Phendrana Drifts

Now who could read the mind of the red-headed girl next door
Or the taxi driver who just dropped you off
Or the classmate that you ignore
Don't assume everything on the surface is what you see
Cause that classmate just lost her mother
And that taxi driver's got a PhD

I wonder if taxi driving is a better gig than I give it credit for, because Amanda Marshall's lyrics above are not just an isolated incident, as I have been given a taxi ride by two doctors as well, and I don't talk too much to every taxi driver, so for all I know that total is much higher. So, upon coming to Canada, these very smart people choose taxi driving when my country decides to ignore their degree. It never struck me as particularly lucrative, but perhaps I'm wrong.

In any case, I wish those with solid credentials were recognized here. I understand why that process takes time, and the recognizing credentials needs to be done with care - you wouldn't want the engineer designing a bridge to really be something closer to a lego builder than an engineer. Still, my impression is that we have too many taxi drivers with PhDs and not enough PhDs in our country. And MDs, and other credentials.

Labels: education, inane

3 Comments:

At 12:30 AM, Allie said…

My sister Kate was a taxi driver in England and she loved it - her own business, her own hours, getting to know people, etc....
At 5:30 PM, michele said…

When I worked for the immigrant aid organization I was a part of, this was one of those things that we continually pushed to have recognized.

Most people with professional or doctoral degrees were required to complete the equivalent of half of their higher education here in Canada for licensing. So if it took you 4 years plus in your home country to become a doctor, you'd have to spend 2 years plus here before you could be licensed.

And if you had an undergraduate degree in, say, psychology, to get it recognized, you had to do almost 4 years here in Canada. In other words, you had to almost do the degree all over again.

What a waste!

I too want the bridges to be built by people competent to do so, and my surgeon to know what she's doing when she cuts into me, but there's gotta be a better way to evaluate competence other than making people "prove" themselves by learning it all over again!
At 11:42 AM, Heather said…

Part of the problem, though, is that standards of education can vary quite a bit from country to country - and you simply cannot take the risk that a professional graduated from a degree program with an equivalent of a 35% average (I've seen it!). We need a way to better identify credentials and speed people through recertification. We need things like targeted ESL instruction for professionals, and we need to get them through it quickly enough that their skills do not degrade while they're not practicing.

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