Two elders of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist sect my father belonged to, came to our home when I was 18 and prayed that I would not go to university. They told my father that “I would be lost to the world”.
Well, I did go to the University of Toronto and enrolled in what was called Engineering and Business, an arm of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
I was not lost to the world, to use their language, but became part of the world. My “edumacation” made me a player.
The first thing I learned was that the more I studied the more ignorant I felt. In every course associated with applied science I realized I was just scratching the surface of my understanding. It was an experience that changed my life.
I also discovered that everyone was bright, but the difference in class standing was more about self-discipline and organization skills than raw intelligence. Another important lesson.
And besides studying things like hydraulics and machine design, I was also exposed to a range of liberal studies like economics, politics, and psychology.
So, I was being trained to be a member of a profession and a questioning member of society.
Six years later, I went back to the University of Toronto to take a Masters Degree in Business Administration. This led to a teaching career at the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute which later became Ryerson University.
But as part of my new job I was required to spend two summers obtaining a high school teaching certificate.
The professors at the Department of Education, which was part of the University of Toronto, told us our goal was to help young people, “know what they do not know” so they will become life long learners.
They also impressed on us how much young people change in their teens in terms of their mental, physical and emotional well being. So, our job was also to help them “know themselves”.
My teaching years during the 1960s were some of the happiest and most satisfying years of my life. The only downside was catching about six colds a year from students who did not want to miss a day of school no matter how sick they were.
I was a member of the Accounting and Finance Department, and taught the basic course in Business Finance. And I was also the elected member from the Business Faculty to the Ryerson Academic Council, which was the equivalent to what is called the Senate at universities.
This body approved all curriculum changes for the many departments at Ryerson. I became a student of learning theory with a small conference budget.
With that budget I attended conferences on entrepreneurship in the US which took me into the world of small business, which again impacted my life when I left Ryerson to fight a federal government series of tax changes.
I created the Canadian Council for Fair Taxation, to organize opposition to the government’s proposals, and later converted the Council to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which is an advocacy organization of over 100,000 small and medium sized enterprises.
When I retired from CFIB in the med 1990s, I worked with Jim Rapino and family members to create Vubiz Ltd. at vubiz.com, an e-learning company with offices in Oakville, Ontario and Santa Monica, California.
Today, online learning has replaced about 75% of traditional stand-up training provided by colleges in Canada and the United States.
Grandpa Halter had only five years of primary education, and grandma Halter did not have one day of schooling. In her day, it was only the boys of a family that received any education.
But I never once visited them as a child when they did not ask about my school work. Grandma said she taught herself to read and write by studying articles in the newspaper. Your grandparents can make a difference in your life,
Yes, I believe in “edumacation”.