Chapter 3

http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2005-2009/2007EDU0006-000026.htm

This article is about the new tutoring service the Provincial Government of BC is offering to students through the internet. This service, named LearnNow BC, is a new, innovative way, which the government is using to reach out to the BC students and improve their education. LearnNow BC at www.learnnowbc.gov.bc.ca.was first introduced in October 2006 as it offered tutoring services to all students taking Math 10 and Science 10. Now, it has expanded to other subjects including Social Studies 11. Students acquire help from a number of options, such as 1-on-1 chat rooms with tutors, “live” workshops with teachers, and or practice quizzes. LearnNow also provides online courses to students.

Observing this move in economic terms shows us some of the ways the government is trying to improve the quality of education. For a long number of decades, tutoring has always been a privatized service. It gives students more help than they needed on the subjects that they need help on. However, it is up to the parents to pay for this help. Not every family has the money to support their child this way due to the distribution of income. Thus, the government will pressure the “right” privatized side of tutors to improve their services and create some negative third party effects towards them. For example, they may have to reduce prices of their services since students can now get it for free if they wish, which means some of these companies might have to layoff employees to take the loss of business. Also, they might have to spend more money on marketing to convince students that their service is far more superior to the online service to justify the payment of this good. Either way, this is good news to the consumers with the increase in competition in the market.

By offering education this way, the government gives more opportunities to all students who wish to learn. The online courses offered by LearnNow is a perfect example why education should be handled by the government as it is in a lot of ways an unmet good, and why they are more efficient at providing this service than private companies. Only the government is able to provide a service that can be accessed by everyone equally. Even in rural areas, students are able to follow the same curriculum as students in the city. No child will be excluded due to financial reasons and no one will uphold an advantage of a better, costlier school.

All this has no effect on me whatsoever. I’m already in grade 12 and am graduating in less than 6 months. I could care less if the government offered even more services to students. They don’t even offer tutoring for grade 12 courses yet! However, I would have appreciated it if I was given this kind of benefit a few years back, as I could have gotten more help on my courses. Obviously, there are more students like me that need the extra help to keep up with their courses, so I give thumbs up to the government for finally reaching out to us students and putting more of those tax dollars to good use.

Above all, it shows how much power the government has on even the free market system. Either through regulations, taxes, or crown corporations, the government has what it takes to change the entire landscape of how a business should be run. Also, I truly feel that Canada is one of the better countries at handling tax dollars. At least we don’t spend billions of dollars in war like some other country…