My daughter loves my stories about the “old days.”
By “loves” – of course - I mean she immediately picks up her phone and starts texting her friend that her father is “rambling on about the old days again. Please kill me now!”
And yet, I persist in telling these stories because I use them to drive home the point that she definitely has things better than I did when I was her age.
Oh, sure, back in 1987 I could rent a decent apartment for $400 a month, gas was 49 cents a litre and the environment wasn’t collapsing all around me, but I didn’t have my own smart phone so there.
I also went to school in a building that looked like a prison.
I graduated from Burnaby North Secondary School in the 1980s and the building was grey and made out of impersonal stone blocks that would have fit right in on a street in Mother Russia.
They have painted BNSS since then, but the building still looks grim.
I know that a good education is about the educators, and we had excellent ones back then as I’m sure they do now, but it would have been nice to go to a school that didn’t look like a prison.
Thankfully, things are about to change. A new BNSS is set to open in 2022 and I checked out the latest artist renderings and the place looks more like a futuristic Google campus building than a school.
They even have flowers growing. We didn't have flowers back then.
It’s all full of different colours and shapes, possessing an architectural feel that doesn’t scream “dystopian nightmare” to those who work and attend.
The $105-million, 1,800-student school, is set to begin construction “very soon,” secretary-treasurer Russell Horswill told trustees during an online school board meeting last week
This, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
The school is 64 years old and has been deemed to be at “highest risk of widespread damage or structural failure" during an earthquake – so apart from its slick look it also won’t fall down and kill all of the students and staff inside.
I’ve written this before, but I just can’t help feeling sick with jealousy that the students of today have it so much better with nice buildings, the latest technology and SOGI programs that attempt to undo the hate they get taught by our society.
I’m happy for them, but I’m still bitter at all of the great programs I missed out on when I was a kid. I’m still furious at the old Social Credit government that starved B.C.’s education system of money and resources, and showed zero creativity when it came to the curriculum.
Then again, as I said, I didn’t graduate high school facing a crumbling and staggeringly unaffordable world like today’s students.
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
