Education as preparation for work

Education as preparation for work

As a former public high school teacher, I am very concerned at the trend to educate primarily for “higher education” ie college. The statistics do not bear out this trend as the way to educate all of our young people to be successful in life.

It is absolutely essential that public education policy makers remember the primary responsibility of the schooling they are supporting – education towards livelihood generation.

Some students do have the desire and funds to go directly from high school to college; others realize in the 9^th grade or so that their older friends and acquaintances who went through the school system are not able to get legal, fulfilling work with the education they received in high school, so they check out.

How can the education system change this destructive pattern? By providing job skills for all, of course, and that means going back to vocational training as an important, valid part of the middle school and high school curriculum. Even most of the young people who go on to college will have to earn part of their living while they are taking classes. Every student should have basic skills that allow him or her to qualify to work at something legal in our society upon graduation – and can be enticed to want to graduate for that very reason.

The lame excuse that vocational education is too expensive because the class size has to be small arises from the value judgment that college-bound students are worth more over time than the clerks, laborers, plumbing and electrical apprentices, carpenters, metal and woodworkers that truly keep our society’s underpinnings in order. My premise is that no young person is worth less education than it takes to prepare him or her to be able to earn a living immediately after high school and preferably in a field that competent guidance counselors have identified as suiting their capacities.

Let’s start a conversation about this…