Poor education: No stores in Albuquerque, B.C.

Published 4:00 pm Saturday, February 21, 2004

Our son works for a company that has offices in Albuquerque, N.M., and they have seen fit to believe that would be a good place to assign Charles.

We have been informed that he is getting married in June and he gave us some bits of information about his soon-to-be wife. One of the bits of information we received was her birthday. I think there was a slight hint in his release of the birthday date. My wife suggested we send her a gift certificate from one of these exclusive female stores. I thought it was a good idea so on a recent trip to the Cascade Mall in Burlington, we dropped into one of the exclusive female shops to see if they had stores in Albuquerque.

There were two young clerks behind the counter as we walked in. My guess is their ages were about 20. Just like, recently out of high school. My wife asked if they had stores in Albuquerque. After a few seconds of thought one of the clerks replied, “No, we do not have any shops in British Columbia.” After we recovered from the shock of that remark, my wife informed the two young ladies that Albuquerque is in New Mexico. The two clerks looked at each other as if to say, “We don’t have any shops in Mexico either.” I know that every high school graduate will not be a Bill Gates or a rocket engineer, but I think it is only fair to expect them to have the basic knowledge of U.S. geography, and enough knowledge of math to give me the correct change when I make a purchase in some place like KFC or Pizza Hut.

As we started to leave my thoughts turned to Abe Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address which in part was, “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.” I wondered how many school teachers paraphrase those words of the great Lincoln with, “These students will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but we are required to give them passing grades anyway.”

How many of those students have any knowledge of Lincoln other than is it a big car manufactured by Ford? Or maybe his image is on the U.S. one cent coin, thus the name Lincoln penny.

This is just the latest case that has made me wonder if we are getting our money’s worth in public education.

Robert Brown

Oak Harbor