Times of social unrest and political change have in the past put the education of generations of young people at risk. Speculating on the impact of Y2k disruption (from whatever source, actual or imagined) it seems that many young people will find that reduced economic activity impacts on their education plans.

According to the Statement to the Senate by J.L Williams-Bridges, many developing nations will be impacted by Y2k. Every nation has its developing areas where people seek upward mobility through education. The greatest impact of Y2k is likely to be on education, the funds for which are drawn from discretionary spending/saving/loans. Seems likely that the level of indebtedness of the 20 to 30 somethings is going to increase. We could also predict a five year shortage of skilled people as many folks don't complete their educations on schedule.

It is noteable that only two of my recent postgraduate students (10) in Computer Science have been New Zealand born.

The question is: what are you doing to protect the educational opportunities needed by your children in the face of Y2k disruption?

-- Bob Barbour (r.barbour@waikato.ac.nz), August 02, 1999

Answers

My three sons (youngest 18) have been homeschooled, the youngest never went to school at all until he took some tech school machine shop classes. The older 2 did go to high school a bit, but it was a terrible experience. Public schools expose kids to lots of the worst in the world, and don't prepare them for real life. I feel that my sons already have more real life experience than many people twice their age, and understand that they can learn almost anything they want to on their own, and they know how to search for experts to learn from, if they have trouble learning something by themselves. One of the problems with the country today is lack of self-motivation and lack of learning skills. Doing well on tests in school is no indication of having learned anything. As far as what we are doing to provide educational opportunities, we have thousands of books on many subjects, know lots of people who are skilled in many trades and professions and are willing to share their knowledge, and we have workshops and tools to do many kinds of work.

-- Jim (jiminwis@yahoo.com), August 02, 1999.

A-Beka! :-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), August 03, 1999.