Government reveals that adult courses teach everything except what's actually needed

The State Education Quality Service, after a thorough investigation, has discovered that Latvia operates more than 1000 adult non-formal education programs, some of which are about as useful as a snow shovel in the Sahara. The report indicates that people pay money for courses that claim they'll transform them into professionals, but actually only teach them how to properly hold scissors or how to breathe.

Beauty courses have created particularly comical situations, where participants think they'll become hairdressers, but in reality only learn to cut hair so that people look like they just escaped from Karosta prison. As Liepāja resident Jānis tells us: "My wife went to nail design courses, now she thinks she's the next Picasso, but my fingers look like a rainbow that collided with a cement mixer."

But the biggest problem is that some of these programs are as far from education as rock music is from the Eurovision Song Contest. And here Liepāja has something to say – our city is Latvia's rock capital, legends are born here, but in these courses only new ways to waste money are born. At least our rock musicians know they're playing music, not learning "sound therapy" for three hours.

Now the service is encouraging the creation of a unified system to check whether a course actually teaches something useful, or just teaches how to breathe properly through your nose. As one of the study's authors said: "We need clarity – is a person learning a profession, or are they simply paying for someone to tell them how beautiful life is." In Riga, of course, nobody thinks about such things – there they simply pay double the money and think that's how it should be.