Maria McMaster of St. John’s insisted in a letter July 7 in The Western Star that Memorial University ought to tailor all its offerings to serve the local labour market.
We ought all to be so grateful to Ms. McMaster for such a progressive and uplifting suggestion, which is such an advance upon the old-fashioned and hidebound notion of a university education as the basis of a pattern of interconnected and expanding thought suited to satisfying the mind of man.
That is to say, of course, that since Charles Darwin and Karl Marx have taught us that “mind” is only matter and the only needs of man are strictly “economic,” we now know that it is our evolutionary destiny to pay others to train us to serve the needs of commercial enterprises owned by yet others, and often managed by still more others, so that we may dawdle toward medically assisted death with dignity with a minimum of irksome effort; “intellectual stimulation and development” must have been an illusion to inveigle the naïve into centres of job-training while the naïve were still believing in “educating for appreciation;” since the illusion’s purpose has been wholly achieved, it is high time that we discarded it.
I’d like to see more from Ms. McMaster on this subject, from the further enhancing of which our employers in commerce would much profit. For a great believer in “spiritual” incentive once remarked that if most men were not bound by essentially slothful attitudes to their being employed by others instead of having the energy and ambition to strike out in lives of their own making, our great system of strictly commercial activity would simply break down.
And what, I ask, would our world be without that great system? On what then would the more evolved mind feed?
Colin Burke,
Port au Port
