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Safety Switch: A Safe Life Could Begin in School |
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Despite our progressive world, many students do not complete high school, and have in many cases difficulty with basic literacy and numeracy.
Many students leave school early for the workforce, or hold down part-time or summer jobs.
With the unnecessarily high injury rate of young workers, it would seem to many people in the work world that courses in risk and hazard assessment embedded in the high school setting would be of great value.
Keeping all this in mind, it would seem that a voice asking for safety awareness and training would be lost in the larger wilderness of other voices demanding more and more of our high schools.
Growing up on my family's cattle farm, at our parents' knee, we as kids learned all about safety around machines and the large animals that shared the farm with us.
When I got older, and went to high school, to say I was shocked at the whole day of farm safety training in Grade 9, in my “urban” high school no less, was an understatement.
It seems the folks at the Ontario Federation of Agriculture had found that lots of kids from town, who had friends on farms, seemed to be getting hurt and even killed with such regularity, that a day was set aside to teach everyone about the dangers I knew all too well.
What I recall even today, was the effectiveness of the safety awareness training, delivered in such a fashion that it felt that it was just a regular part of learning in high school.
Today, involved in the business of occupational health and safety training, I hear on a regular basis from both employers and my mature students alike, about how “kids today” are different … well, they are, and it’s all of our responsibility to ensure that as they grow, they get the safety training they need to keep them protected at work and at play.
The training of our young to be productive members of our society is accomplished by the entire village, and it's imperative that we ensure that they are given the tools necessary to make informed decisions about behaviour and just how much risk they are willing to accept in their lives.
Nicholas Tilgner is the executive director of the Northern Safety Network Yukon. You may contact him at
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