I just wanted to say that I've had an opportunity in the last four or five months to travel all the way across Canada and to visit some of the places I've lived and worked in, to talk to ordinary people across Canada. They ask what I'm doing, and I say I'm doing workplace education, and they say, “What's that?” I tell them, and they say, “Well, why do we need it?”
I can tell you there is a huge gap in understanding the size and nature of this problem all the way across Canada. Nobody has a handle on it really yet, except maybe us in Nova Scotia.
I think the other thing that is out there that is huge and that people really haven't come to appreciate is that there is a huge lack of credibility in the education system today. I've talked to a lot of human resources people across the country, and one of their common concerns is that people they hire or would like to hire just don't have the essential skills to do the job. And they feel bad about turning them away. They understand the impact that has on the family, but they just can't use them because they don't have the reading, writing, and math skills they need. So this is a pan-Canadian problem.
I think the way to do it is to build credibility back into learning and back into education, and to make it not such a scary place to be. Too many people today think, “I won't go into a classroom because it's scary”.