Mr. Speaker, I want to join some of my colleagues today in highlighting the importance of adult education opportunities in NWT communities. What makes adult education different from early childhood education is that it needs to be more immediately practical and useful to folks to tie into an individual's life goals. We need to stop treating adult education as remedial, something people feel obliged to do because of a lack of failure, as if it's a punishment for somehow not passing school classes in the first place. Instead of being remedial, it should be something that's useful and even transformative.
Community members have been saying for years that enrollment would increase at community learning centres if the programs could lead directly to local employment opportunities and tie into local initiatives. For example, there's demand for pre-trades training in Fort Good Hope to get people ready to work at the upcoming housing construction centre, or maybe a local government or development corporation has a need to train office or business administrators. Instead of doing the same thing that hasn't been working well, or eliminating CLCs entirely, imagine if we had cohorts of students working towards a specific employment qualification with a mix of learning settings. So maybe a roving instructor visits the community for a few weeks at a time, a face-to-face learning, and maybe the cohort would visit a regional centre every so often for hands-on learning, and maybe the rest of the time local tutors could support students in remote learning that could be done in a group setting with the instructor on a large screen. And, ideally, periods of on the land learning could be mixed in there too.
The mobile trades trailers, such as the one established in the Beaufort Delta, are an innovative approach that could be done in more communities with proper resourcing. We need to overcome the destructive politics surrounding on campus programming. This shouldn't be a competition where only one community gets to offer trades programs. We need this kind of programming close to home in all communities.
Beyond preparing for a job or apprenticeship, another important motivator for adults to pursue education is to be better parents. Family literacy programs help train parents on how to support their baby's brain development and language development, even in multiple languages. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
Mr. Speaker, family literacy programs can give adults more confidence to engage with their kids' teachers and to support their kids' success in school. So for all these reasons, we can't lose sight of how important adult education is to building up our economic and social foundations. We just have to make it more focused and practical. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Yellowknife Centre.
