True story! In newspapers today has been reported that EU Commission officials have issued a recommendation letter to all Member States to go do somethin' about the quality of their school teachers. I guess the EU folks who issued that directive were the Mandarins from EAC* and their most valuable Commissioner... between us, sharp cookies, those specific Eurocrats should better get their own act together before going after Member State educators, but anyways... To their credit, however, I have to admit that our youth is not that smart after leaving school. I and (beloved spouse) Rita have witnessed two very sound illustrations of this in two separate occasions altogether, during the last 24 hours.
Rita went to the local post office (Oudenaarde, East Flanders) to mail a letter to friends in Geneva, Switzerland. The clerk at the counter, a temp worker from the student community (they call 'em jobstudents in 'Dutch') reads the address ending at "Généve, Suisse" and asks, "This is for France, right?".
Per my earlier blog, as I was queueing up to board the morning flight to Barca, I over-heard on my left a young voice of an eighteen (give and take) year old broad (the local Essex version of the species) saying to her fellow traveller friends: "Catalonia, that's an island, innit?". Makes Gaudì turn in his grave! 'Sure thing, I thought... and George W. Bush is a mountain in Siberia... you wish' As I turned around in shock to see who the genious was, her friend rushed into correcting her that it is actually a Province in Spain with Barcelona as its capital. In fact, it was just there where they were... headed that morning. I wondered if the genious already knew that, either...
Sad to admit... for a change, those infamous EAC Mandarins appeared unfortunately to... be right!
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*Education And Culture
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