02-02 Ryerson

In the early 1960s Ryerson was the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute and it was unique as a post secondary educational institution with a focus on teaching rather than research. And I started as a member of the Business Department in September 1963. Today it is another Toronto university.
And part of my employment contract was to spend two summers obtaining a high school Ontario Teaching Certificate. That is where I was first exposed to the term “learning by doing” and its major proponent, John Dewey of the United States. Interesting that his impact was so powerful that the US produced a 30-cent stamp in his honour in 1968.
My experience as a student working towards an engineering degree was very difficult with half the staff made up of PhD students with no concept of how to teach. My MBA experience was much better mainly because I was ten years older and was used to learning on my own.
One of the first things you learn in teacher’s college is that students learn differently, so I was taught to minimize teaching via lectures and to focus on group learning through group discussions; and to develop projects where students could go off on their own. I used to send them to interview company owners.
I was always looking for learning experiences that exposes students to real life problems that they could relate to. Guest lecturers that were business owners was one idea I relied on.
Teaching was a wonderful way to make a living, and much harder than I had ever believed. At the end of the day there were always young people wanting to talk to me.
In many ways, my job was made easy with half of the students from family-operated businesses. It was what made Ryerson in those days unique. And it also made it easy dealing with students who, for the most part, had worked before coming back to school.
I used my father’s business to give examples of basic principals, and he was located only two blocks away from Ryerson. And more importantly, I told them that five years after they graduated a third of them would start their own businesses. I tried to make teaching business finance a workshop in “learning by doing”.
When we were talking about cash flow I would relate the problems my father faced when he could not get an operating loan from the bank to start his company. So, he operated his business on a cash basis but paid his suppliers in 60 days.
Then when discussing capital budgeting, I gave the example of father taking in his brother-in-law as a partner because he had been in the manufacturing end of the business and put up the needed capital to build a factory.
I never forgot something one of the professors said during a teacher’s college lecture. He said we want young people to continually “know what they do not know”, so learning will always be a hands-on lifetime experience.
Today, with the advances in information technology, it is almost impossible for the education system to keep up with change. So, combining work and learning must be a fundamental underpinning of all learning at all ages.
That’s the way I see it anyways