After attending a debate among the candidates for my fire-engine red district’s state representative seat one question sticks with me.
The three Republican candidates as well as the lone hopeless Democrat railed for job skills training for our students.
It seems to me that job skills training is nothing more than a form of corporate welfare, instead of hiring well rounded individuals and training them in a skill companies are expecting public schools to provide the training and everyone seems to be alright with it.
Do we indeed have a duty to provide education for whichever thing the industry of the month deems worthy?
The job skill taining at my local high school doesn’t really fit the ‘corporate’ mold. Vet assistant, medical assistant, automotive work, plumbing and heating. All these seem to me more like small business workers. These are skills a community needs and jobs people can do right out of high school. Win-win. There should be more of these classes rather than advanced French litrature.
Just don’t get me started on colleges. THAT is corporate welfare in the sense you are talking about IMO.
I think it is a red herring. US workers will always be lacking in math and science skills, communication skills, work ethic, etc. compared to cheaper alternatives overseas. US employers simply want to keep us focused on rearranging the furniture while they outsource jobs. As discussed elsewhere here, those STEM majors today? They are this generation’s auto workers, as soon as a steady supply of people with the same skills and lower expectations can be cultivated.
And if you spend all of your meager educational resources on ‘training’ your populace rather than educating them to be informed citizens, well, how much easier is it to carry out the other side of that business plan?
The majority of people have no idea what the goal is of a liberal arts education and I don’t know that anyone yet has any hard numbers to support its success.*
Most people think that the goal of school is to train students for their future and specifically their future occupation, and find it to be largely wasted time that we’re teaching them literature and world history, etc. They think that the more skills their child has, the better their career path will be, rather than that the more general education a child receives, the better their career path will be.
I don’t think most corporations want children to be brought up this way. I think that they do want college students to pick up skills relevant to their future occupation, but that’s after receiving a general education. Most skills that would be taught in high school probably only help small, single-owner businesses, and those don’t have much lobbying power on the whole (except as voters).
By which, I mean that we don’t know whether it is successful at its own stated purpose. We do have hard numbers about people’s financial success in life compared to the amount of schooling they receive, of course, but that could be unrelated.
Personally, I think the kids should be taught more life skills, like how to manage credit cards, fill out tax returns, build a retirement savings plan, use power tools, handle a household plumbing problem… basically to try to eliminate common sources of stress, show them they can handle problems, etc.
I agree with shiftless, colleges are chock full of corporate cow-towing and promises that X industry is the next big thing(not just daytime TV advertising colleges either). I was looking into high schools more or less because the financial support for Public schools is from the taxpayer only as opposed to colleges who have at least a portion of revenue coming from students directly. Also the high schools reach a much greater portion of possible students.
I admit that I see value in teaching some level of technical/shop/maintenance type stuff to our students, but more for “something to fall back on” as opposed to a way for regions to market themselves to our new corporate overlords. Every time I hear someone talk about job training programs it seems as though it is about employers choosing their location and not about giving students skills.
Getting a college degree is the hands down number one thing a person can do to improve their chances of being employed and having a high salary, full stop. You may have a kinds of your own little theories about education, but the number show that college-- if you are capable of graduating-- is basically always a good idea.
I’ve mentioned this idea on the SMDB before, but one idea is to split the traditional college “liberal arts” education from job training. The trend over the past few decades has been to “collegeize” what were once jobs that were learned in trade schools or apprenticeships. E.g. nowadays every 2 year college worth it’s salt has an Associate’s Degree in Auto Mechanics, Associate’s Degree in Carpentry Technology, where you also have to take history, literature, etc… It’s harder and harder to get an apprenticeship and learn on the job, or even “just” go to trade school - you “need a degree” nowadays. Why? This has happened before - 200 years ago people could become lawyers by apprenticeship without having to take literature or world history courses.
Maybe that’s the wrong way - maybe we should be making more job training programs that allow one to (hopefully temporarily) bypass a liberal arts education. E.g. build programs allowing someone to apprentice as an electrical engineer, learning enough math, physics, and chemistry to master the EE material but skipping literature and composition requirements beyond basic literacy requirements.
Then, people could “get trained”, get into a career, and then go back and take all those general education courses to finish a “real” bachelor’s degree.
I’m not saying that people ought not get a liberal arts education - only that we don’t need to entwine a liberal arts education with what are more or less job training programs. Get an education from Harvard, get a certification in software development from the Software Training Institute.
What I mean with this is why does someone need to be able to analyze tactics of the War of 1812, discuss the impact of social justice movements on major literary works of the late 1800’s UK and US, or explain the importance of the contributions of Freud to the modern understanding of the human mind in order to be a software developer (or electrical engineer, or architect, etc.) Sure, it’s nice to have that, and might give someone an edge on the job, make them more adaptable. But dammit people, you don’t have to be able to quote Shakespeare to fix bugs in JavaScript loops! Maybe if you want to be a senior developer, or team lead. But not to be a code monkey.
Make software development a job training program. Let college be where you go to learn about Shakespeare, etc…
In fifty years, I wouldn’t be surprised if you need a master’s degree in logistics and transportation studies to unload boxes, or a Doctor of Communications Technology to answer phones.
China and India are not going away, and we aren’t going to keep our share of the global market by becoming less educated.
“Code Monkeys” most certainly do need liberal arts skills. Specifically, the thing that seems most elusive is the ability to truly understand the client’s requirements. Not just to read them on paper, but to really get how the system you are building affects the business. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen thousands of dollars wasted because the developers didn’t really “get” what they were building.
And that is a function of learning to analyze, think critically, tear apart a text and look at something from other perspectives- exactly what you do in a liberal arts education.
But low-level “code monkeys”, in my experience, aren’t the ones doing a lot of requirements interpretation, discussion, analysis, and dialogue. They are the ones being told to align all the tabs on the left navigation bar, add a “Total Spent” column to the Monthly Project Report, and fix it so that the “Submit” button doesn’t throw a FileNotFoundException. They aren’t analyzing the wisdom of having a submit button, of whether or not a left navbar is the best user interface choice, or what managers want the most from a Monthly Project Report or what potential Monthly Project Report features would gain the most value on the company’s dollar. They are grunts, taking orders.
Mid-level and senior developers, however, are expected to deal with vague requirements, distill them to basic principles, and question requirements that are unlikely to give significant business value.
There’s a small, small number of tasks where that’s sufficient and, if you’re actually among the coders, rarely is it useful to have someone on the team who can only do that sort of thing.
IMO, there should be a split during the last three years of high school between academic and vocational. The US puts too much emphasis on academics in high school, leaving vocational education to private institutions and community colleges.
Despite the (possibly correct) claim that completing a degree is the best thing you can do for your career, most Americans do not. According to Wiki:
“In 2009, 21.3 percent of the adult population above 18 years had attended college, but had no degree, 7.5 percent held an associate’s degree, 17.6 percent held a bachelor’s degree, and 10.3 percent held a graduate or professional degree.”
The US university system is recognized as the best in the world, but only serves a minority of Americans. Nor should everyone go to university. Tradespeople are better served by an apprenticeship where they learn the skills and earn money. Unfortunately, the apprenticeship system in the US is not strong. I suspect that the huge US military fills the gaps somewhat by providing training and work for people who can’t afford university or are not academic, but I don’t think that’s a good solution.
I disagree with the idea that Shakespeare and the War of 1812 should not be taught in high school. There should be some amount of cultural literacy. Academic content should be available to interested vocational students, and encouraged. The reverse is true as well.
OP, what does “job skills training” entail? I ask, because most of us who are doing quite well at our jobs never received any formal job skills training. I’m not sure where you’d start.
I’m not sure what I would have cut to include this, assuming an entire semester or year. Then again, I’m not sure how to fill an entire with these topics.
Do you really feel like current high school grades are coming out with an amazing degree of cultural literacy, and that we could clearly cut some time there?
Kids learn slowly. It’s their defining feature. The amount of time it takes to beat an idea into a kids’ head is simply not to be believed until you’ve done it. The reason we put job training/vocational training at the military/community college level is that you need four years just to teach them to read, write, calculate, and have a basic understanding of the world around them.
Not to mention that analyzing the tactics of the War of 1812 teaches
critical analysis
how to get a handle on a complex system that is entirely new to you
methods of research
and usually
writing skills,
all of which ARE job skills. Same with Shakespeare or anything else. Do people really think that the educators of the world are so stupid that they pointlessly teach Shakespeare just in case somebody gets a job reading Shakespeare?
Somehow other nations-- nations with better test scores for math, science, and language-- manage to work with a vocational/academic split in high school. You admit that the current set up in the US doesn’t work very well, why defend it?
Well, to start with, one of the reason why these nations have such great scores is precisely because they remove the lower performers from the testing pool. Funny hole that works.
For middle class student and above, the US has a great, top notch education system. What we aren’t good at is getting results out of poor schools- which is probably more about social issues than education. But even when we test the whole range of students, we are still pretty much in the middle.