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From: chapman@fornax.uucp (John Chapman)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Who pays for education - knee jerk reactions
Message-ID: <224@fornax.uucp>
Date: Wed, 4-Mar-87 16:01:43 EST
Article-I.D.: fornax.224
Posted: Wed Mar  4 16:01:43 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Mar-87 03:36:01 EST
Distribution: can
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 66

.
Hmmm, where to start? Well I certainly provoked a reaction with my
recent articles. I'm happy about that since can.politics experiences
too many "dead" stretches.  The quality of some of the responses
leaves something to be desired though.  Some people seem to be in
too much of a hurry to bother actually reading the articles and, *gasp*,
thinking about them. I make a suggestion and invite comments but it
seems that some people cannot control knee-jerk responses and the
compulsion to shout "communism" (or socialism or whatever).
This propensity to rash conclusions, arguing a point using emotionally
laden terms and labels, and in general a refusal to consider that
the world is not some simple black&white arena where you must choose
up sides is disappointing.

Let me summarize my proposal a bit.

The major effect would be to:
 1. allow many more people to attend school than can currently do so

 2. allow people to go to school without having to exit with a
    massive debt burden which they must begin paying off
    (many people are leaving school with $20,000 debts to CSL which
     they must begin paying off almost immediately - makes it pretty
     hard for them to get a "foothold" on the rest of their lives)

3. increase the general educational level of the country which
    I believe would be an enormous benefit

A lot of the reaction seems to be that this is an amazingly restrictive
proposal that could only happen in a communist country.  Let me point
out that this idea is hardly unique to me and that other examples can
easily be found, e.g.

 a) the Canadian Armed Forces uses almost precisely the exact same
    practice as I have proposed
 b) smaller/poorer countries have similar schemes for students who
    study aboroad.  They found too many of their people accepting
    money government support to study abroad (e.g. to become MDs)
    and then refusing to return home to give their people the benefits
    of the study that they (the people) had payed for.  Once their
    education was paid for by their poor relations they antd to stay
    where they could make lots of money.  These countries now insist
    that the students agree to return home for a certain number of
    number of years.

 c) many corporations insist on employees signing agreements to
    the effect that they will not use skills/knowledge obtained
    through the company for a certain period after they leave the
    company's employ.



If a child only kept company with me as long as I lavished $$ on her/him
and showed no appreciation I would consider them a spoiled brat.  I'm
not sure what you can say about adults who want to be able to behave
in the same manner.

Perhaps the people who so violently object to this can explain to me
just why I and other taxpayers should be expected to pay for someones
education just to have them whistle off to some country where they
can make more money??  If they like these other places so much let
them go and try to get a cheap education "there".

Thats all for now,

 John (big brother socialist commie social democrat) Chapman