Money is generally a problem with education.  There’s never enough of it, and there are always too many things that need to be paid for.

So what priorities should we set?

I wrote an article at Helium, arguing that getting basic supplies is more important than paying for teacher training.  After all, what good does extensive training do if you have no paper and if you have no functioning computers?

My reasoning here is partly coloured by my experience in my own school.  We have no paper freely available, and the only way to get copies is to put a request in at the office.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get the copies back within 2-3 days.  No chance for spontaneity there.

Computers are equally haphazard.  There are no central labs, and the laptop carts contain at most sixteen laptops.  Of these, several are generally missing or malfunctioning.  The working ones have an old version of Internet Explorer and MS Word and nothing else.  The old version of explorer can’t even display many new pages correctly (like pbwiki.com).

What’s the point of spending thousands of dollars on fancy workshops when these basic needs are going unfulfilled?  What do you think our priorities should be?

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Education, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.