EDITORIAL PAGE — Blue-collar whiz kids

Global competition is making it more evident that corporate Canada has under-invested in its workforce, that Ottawa has poured millions of dollars into poorly focused training programs and that the public education system is critically in need of reform.

Each year, a full one-third of all Canadian teenagers leave school before graduating. Others get only a high school education that is, in most cases, sub-standard. For kids who are not college-bound, the school-to-work transition is haphazard, with no coherent and comprehensive system available to help them gain the skills needed to find jobs with a future. Many have no concept of what a global economy is, let alone what skills they will need in one, or how to get them.

The World Economic Forum recently ranked the ability of our education system to meet the demands of a competitive economy 11th among 24 industrialized countries. We ranked 17th in science and technology, and an appalling 20th in occupational training.

Early this year, the Economic Council of Canada warned that if present trends continue, Canadian schools will send another one million functionally illiterate students into the workforce during the 1990s. What’s more distressing is that almost nothing is being done. The situation is so serious and so unacceptable that as a first step, local school boards should be scrapped in favor of professional managers capable of reforming the system from top to bottom.

Training initiatives are also in need of reform. Canada is still one of the lowest-per-capita investors in training among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. While idle youth here hang out in malls, countries such as Germany offer near-universal availability to high-quality vocational training through an apprentice program evolved from the old guild system. Nearly 70% of German youth go through this process, and today’s 1.8 million apprentices are considered to be on the cutting edge of Germany’s industrial competitiveness.

The system works well because it is run and financed mostly (70-80%) by industry, and can adapt quickly to market forces. In Germany, non-college youth apply to companies offering training and acquire practical skills. Several days each week are spent in the classroom for theoretical knowledge, which these days can involve college-level mathematics, physics and chemistry. The scope goes far beyond traditional trades such as carpentry and plumbing and provides training for high-tech industries so that hands-on specialists can hold their own with theoretically trained engineers. The system turns out teenage whiz kids who can run a complex production line, do mathematical equations to program-computerized factory machinery and repair the machines themselves.

A number of countries, including the U.S., are currently studying the system. Canada might consider doing the same. Too many of our vocational programs are still focused on traditional trades and low-skilled service jobs, with students learning yesterday’s know-how on outdated equipment. And there is still an unfortunate stigma attached to non-academic streams of education which must be changed, so as to foster pride in a trades-based or technology-based education.

Japanese and German companies typically devote 3-4% of payroll to training, as a market-driven investment in the future. Their costs of action may be high, but our costs of inaction could prove to be far higher.