation isn't quite as secure in this respect and this area as they would like to see it. I'd like the minister to specifically assure the House that there are no major revisions planned at the present in collective bargaining for teachers. For teachers particularly, who have submitted to compulsory arbitration and have been treated as they have been from time to time by the ministry and some school districts, it is a bit much because they have gone a lot further than the trade

[ Page 3897 ]

union movement in that respect. I am not suggesting that it's right, wrong or indifferent, but they have a tougher programme that they have taken on themselves than most other groups within our society that are thoroughly organized. These people are well organized. So depending on where you stand, you certainly must respect that.

I also would like to know, Mr. Chairman, whether there has been any discussion around the Public Schools Act. Would the minister provide some indication of the nature of the revisions to the Public Schools Act that he alluded to when he was talking about some revisions? Are they major or minor revisions that are coming up?

The minister might answer: "I can't talk about legislation." I'm not asking you to be specific about that; I understand that you can't. I would ask you whether or not they are major revisions that you contemplate. Will those revisions, before they are made, be discussed with the BCTF and the BCSTA? That is important. They are two major bodies of education which I believe have not been consulted by the minister in the last while the way the minister would like us to understand or like us to feel. I believe that there has not been nearly enough consultation. So I would like the minister to answer that question.

What about the special certification requirement for teachers of the hearing-impaired? The minister was telling us that whether we like it or not he is going to decentralize the programme. You all heard what I had to say about the Jericho Hill School. Incidentally, I was completely supportive of the Prince George. and Kamloops operations. If the minister is going to continue his decentralization process, what will be the certification requirements?

I understand that not too long ago a teacher was moved because that teacher didn't have the requirements. They are still looking for a teacher with the requirements and nobody seems to know what those requirements are. I would hope that the minister might be able to tell us something about the qualifications that he is looking for.

Those are a few questions, Mr. Chairman, Knowing the minister's habits and the fact that he likes to get a number of questions in a row, I would just like to give him an opportunity to answer those few and then I have some other things that I would like to ask him about on other matters. I think there is a lineup there for you. Maybe the minister can answer a few of them.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. minister, before you stand it is the duty of the Chair to advise you that in Committee of Supply we cannot discuss legislation, matters involving legislation or matters requiring legislation.

MR. COCKE: Oh, for heaven's sake! Honestly! You're not talking to a two-year-old.

HON. MR. McGEER: Mr. Chairman, I certainly respect your ruling on that, though 1 must say to the Hon. member, Mr. Chairman, through you, that the B.C. Teachers Federation and the B.C. School Trustees Association each year have a shopping list of changes that they would like to have made in the Act. We take their wishes very seriously into consideration in any judgments that the government might make about opening that particular Act. As you know, we have been so long on estimates this year that it has been hard to get to legislation.

MR. COCKE: You haven't been able to put it together. Come on, Pat!

HON. MR. MeGEER: Whether or not we'll be able to get to all the pieces of legislation that the government would wish to discuss this year is still an open question.

With regard to the declining enrolment problem which everyone recognizes is now upon us in the school system, we've commissioned the Educational Research Institute of B.C. to develop a plan for dealing with it. We have used a number of the districts as models and have already alluded this afternoon to what we anticipate to be quite vigorous competition between schools in the future as the neighbourhoods decline in population and you have to decide which school you are going to go to. There are 57 vacancies at this school and 122 vacancies at that school, Then there is the Boundary community school. This is a classic example of the dilemma the ministry is going to face. I don't think that is going to go away.

It may not be quite as much of a problem with respect to teachers, Mr. Chairman, because there is a 10 per cent attrition each year. A lot of people drop out so that there usually are jobs for all of the teachers who wish to apply. We do have an oversupply in places like Vancouver and Victoria simply because the people don't like to go up country. There is an exception in the case of teachers of the handicapped because we simply haven't been graduating enough from our universities to take care of that need. We are short this year of something like 10 teachers of the deaf that we hope to be able to find by the fall. Mr. Gittins of our ministry is working very hard to locate these people. If anybody knows where they can be found there are jobs available in British Columbia.

When it comes to teaching the handicapped, your costs per student go way up because the ministry, 1 think appropriately, is very generous in the amounts of money that it spends. Certainly at Jericho Hill School the costs per student are roughly 10 times the

[ Page 3898 ]

cost of the student in the public school system. A lot of money is invested in these people and 1 think it is well invested. We are short of teachers of the deaf. We hope to be able to satisfy the requirement by September. We're not so short of teachers for the regular students. While the average teacher may grow older in future years as the population declines, there certainly should be jobs available for all those who wish to continue teaching.

MR. COCKE: Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the. minister for providing those scant answers to a few questions.

1 was amused when the minister said that they can't get around to legislation because the estimates have gone on so long. The only thing that saved the government any kind of face at all has been the fact that we have carried the estimates on, and we had to do that in order that the government didn't fall flat on its buttocks. They can't get their legislation ready; they can't put their act together. Talk to the Attorney-General some time. He must be having terrible trouble in those legislative committee meetings. They just can't bring that legislation down the pipe. We think we might be here forever, Hansard. We might be standing here talking forever, waiting for them to produce their legislation. What a government! Ugh!

Anyway, Mr. Chairman, I notice that the minister didn't deal with my question on the qualifications of our teachers for the deaf. 1 suspect, however that you might find some of the teachers of those teachers coming out of John Gilbert's classes in UBC. The way he's been handled over the last number of years -he's been given virtually nothing to work with - I'd be quite concerned about where we're going in that regard. The Kiwanis or the Kinsmen gave him a grant to continue on with his programme. It's really shameful the way some of these education programmes are handled at UBC.

Mr. Chairman, I know that this question has been discussed over and over and over, but I would just like to deal a little bit with "core" and PLAP. I love the sound of PLAP - provincial learning assessment programme. In the first place, the minister brought out a little green book, good Social Credit colours, and the green booklet was guidelines. I suggest that much of what it said in the booklet was motherhood, or parenthood.... I shouldn't be too sexist about this thing - I'll call it parenthood.

I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, that some of the things that have been said about this situation have best been said by some of our letter writers. I noted one recently that I was particularly interested in. This was written in February. I just want to quote a little bit of it. I'll tell you right off the bat that it's from teachers at Charles Dickens Elementary School. The very first thing they said about it was:---The centre of attention on curriculum rather than children." I think that's a very important statement. I often think that in our fuzzy thinking around education we neglect to think about the children and we think in terms of what we are doing and what we're providing and lose the theme of everything that we set out to do.

I think "core" as such is very difficult to criticize, but I suggest it bodes ill not so much for what it contains as for what it fails to contain.

MR. L.B. KAHL (Esquimalt): Who wrote your speech?

MR. J.J. KEMPF (Omineca): Yvonne.

MR. COCKE: Yvonne did. Does that satisfy you?

MR. KEMPF: It sounds like her quality.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please! The hon. member for New Westminster has the floor.

MR. COCKE: Mr. Chairman, I love those bright remarks that come from that comer. It teaches us an important lesson: that one should suffer ignorance from time to time.

Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that what "core" does, if I can understand it.... I know really a lot of what the minister's talking about is PR, but what his booklets provide is that they underline the wrong skills to a great extent - learning by rote as opposed to learning to think. There's a stress on knowledge and not enough on thinking. Mr. Chairman, I fear rote learning to a certain extent. I know some of it must be done, but if you'll look at the booklet, pages 26 and 27 are the only areas in that booklet that I can see that deal with thinking skills, and a little bit on page 30 deals with physical education. So, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest basically that the core is in place now, and what we should be doing in the Ministry of Education is encouraging competence in teaching of the thinking skills. I really think that's important.

Mr. Chairman, I suggest that the core booklet and those meetings didn't provide for much input. The minister sent out a press release just the other day with a great deal of excitement, I presume in anticipation of his estimates coming up. Core curriculum goals endorsed - 13,584 responses, 63 per cent of which were so positive he was excited to death. Okay, fine. But, Mr. Chairman, that really doesn't impress me that much. I think the whole question is something that probably is being oversold. The minister is trying to ignore some of the real problems we have in education by offering this kind of panacea.

I am concerned about the provincial learning assessment programme - not quite as concerned as I

[ Page 3899 ]

would be if I thought the minister had money enough to finance it. But I really don't think he has; I don't think he's going to be able to insist upon a testing programme across the province. If he does, he's going to have to also pay people to mark those tests, and I just don't know where he's going to find the bucks. So having said that, I do have some concern about this kind of programme that we "enjoyed" in the '50s. I'll never forget a discussion that I had with a teacher who was relatively new to the country and relatively new to education. He told me that when he went to his new school in B.C. he was told by some of the staff members: "Now look, you're going to be teaching and we're going to be testing for the first while." Well, of course, he did that just beautifully. He taught to test. He said that all during that period of his becoming accepted, he was half the teacher he was later. Teaching chemistry - pretty easy to teach to test. But he didn't teach people to go out and search for new knowledge; he didn't teach them the important history of chemistry; he didn't give them an opportunity to really learn and really advance their learning skills. Once he became free of this burden, he became twice the teacher, and the young people that he taught became twice the students.

MR. KAHL: How do you know?

MR. COCKE: That member, Mr. Chairman, would never understand. The best thing that ever happened to the education system in our province was his election. The best thing that ever happened.

MR. KAHL: Sick joke.

MR. COCKE: It took him out of the school system and gave the children some relief for a short while.

Mr. Chairman, I have some concerns about the programme, and I know there are some differences. I'd like to bring to your attention one of those differences. I saw not long ago an article in The Vancouver Sun by the deputy minister, Walter Hardwick:

"The province is headed, the critics tell us, for large-scale standardized tests where teachers will be preparing their students to memorize mountains of data, much of it trivial, which will be forgotten within weeks. This is patently not the case."

Then, by happenstance, I happened to be reading an article in The Province, just about the same time. The article in The Province says:

"McGeer noted that by using standardized tests, the ministry hoped to create a body of knowledge about student performance over the years. But teacher Timothy Trivett of Westridge school read from a letter he received last month from J.T. McBurney, assistant superintendent, educational programmes. It said: 'There are no plans for standardized tests in the school.'

" 'Does that mean that people running the ministry don't know what they're talking about asked Trivett.

" 'Yes, said McGeer, 'that's what I'm saying about this; they're saying there will be no standardized tests.' "

They're having difficulty putting their act together. Is it any wonder, when the minister is so involved in ICBC, so concerned about the member for Coquitlam (Mr. Kerster) , so worried about the Minister of Health (Hon. Mr. McClelland) and hospitals, that he has no time for education? I'm concerned for that poor Minister of Education.

MR. L. NICOLSON (Nelson-Creston): I'd like to ask the minister a few brief questions. I'd like to know, first of all, what the minister feels about the physical environment and atmosphere in the direction in which the architecture of our schools and such should go in the next few years.

I'm thinking in terms of trends which are partially motivated by the energy crisis and the desire to save on energy costs. Recognizing that the minister has said that maybe decreasing school enrolments is one of our major problems and we won't be building as many schools, it seems inevitable that we will still be building new schools in the expanding suburb areas while the suburbs of the '50s, such as Gilmore Avenue School in Vancouver . Heights.... I understand - and this was two years ago - that it has a population of about 19 or 20 pupils per available classroom, while there were students on shift maybe out in Coquitlam where there were crowding conditions and a need for expansion. In the suburbia of the '50s, with which some of us are familiar, the school populations had shrunk but there will still be need in terms of renovation of schools. Renovations go on and modifications to some of these older buildings take place.

I would like to know, very definitively, what the minister feels in terms of the windowless classroom. They're now talking about building schools underground in some places - at an underground level - to save energy, which, I think, is a very good motivation. But some of the atmosphere in the environment which is created for children and teachers in a place where they have to spend so many hours of the day.... I would hope the minister would make a definitive statement against the concept of the windowless schools or these schools where there is no visual access to the outside. I think they are absolutely inhuman and a terrible environment.

Also, on the trend toward excessive fluorescent lighting: the minister, of course, mostly travels by

[ Page 3900 ]

AirWest. But if he ever had occasion to maybe be out at the Victoria airport at 6 o'clock in the morning, he would note that with about 10 fluorescent lightbulbs on, there is a good level of illumination for reading. But because it was recently renovated, there are now 280 fluorescent lightbulbs up there, and at about 6:30 in the morning when the CARA shop opens up and everything really comes alive at the airport, they turn on the rest of the lights. It's absolutely blinding and can cause some distress unless your eyes accommodate themselves to it.

Fluorescent lighting is, you know.... Whenever a renovation is done, softer incandescent lights, which provide enough illumination, are almost always replaced by fluorescent lighting. In replacing them they usually use very poor ballasts and these ballasts buzz and maybe the minister has had that experience in some lecture hall out at UBC of this type of thing. I know that for myself, I often found it necessary to climb up on a desk and turn off the fluorescent lights, such as they are, because of such ballastings. I've also seen these things burst into flame in one instance in a classroom, so it could be a fire hazard.

But the main point in terms of this physical environment - I would really like to know what the minister feels in terms of the concept of the windowless school, because it is something we have to address ourselves to. Some of the motivation behind it in terms of conservation of energy is very good but I believe there has to be a better way. I know that windows of any kind, even double seal, are energy inefficient, but I think that in schools this is one of the areas where we should continue to have some kind of a visual access with the outside as well.

I would also like to make a few comments on external examinations and on the concept of scholarship exams, This is a private opinion and I expressed it to the minister last year and I would like some response. There was a change made - to motivate students to take English a little more seriously, I suppose - and it's required that students writing scholarship exams all have to write an English exam as part of that. If they don't qualify in that, they don't qualify - period. J said last year in these estimates that I believe this to be ethnically discriminatory.

There are many second-generation Canadian children who come from these same homes. We were talking about the difficulties which are expressed in the elementary school levels. In the elementary schools, these children experience difficulties because the first language at home is some language other than English. I can personally.... Well, I can say that at the school in which I taught for one year, two-thirds of my class in physics qualified for some government assistance under the high school scholarship programme. Now I understand that at that same school - in the entire school - only about two or three students qualified last year. Part of it is because it takes so much more time and part of it certainly is because of this requirement for English. Indeed, many of the people who required financial assistance.... I think this change probably came in when we were government. I'm just saying it's been there. We've seen what's happened.

I could ask the minister to go back and say how many high school students were assisted. I'm not going to ask for those figures tonight, but one could ask for those figures. How many were assisted by high school scholarship exams in the years going back to 1969, 1 suppose? I'm not going to ask that question, but I can assure this House.... I would say it's probably less than 10 per cent of what it was five or six years ago in terms of the numbers of people helped. The degree to which they are helped could be another question.

There was a philosophy that English is very important, but if this minister would think of some of the greats of science there certainly were the Renaissance people who were proficient not only in English but also in many other foreign languages. There were people like Thomas Young, who deciphered the Rosetta Stone in addition to making discoveries in physics and in medicine and discovering the original formulae for the correction of astigmatism and various other things. This was the complete Renaissance person - people like Gauss.

There were others in history who were outstanding but were not perhaps complete and gifted in every sense. They were people who might have had trouble communicating. I see today many young people who, usually because of some ethnic background.... I'll give a stereotype, and I hope I don't offend anybody. I certainly don't intend to do that. Let's take a stereotype of a second generation Chinese boy or girl in high school. It has been my experience that they tend to excel in mathematics and the sciences. They do tend to have difficulty - although not all of them certainly; some of them also excel in English, but a good number and I would say even the majority - in English, at least to the degree that if they are an A student in maths and sciences, they might be a C+ student in English. I just don't see it as fair - and this is a personal opinion - that English should be required to this extent. I understand it still is in discussing this with teachers from both Nelson and Prince George just recently.

[Mr. Schroeder in the chair.]

I would also like to go further on the area of external examinations at the grade 12 level. I would suggest to the minister that a great number of teachers in the senior grades are wondering whether or not a return to external examination would not be in order. Now this might not be popularly held by

[ Page 3901 ]

people who teach in the humanities and such subjects as social studies and English, but certainly talking to many of my colleagues in mathematics and the sciences, there seems to be a little bit of concern and a desire to kind of check up on standards. A great number of teachers aren't unwilling to have something externally imposed upon them. It is a pet thing of mine and I raise it at every opportunity I have to talk with one of my former colleagues. I know that it's costly, and I would say that government started getting out of this many years ago, back in the 1960s.

One of the first moves was to move toward strictly objective testing, multiple-choice tests. Of course, they are rather bad. They are bad because the items were not pre-tested. Their validity and reliability were not established. They were just sort of one-time, one-shot tests and the questions themselves often had many inherent contradictions. They were just poor as opposed to standardized tests that have stood the test of time. In order to test achievement in our school system I just don't see how the multiple-choice test could work. It does mean going back to marking a certain number of students who aren't recommended and setting some kinds of standards.

I think, too, there's a lot of concern about discipline and self-discipline. I don't think that all the answers and all the alternatives are there as yet. It would impose some degree of self-discipline for both teacher, and certainly for student, in terms of the ultimate test of some kind of external evaluation. This could possibly be the absolute wrong way to go in the humanities, but I suggest very strongly that this should be there in terms of mathematics and science.

It doesn't mean that teachers have to teach to the exam for the whole year. I used to mark exams every year and I met a great number of colleagues from around the province at that time. Most of the people did not look upon it as something they had to do all year, but certainly we might have concentrated on exams in the last couple of weeks. That was good because, Mr. Chairman, when you concentrate those last couple of weeks it sort of recalls everything that happened during the year.

Today there is nothing to tie it all together and there isn't that motivation for the overview. In fact, I really don't know what is done in the last couple of weeks of school today, because previously there was an examination period and marking going on. Today the students are still released a couple of weeks before the actual official last day of school. Whatever remains to be done is done at any rate. In fact, some of the odious chores, such as keeping registers, have been removed. I would like the minister to comment on that.

In terms of core, I must say to the minister I attended a meeting put on at the invitation of the school and the principal, I would say about 50 people showed up, including the member for Oak Bay (Mr. Wallace) . I didn't notice the member for Esquimalt (Mr. Kahl) at that meeting. If you have only had about 15,000 or 16,000 responses I would guess, from the people that I talked to, that there was fairly good attendance at these core meetings. Perhaps with a school with 500 students a turnout of 50 parents is not too good, But if one were to multiply that by all the students throughout the province, I would suggest that there would be many, many more times the number of persons attending the core meeting than there were responses sent in.

I would suggest to the minister that people were somewhat confused. First of all, because of the publicity that preceded core, people had the mistaken notion that there was not some sort of a core curriculum, something written down, something engraved if not in stone at least on paper. They were rather surprised when they came in to find the course outlines. When they started thumbing through the course outlines they found them quite specific and detailed as to the aims and objectives and where the students were expected to be at the beginning of a particular day and where they were supposed to end up in the various subjects. In fact, if you read the curriculum outlines in the secondary grades, they are possibly even more specific.

One of the persons present pointed out that in reading the core pamphlet it reminded him of reading hunting regulations, where you get the nicely illustrated, very readable and very attractive hunting regulations. But those are not the regulations that are actually passed and that are really the law of the land. They have been written up to be more readable, but they aren't the real letter of the law. He was wondering about the hidden agenda.

I can accept almost all of what was said in the core curriculum; I don't find too much there that I quarrel with. But what does that give you a mandate to do? I suggest to the minister that it leaves him really just where he started from. Indeed, just about all of the things suggested in the core pamphlet already existed.

There was some rather interesting debate in the meeting I attended. I talked with people who attended two meetings in Nelson and people who had attended other meetings in Victoria and Vancouver. Certainly it would appear to me that a great number of people attended those meetings, but I don't think that you got 10 per cent response from the people who actually attended the meetings. A great number of people went away very confused and wondering what it was all about after really seriously trying to engage in some kind of discussion. People came away with the idea that you could read into it whatever you wanted to. If you were a traditionalist, you could read into it traditional directions and values. If you were a progressive I suppose you could even read that into it.

[ Page 3902 ]

1 would also like to put in a plug to the minister. He mentioned the other day the business of total-immersion French schools and I think that is excellent. I would also like the minister to consider....

Interjection.

MR. NICOLSON: Yes Bill, he said that. That's what I read. Maybe he was misquoted.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to see the minister give really full support to the Doukhobor people in terms of offering - I don't say necessarily total-immersion Russian - Russian at the elementary grades. Steps have been taken and it has started. There are programmes in certain parts of the Kootenays and Grand Forks. I would like to see it go further and that these people be able to retain their language's culture.

Certainly I will say that the Doukhobor people are not people who are locked in time. If you want to see a couple of the most progressive sawmills in British Columbia you can go see the ones owned by Klesnikoff brothers or Hadakan brothers and you'll see a couple of really first-grade, technologically up-to-date sawmills. If you want to meet people that are in the forefront of the credit union movement, the Doukhobor people have always, since they came here, been very technologically innovative. They built the original crossing of the Kootenay River at Brilliant - a suspension bridge which still stands today although it's been superseded by a more modern structure. I don't think there's any threat of the Russians becoming a country within a country -the Doukhobor people. They are certainly part of Canada and a group of people that I am very proud to represent a great number of.

I would like to see them given an opportunity to have extended Russian courses in the school system. We have many Russian teachers who are capable of giving this instruction.

I'd also at this time like to put in a plug for physical education being carried through to the grade 12 level. It's always struck me as a serious deficiency in our education programme that we insist that children take a physical education that increases in vigour up to grade 11, and then it is absolutely cut off in grade 12. 1 think the students would be better capable of ~studying if they were in a better physical frame of mind, just as many members go and play squash, jog, cycle or do something in order to keep a balance between the mental and physical rigours that are imposed upon them. So I'd like some comment from the minister about the possibility of instituting compulsory grade 12 physical education.

I know that a lot of grade 12 students elect to take community rec, and this is towards lifetime sports and avocations and things which people will carry on long after they've given up sports such as basketball and so on. That's very good. It introduces them to things in our area such as mountain-climbing techniques - they learn to rappel. They learn to ski if they've never had the opportunity to before. That's a very good programme.

1 do think that some physical education should continue right through. It used to be compulsory for the first two years of university and it seemed a ridiculous gap when it wasn't required in grade 12.

These are the questions which I have. 1 would like some expression from the minister on the concept of windowless schools and on the problem of what 1 consider the overuse of fluorescent lighting in schools - two physical things in the schools.

Scholarship exams. Make them a little bit more enticing, frankly, to the students. 1 had three-quarters of my class that qualified - well, one or two more might have written it. Today in that same school under the present conditions, only one or two people in the school are even bothering to write any more. I'm not saying that trend happened just overnight, either.

On the core programme, 1 don't expect the minister to respond to that really. But he may if he wishes.

Departmental exams. I'd like some real consideration of going back to departmental exams. I'd suggest the minister get into a dialogue with some of the teaching profession. You certainly will have to get by some of the so-called spokesmen in the teaching profession. You have to get right to the teachers on it.

Russian education for people in the Kootenay area 1 know is going on right now but can be expanded in grade 12 physical education.

MR. C. BARBER (Victoria): Mr. Chairman, if the minister would care to reply at this moment I'd be happy to yield to him. Do you want to do that? No?

MR. CHAIRMAN: The member for Victoria has the floor. Please proceed.

MR. BARBER: I've been doing more of my readings from the past lately, and have recently enjoyed the opportunity of going through Politics in Paradise, a book by one Patrick McGeer.

MS. R. BROWN (Vancouver-Burrard): He'll never write again.

MR. BARBER: I propose to demonstrate, if 1 may, Mr. Chairman, one of this minister's principal problems. He is totally lopsided. He has no balance. There is no reconciliation. Nothing is even or level at all. The man is a veritable Quasimodo of the education world, Mr. Chairman. 1 have been reading

[ Page 3903 ]

in his book his statements about education. 1 have been reading in his book the statements of a man whose view of education is wholly elitist and wholly prejudiced in favour of a scientific research establishment, itself prejudiced in favour of a corporate and commercial enterprise which the minister seems to think is the only and proper justification of education, as he views it.

1 have been reading Politics in Paradise and 1 haven't liked everything I've read. I must admit, Mr. Chairman, I've enjoyed the parts where he's attacked 'people like Evan Wolfe - I'm just quoting names from the book - and Bill Bennett, junior and senior. I'm just reading names from the book and not referring to their positions, Mr. Chairman. I have enjoyed the parts where he's attacked his present colleagues. That's been lots of fun. Later on more readings from the past will demonstrate what I'm leading to.

However, 1 would like, if 1 may, Mr. Chairman, to read just a couple of paragraphs into the record to add weight to my contention that this minister apparently understands not at all the value of a broad and subtle, truly liberal education.

MR. CHAIRMAN: 1 would like to remind the hon. member that vote 158 has to do with the administrative responsibility of the Minister of Education. The topics for discussion do not include those items which were spoken or were in existence before he took office. As long as the member keeps that in mind and makes his statements brief that will be fine.

MR. BARBER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 1 don't want you to think that this is a plug for the minister's book. 1 wouldn't want anyone listening to me tonight to think that I'm plugging Politics in Paradise, available from Peter Mar-tin Associates at $7.95. 1 wouldn't like anyone to think that I'm encouraging people to go back and read the minister's book, even though it might be great fun should they do so.

What I'm trying to determine is this minister's educational philosophy. What 1 propose, Mr. Chairman, is that it's just possible that this book is a far more honest statement of his personal philosophy than anything which corporately his government may be saying about education. So I'd like to read a couple of paragraphs. It won't be very long and I'm sure the minister will remember them. What 1 propose to demonstrate, Mr. Chairman, is the total, lopsided, off-balanced, unbalanced, Quasimodo-like attitude of this minister in favour of one very narrow, esoteric, specialist and elitist view of education. It's all in his book, Mr. Chairman. It's all here in black and white.

He says on page 12:

"Government policies must be devised to encourage Canadian corporate teams so they can develop and produce sophisticated products comparable to those produced by the great corporate teams in other nations. If there is no national policy in this field, a British Columbia government must produce one that will work for this province alone.

"The way to start is with a science city. The University Endowment Lands surrounding the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver are an ideal location for such a centre. A comparable development exists in Palo Alto, California, adjacent to Stanford University, and has done much to thrust that area of the world into the glamour industries of this new age. The science city would be the initial attraction for groups interested in technological development. They would be able to work with a greatly expanded B.C. Research Council and the technological and training facilities of the University of British Columbia and our other universities. They would also have the benefit of any future government laboratories which would have access to the site."

He goes on to quote from his own maiden address when a Liberal. You may remember he was once a Liberal. Once again demonstrating in his obvious and transparent way the totally lopsided approach he takes to public education in this province, he said the following:

"Canada, with the United States, led the world in pioneering universal literacy. North America's wealth grew from it. Now, in Canada, we have lost our courage to make full use of the power of education. Has there ever been in the history of the world an investment by the state which guarantees a surer return than the education of its people? Can we in British Columbia fail to qualify for admission to the new age of technology?"

Departing from the quote for a moment, see, Mr. Chairman, how this man's philosophy begins to move from an apparently ideal abstraction about a generalized public education and the value of universal literacy into once again his specific, biased, prejudiced, lopsided, unbalanced commitment to his elitist view of scientific research as being the only apparent interest he has in education.

He continues, in his maiden speech:

"Must we continue to fall back upon our present policy of disposing of our unprocessed primary products and, as ownership slips from our grasp, blame foreign countries who supply the skills we have failed to cultivate? Dr. MacDonald invites us to unlock the power in the minds of our youth. There is no mystery in his proposal. If you educate young men and women in the sciences, if you provide them

[ Page 3904 ]

with some laboratory facilities and freedom to exercise their agile and inquisitive minds, they will invariably advance man's skill and knowledge, and in so doing will uncover rich new fields for commerce and industry."

Mr. Chairman, these readings from the past demonstrate what the minister's actions in the present have already concluded. He has no interest in a broad, liberal education. He has no understanding whatever of the subtle and subterranean value of understanding broadly and generally how the world works, how one thinks logically and scientifically within it, and feels sensitively and poetically about the state of the world.

To the contrary, Mr. Chairman, this minister's whole conditioning and career have led him to a total predisposition towards a very narrow view of science and a very specific aspect of scientific research. His speech opening his own estimates demonstrated that, Mr. Chairman. His total takeover of the Ministry of Health in its research establishment demonstrates that. His public statements since becoming Minister of Education demonstrate this hopeless lopsided, unbalanced and quite illiberal commitment to a most elitist education indeed.

AN HON. MEMBER: Hear, hear!

MS. BROWN: He should be condemned to an arts faculty.

MR. BARBER: It seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that the minister is failing miserably, but predictably, in the commitment that he should be exercising to a genuinely public and liberal education in the province of British Columbia.

The minister seems to feel that the goals of commerce and industry are somehow the goals of education. The minister seems to feel that the object of logic is to further the proceeds of commerce and trade. The minister seems to feel that the highest object in one's life is somehow to obtain a job in a science city somewhere at the University of British Columbia, and to convert that energy and that thinking into further assets in the armament of big business and big industry in North America.

Nowhere in this book, as I've been able to read it so far, Mr. Chairman, and nowhere in the minister's speeches to date in this House, have we heard any sensitive, imaginative, thoughtful commitment to a liberal education. To the contrary, the man has over and over again displayed an elitist, private-school attitude to one specific aspect of a scientific education that the minister seems to feel, if carried out in his famed and hoped-for science city, will lead to the advancement of industry and commerce.

Now I think, Mr. Chairman, it would be worthwhile to put to the minister some proposals for broadening his own education. I wouldn't recommend to him, Mr. Chairman, that he simply go back and reread his own book. His ears would be blushing red for hours and hours if he did so. But I would recommend some amendments to his own direction as Minister of Education.

HON. MR. McGEER: I understand we were reading about the big corporate donations to the NDP in the newspaper tonight.

MR. BARBER: I would recommend some changes that could be made in the Ministry of Education's role, and I would make three specific suggestions right now, Mr. Chairman, for overcoming the hopelessly lopsided and Quasimodo-like approach this minister has taken.

First of all, 1 want to talk about music education, Mr. Chairman. 1 recently attended the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Music Educators. At that particular conference I was enormously impressed by the achievements of our American neighbours to the south. In the states of Washington, Oregon and California represented at this conference....

MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please, hon. members. If the first member for Vancouver Centre (Mr. Lauk) wishes to make a speech, let him stand in his place and be recognized.

AN HON. MEMBER: Hear, hear!

MR. BARBER: I was impressed, Mr. Chairman by the quality and the learnedness of those American states' commitment to musical education for young people in their public school system.

As it happens, Mr. Chairman, 1 played the violin and the piano and have studied composition and conducting. My musical education began when 1 was eight. I appreciated the opportunity then present in our public schools to learn some of the rudiments of theory, composition and conducting. and indeed to pick up the instruments which I now enjoy playing.

What I've seen in my own life, Mr. Chairman, over the last 15 or 20 years is the deterioration of a systematic, thoughtful, profound and exciting opportunity for musical education in this province. I've heard nothing whatever from the Minister of Education regarding the value of music. 1 want to propose, Mr. Chairman, that this minister might well engage his own department in a study of at least three or four of the American states which have pioneered some of the most extraordinary, effective, demanding, disciplining and productive musical education programmes that 1 or any of my friends in the musical professions have ever seen and enjoyed.

They've learned some things about how to inspire

[ Page 3905 ]

young people. They've learned some things about how to involve their parents. They've learned some things about how to involve the community and obtain its support. They've learned that you don't have to simply rely on the taxpayer for financial support for these programmes because they've been able to rely on business and trade unions and on community groups and foundations.

In many American states, Mr. Chairman, where they have a commitment to the value of music as an expression of humanity and truthfulness and genius, and where that commitment is exercised in the public schools, they've taken some marvelously bold, innovative and vigorous new approaches. We've seen nothing of the kind in British Columbia, Mr. Chairman.

It was an absolute embarrassment to attend this conference and realize how little the province of British Columbia does to promote a musical education in our schools. It was an embarrassment to stand and meet musical educators from the United States and hear from them the commitment of facilities, of instruments by rent or by gift to their students of music, books and texts of music itself, and of first-rate teachers that they have and we don't have at all.

It was absolutely embarrassing, Mr. Chairman, to realize that in this province we are throwing away the potential talent and experience and expression of some of the best musicians we might ever have heard. Mr. Chairman, music is the most honest language in the world. You can't fool with it; you can't cheat with it; you can't mess around with it and be ambiguous and have double meanings in the sense of it. Music is the most honest language human beings possess, which may explain its particular success in crossing borders, in diminishing fear, in bringing man and woman together as brother and sister across the whole circle of nations.

Music is an extremely important expression of our faith and our hope that men can live together without hostility and anger and prejudice because they may look a little different, sound a little different and speak a little different. Music overcomes all those fears and those boundaries, and it breaks down all that false sense of trespass. Music is one of the most civilizing forces on the planet. It's truthful and authentic, and it must not be overlooked.

To the contrary, it must be encouraged by a government that, hopefully, believes in the value of a musical education as an extremely important element of a liberal education. There lie within our schools the Mozarts, the Haydns, the Schumanns and the Schuberts of our century. The young Mozarts, who at the age of 3 were playing the cymbalo and the clavier and at the age of 6 were writing string quartets and at the age of 12 had composed their first symphony and at 13, their first concerto, and here in our school system if we but discover and support them. The young Mozarts are here and they are being overlooked because of the failure of our system to identify and encourage them.

Who remembers the name of the Premier of any state in Austria when Mozart was alive? No one. Who remembers the name of a president or prime minister in any of those European countries when Beethoven and Liszt were alive? No one. But we remember the achievements of those geniuses and those achievements will endure forever.

It is the responsibility of this minister through the public education system of this province to identify, to energize, to excite, to train, to discipline and to thrill young people who have a musical capacity. No one will remember in 50 years hence the name of this Minister of Education or of our Leader of the Opposition, and probably no one will care. But they may remember if we discovered a Brahms in our school system this year or if we discovered a young woman or a young man who had the heart and the talent and the genius and the inspiration to express themselves musically. That achievement will endure forever, if those people are given the chance.

1 want this minister to make a commitment to examine the musical education systems in the United States and further. having examined them, to determine how their success might best be replicated here. 1 want the minister to make a commitment to engage in a systematic redevelopment and restatement and improvement of musical education in our province so that it is, at the very least, the equal of anything our American neighbours to the south enjoy. 1 want this minister to tell us if he believes it is the case that a musical education is at least as important as a mathematical, a literary or a commercial education. Those are the achievements that abide forever. And if this minister doesn't recognize it - if this minister thinks a science city devoted to industry and commerce is somehow a reasonable substitute - then hopefully that minister will give it another thought.

The second proposal that 1 would make to the minister, Mr. Chairman - 1 think it is quite consistent with the first - is that the public school system does little to recognize, to encourage and to broaden the opportunities for the gifted children in our system.

I have been reading a book this week on the philosophy of mathematics. The minister might at least be interested in that aspect of the subject. 1 have been reading how the young Gauss, at the age of two and a half, was correcting his father's computations when his father was paying the labourers in his hire. At the age of seven, the young Gauss had begun to understand the theory of serial numbers. At the age of 12, the young Gauss had solved the riddle of the tortoise and the hare. At the age of 14, the young Gauss was questioning the tenets of Euclid. At the

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age of 2 1, the young Gauss was calculating the existence of the minor planet series by totally mathematical reasoning alone.

There are in our system today, Mr. Chairman, such gifted children as the young Gauss, the young Newton, the young Euclid and the young Archimedes. Once again, speaking of the public school system we seem terribly willing to spend a lot of money on an education which is, by the admission of most of its servants, pretty mediocre. When on those rare occasions the young geniuses come along, we make no provision for recognizing their gifts, for encouraging their energy in whatever field it may lie, and for allowing them the opportunity, with the rapidity and the skill they possess, to move ahead as quickly as possible in whatever field excites them.

I was talking with a teacher friend a few days ago about a young student presently in school in Vic West. This young student has already been advanced two grades and remains frustrated, enervated, tired, critical and angry. This young student, at the age of 9 going on 10, is enjoying a reading level of people who are 16 and 17. This student is bringing to school books that the teacher has never seen before; he is exercising an imagination and expressing a genius that our system appears incapable and unwilling to recognize. In this province, Mr. Chairman, we owe it to the most gifted young people we possess to give them an opportunity to demonstrate and improve and excite and make memorable those gifts.

I was in New York in May. I attended a concert at the Brooklyn High School of the Performing Arts. I discovered to my amazement, Mr. Chairman, that in New York City, where they have a commitment to identifying gifted children, they have two special high schools for those kids.

HON. R.S. BAWLF (Minister of Recreation and Conservation): Sort of like the Victoria Conservatory of Music.

MR. BARBER: One of them is a high school for young people interested in the performing, the theatrical, and the dramatic arts. Young people whose gifts are recognized early enough can, with the consent of their parents and the participation of their teachers, be channelled into a special high school for young people whose gifts lie in theatre, drama and the performing arts; whose gifts lie in dance and music. In Brooklyn, as well, they have a school for the plastic arts - for painting and sculpture. They have a special high school for the gifted young people in that system. Mr. Chairman, if in a school system as bankrupt financially, as racked by violence and decay and distress socially, as hopeless as a city like New York has become hopeless, they can still make provision for identifying the most gifted and talented of their young people, then surely in a smaller system, without those problems of decay and despair, we can do no less.

I'm not proposing that we have the assets the resources or the need for a special high school as they enjoy in Brooklyn for students of the performing arts. I am proposing, though, that there are opportunities through our regional college system and there are opportunities within the high school system as it exists now to identify and help those gifted young people.

This minister has an obligation, Mr. Chairman, to bring those gifts into the world to make them real. The minister has an obligation to employ all of those gifts in valuable and thrilling and exciting ways. I very much hope the minister might care to take some recognition of other programmes more successful than our own that have recognized the achievement and the potential of gifted young people.

Thirdly and lastly, Mr. Chairman, I want to propose that , the minister recognize one of the most outstanding successes of the previous administration, and give it breadth and give it support and give it the financial and technological assistance it needs.

One of the forums of education that recognizes some old principles and acts and some new initiatives in a very positive way is the forum of education that we've now called the community school. In British Columbia, in the last five years especially, we've seen spring up with spontaneity and wit and imagination a series of community schools. These schools have a number of important properties. They observe and increase and revivify the traditional value of community participation in education. They bring together the parents of those students, and sometimes the grandparents of those students, in the teaching environment.

Given the nature of the programme being undertaken, they bring into the classroom businessmen, they bring into the classroom professionals like doctors and lawyers, they bring into the classroom even the occasional politician. They have recognized the traditional value of involving young people with people from other walks of life and from other backgrounds in some of the most dramatically and vividly effective education that's going on anywhere in our public school system.

In James Bay, Mr. Chairman, we enjoy the presence of one of the most successful community schools of them all. This community school happily enjoys the support of its own school district, school district 61. The James Bay Community School received excellent support from the previous Minister of Education (Mrs. Dailly) . The James Bay Community School has involved the police in its teaching programmes, they've involved senior citizens in their teaching programmes. This school is open frequently from 8 o'clock in the morning till 10 or I I at night.

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This school involves in aspects and elements of education people who previously never thought the school was theirs. It involves people like you and me, Mr. Chairman, and it does so at no direct charge to the taxpayer because people like you and me, the police, the doctors, the lawyers, the dentists who come in, the senior citizens who teach chess, the sports enthusiasts who teach cycling, the people who get involved because a community school viewed as their own property, becomes their own pride, work for free. They work as volunteers. They work as people who believe in this theory and this philosophy of education.

It recognizes the value of intermingling young people with older people because they learn from that experience and they share in that wisdom. They recognize the value of involving the whole school, the whole community, as volunteers in the school system, and through the process and the philosophy of the community school deliver that kind of education per capita at a cost far less than one would have to pay were those services ever attempted to be contracted or somehow provided directly within the system.

The James Bay Community School is a thrilling example of a philosophy that recognizes some very old-fashioned and very important traditional values and takes some very exciting new initiatives and new action. 1 would ask the minister whether or not he has identified in his own mind some of those values, whether or not he accepts in his own mind some of those initiatives and whether or not he appreciates in his mind the value of some of that volunteer participation that we have in community schools throughout British Columbia. If he has made that recognition, will he support those schools? Will he support those schools with vigour? Will he support them with leadership? Will he support them with challenge? Will he test their capacity to the limit and then test it again? Will the minister exercise leadership in the creation of a very unique, very strangely effective and very traditional, in a quite special sense of the word, new school system that has grown up within the old?

As far as I am concerned, Mr. Chairman, the community school principle and the community school story is the story of an old-fashioned idea whose time has come again. It's an old-fashioned idea whose time has come again because what we've grown up with in the '50s and '60s simply doesn't serve in any human and sensitive way at all.

I think, Mr. Chairman, that it would be valuable if the minister might care to comment, at least briefly, on developing a musical education system that works and recognizes talent.

I hope he will comment on developing a system that recognizes the gifted children within our system and that allows those children to express their gifts as quickly and as powerfully as possible.

1 hope finally, Mr. Chairman, that the minister recognizes the value and the tradition and the volunteerism implicit in a community school and is willing to offer his support and his moral leadership in the expansion of those schools throughout the province of British Columbia. If he does any or all of those things, Mr. Chairman, I for one would be happy to consider voting for his salary at some time in the near future.

MS. K.E. SANFORD (Comox): I just wanted to remind the minister that when he was answering questions this afternoon he did not make mention of the training of preschool teachers which I had raised with him. Last year when I asked him about more involvement through the Ministry of Education in the education of those who were under the age of five, the minister indicated that there was no way the ministry could get involved at that time. But I was hoping, Mr. Chairman, that he would be able to give us some information or some indication that the ministry itself is prepared to take some action in ensuring that educational opportunities for very young children are improved in this province. That, of course, involves facilities, equipment and training of teachers as well as pay for those teachers.

I have one other brief question, and this relates to some information that we have all received from the alumni association of the University of British Columbia. One of the figures the alumni association has provided for us indicates that part of the research budget made available to the University of British Columbia is U.S. and foreign money. For the year 1976-77, 1 note that U.S. and foreign moneys made available for research at UBC is up over $1 million, some 6.9 per cent of the total moneys available.

What I would like to hear from the minister tonight is how this money is actually being spent in research at UBC. I hope he would have that information for us. I would like to know specifically whether or not any of this money might be provided through the Pentagon in the United States and whether any of the research conducted at UBC would in fact be used in perhaps the development of neutron bombs or bigger and better Tridents or perhaps something in terms of biological warfare. I would hate to think, Mr. Chairman, that research being conducted at our university in this province would in any way advance the kind of research that I know has been undertaken in the United States for this kind of weaponry. I really would like that assurance tonight.

HON. MR. McGEER: I can, I think, deal with the last question fairly simply. I don't think that the CIA is on the campus of our universities; I don't think the Pentagon is making a tool of UBC professors to come across some sly new form of biological warfare or to

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set up a Trident missile base right off the sands of Point Grey.

What usually happens with people who are applying for research grants to conduct basic research of various kinds is that they cast about for whatever agencies make money available. In the past, for example, I had lots of research grants from the United States from private foundations, from the National Science Foundation, the national institutes of health. People who undertake research apply for funds. Of course, everything that is discovered is public knowledge. If you don't publish it in journals, then you never get another grant.

MS. SANFORD: Does any money come from the United States or the Pentagon?

HON. MR. McGEER: From the United States Army? Oh, I wouldn't think so. Classified research of that kind is usually done on army bases or navy bases. They've their own basic research establishment.

Interjection.

HON. MR. McGEER: B.C. Research for the U.S. government? They may do toxicology research of one kind or another. We'd have to find out what the contracts were. Ocean research, yes, but not weapons research.

Pre-school teachers - that's something which is under the Ministry of Human Resources, not Education.

With respect to pleas from the member for Victoria (Mr. Barber) , we do make a few grants available from the Ministry of Education. They're not to parent groups or community groups; they're to groups that provide an educational service that extends beyond a single school district. We have applications from community music schools and it seems to me they're well deserving of support for their educational activities.

As far as the general community schools are concerned - for example, in James Bay or Bayswater, and so on - those are within a given school district and so they become funded by the school board itself.

The member for Nelson-Creston (Mr. Nicolson) asked about the architectural design of schools. He'll be pleased to know the ministry did break its sort of rules of thumb in supporting a school in Kamloops that will cost a little more than the average - that's the solar school. Because it was an novel thing and has the prospect of conserving energy, the ministry thought it was a good investment on an experimental basis.

As far as less innovative types of architecture are concerned, well, we usually go along with the local architects for the school district. They engage their own. A certain percentage of their capital expense is allowed for architects' fees. Providing these are within reason and meet ministry standards, well, we allow the architects of the local area to design the schools so they fit in with local needs and the local milieu.

I believe those are the questions that have been asked, Mr. Chairman.

MR. E.O. BARNES (Vancouver Centre): On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to advise the House that the B.C. Lions won over Saskatchewan 3 5 to 14. It's the first time in 10 years it has happened in Taylor Field.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!

MR. CHAIRMAN: It's not a point of order, but still very interesting.

MS. SANFORD: I want to thank the member for Vancouver Centre for brightening up the estimates tonight and giving us a bit of good news.

Mr. Chairman, I was really disappointed to hear the minister's answer with respect to the training of preschool teachers. He said: "Oh, that belongs with the Ministry of Human Resources." He doesn't even know that there are three separate ministries involved in the training and the decision with respect to facilities and equipment for preschool children.

Mr. Chairman, I specifically asked this afternoon that this ministry take the leadership. They are involved now. The minister just said he's not involved; that it has nothing to do with him. He is involved. He obviously doesn't know it, but at least the people within his ministry should know it. What I'm asking is that that ministry take the lead in terms of improving the education for preschoolers. I'm sure that the minister would admit and would recognize that the education that the children receive at that age stands them in good stead in terms of the education that they will receive in the public school system as it now stands.

The other brief point that I want to make, Mr. Chairman, is that I have no doubt that research which is being done at the University of British Columbia is not directly involved in developing new biological weapons or neutron bombs because I know that's not the depth of research that is being done at the University of B.C. But what I'm asking is whether or not there is any connection. Or is there any information being developed at the University of B.C. through its research programme that is made available or that is being paid for either by the Pentagon or by the U.S. Army or by the U.S. Army? Because the information that is then made available is certainly used, if not directly, then indirectly, in the development of their various weapons in the United States.

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HON. MR. McGEER: Mr. Chairman, this is sort of a little bit of a hysteria ...

MS. SANFORD: Hysteria!

HON. MR. McGEER: ... that perhaps the member might be even more concerned that material published in journals developed as a result of Canadian or any other research is available to the Russians and to the Chinese communists. It's paid for by taxpayers, and these people over there in Russia and China might use that knowledge to develop their own technology.

MS. SANFORD: Oh, come on.

HON. MR. McGEER: It's a dreadful thing the way we publish and make knowledge available to people.

MRS. DAILLY: Mr. Chairman, I just want to say I am not at all satisfied with the answers given to the last two questions either that the member for Comox asked. However, the time is going so I think I'll just move on at this time to one other specific question to the minister.

I understand your department has received a request from the British Columbia Coalition of Rape Relief Centres to assist them in the production of this very fine booklet, "On Rape, " which I understand has been accepted and approved by the Victoria School Board. I think Saanich board and other boards are showing a great interest in it. I understand that it's not the policy of the department to give out grants wholesale to individual groups throughout the province if they're not directly involved in education. But I think if the minister had the opportunity to study this book and discuss it with Mr. Meredith and with the Victoria School Board, which has endorsed it, perhaps he would see that it would be very important and a very good contribution for his ministry to make in even assisting them in the printing of this very fine booklet which should be part of our educational system. I wonder if the minister could give some idea on whether he knows about the book. If he doesn't, would he give some consideration to the request from this group?

HON. MR. McGEER: I'm not aware of the proposal, Mr. Chairman. We do get many requests for grants. I can assure the member that this will be looked at very carefully by the interministerial grants committee.

MR. NICOLSON: Mr. Chairman, I would like to rephrase a few questions in a slightly different way. First of all I would like to comment on the answer that the minister gave.

I was certainly pleased to see the experimental step taken.... By the way, it was one thing that I had always wanted to do when I had the opportunity as Minister of Housing - to at least be involved in the experimental construction of.... I know Kamloops School District did it. You approved it. I say that is good. I do feel that you do have it within your power to set certain guidelines in terms of school construction. I would like the minister to very seriously consider and at least look into whatever literature exists on some of the ramifications and also some of the attitudes of teachers and maybe students to the concept of windowless schools. There is information on fluorescent lighting which indicates, for one thing, that it is excessive. There could be some harmful effects and it does tend to hype up kids, creating a little bit of high anxiety and so on. I think it should be very seriously looked into. I would like the minister to comment on that.

Something I would certainly expect him to comment on is the concept of external examinations and scholarship exams at the grade 12 level - the requisite writing of English along with whatever specialties a person happens to have. If a person has a facility in the humanities, if they are good in history and English and French, they can write those subjects and do very well. If their facility happens to be somewhat limited and happens to fall into the area of maths and sciences, a great number of students.... I submit that people who have a different ethnic background, who don't have a lot of magazines and journals and such in the home, who don't get National Geographic and other reading materials in the home, often have tremendous proficiency in maths and sciences and go on and make fine engineers or whatever to go into technical training or become airline pilots. I would like the minister to say whether he really believes that English is so important that it must be part of any departmental exam.

HON. MR. McGEER: Mr. Chairman, I'm sorry I neglected to answer that. I think the member has got a very, very excellent point. We'll have to consider his suggestion extremely seriously and perhaps make the change.

MR. NICOLSON: I have a couple more of these. I'm glad to see the minister takes that point as a rather serious one.

The House resumed; Mr. Speaker in the chair.

The committee, having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. Mr. McClelland moves adjournment of the House.

The House adjourned at 10:59 p.m.