The fallacy of “school to work” education programs

Yesterday I mentioned that the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE) was able to successfully promote its basic principles of vocational educational and general track for secondary education over the principles of the Committee of Ten who pushed for an academic education. According to Diane Ravitch, one of the finest research scholars in education, the real reason the CRSE ideas were accepted was that the thorny problems of mass education and the problems of educating large numbers of children from poor and non-English-speaking backgrounds fit the expediency of the times

Now when students are slow learners we ship them off to vocational classes instead of spending more time and motivation in teaching them how to read, write and compute better. Is it too stressful to motivate students?

Ms. Ravitch notes that immigrant parents did not demand that their children be excused from an academic curriculum. These parents wanted their children to have the same curriculum presented in the best schools as the wealthy and college bound students. However to do so would have required enormous restructuring of subject matter so that all students could master it. ” It was easier to teach academic subjects to academically able children than to rethink and redesign what was taught in school so that all children could learn and understand the material in the college track.”

As a result of this thinking, today we have two distinct classes of students: college prep and vocational education. Finally, after almost 80 years, a backlash is finally appearing in demands seen as voucher system, charter schools, and increased home study. The CRSE principles have cheated millions of students out of a good basic education under the guise of social needs.

Consider the millions of students who have graduated from public schools without the basic ability to read, write or compute. We have miserably failed these students by cuddling them in vocational programs. To continue the fallacy of “school to work” education programs is to propagate illiteracy despite billions of dollars poured into the public school system.

Employers are not demanding young job applicants show up with vocational job skills on the first day of work. What they are demanding is that applicants read enough to understand written instructions, write simple memos, and do simple computation. If an applicant possesses these abilities, he can quickly and easily be taught vocational skills as needed.

Every time we set up trades classes, we are stealing away valuable time from students who need to learn how to read, write, and compute.
Today’s job market, more than ever before, demands that people be able to do these skills. Manual work demands a certain high level of competency in literacy. Woe to the student who doesn’t master literacy. His future will be bleak.

Dr. Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution for over twenty years, states: ” School is not a place for makebelieve practicality. Schools need to do what they have a special advantage and a special time for doingconveying to the young the basic skills that they are going to need, irrespective of the particular jobs that they may have, which no one can predict anyway…. More important, people need to be educated as citizens and as human beings.”

The tragedy in this is that we are mentally crippling our children in trying to predict their future by restricting their opportunity to learn. When we relegate students to a vocational track over an academic track, we are categorizing them as mentally handicapped prematurely. Let’s reevaluate the fallacy of “School to Work” programs and stress the basics again.