(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
State government has taken steps over the past several years to give public school students greater exposure to the workplace and career fields. Recently, there’s a big, well-intentioned push by many thought leaders in both state government and industry to establish “apprenticeship” programs similar to those in Switzerland’s schools.
School districts have long received a lot of blame for “pushing” kids toward college degrees, but that’s not a goal educators voluntarily took on. That perceived “push” reflects what plenty of parents – and society as a whole – long viewed as the best path for economic success. Guidance counselors have told me of the many occasions on which a student’s interest in the trades or military service was shot down by parents insisting on college.
My own high school served a largely blue-collar community where many of my classmates were expected to follow their parents into steel mills, refineries, automotive plants, and other industrial facilities. They enjoyed high-paying jobs for a few years … until the 1981 recession permanently eliminated them.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to achieve meaningful change in public education. If it were easy, we’d have fixed things a long time ago. But when we talk about how we should prepare kids to be part of a productive workforce, we need to remember this simple reality: the graduating class of 2039 is sitting in kindergarten classrooms right now. How different do you think life will be in 2039? How many generations of new technology will we have gone through? “Bluetooth? Grandpa, I’m not a dinosaur!” And most important, how will today’s kindergarteners pay their bills?
We really have no idea what the world will be like in 2039, what the hot jobs will be, what skills they’ll require, or the next Apple or Nvidia that will employ them (its founder is probably in high school right now). While career education plays a critical role in helping graduates identify the right path and begin the journey, much of its instruction necessarily focuses on jobs and skills we know today. Granted, some jobs like plumbers will probably always be important. But I can’t even begin to guess what jobs will be around when it’s time for today’s kindergarteners to step into that real world … beyond hoping that flying cars will be a thing.
By all means, I support the idea of preparing kids for the workforce. But I think we need to focus on something far more important: we need to teach them how to be better learners, because there’s no way they can graduate with most of what they’ll need. It’s why Plainfield Schools emphasizes what are often called the Four Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Knowing that Millard Fillmore was the nation’s 13th president matters far less than knowing how to find, evaluate, and use the information they’ll need, no matter what they end up doing.
Two other points bear consideration. First, the efforts to establish apprenticeships for high school students are laudable, but they come with a fundamental problem in most communities – especially in rural areas. There are a lot of students who could benefit from those apprenticeships, but relatively few local employers with the capacity to take them on. Do you have spare time in your busy day to supervise, train, and mentor a teenager? How would you fit that responsibility into everything else you’re expected to accomplish?
The second question is more fundamental. We need to think carefully about what we’re trying to accomplish. Should we equip kids primarily with skills specific to today’s economy? Or should we focus even more on helping them become adaptable learners who can handle whatever happens when today’s lucrative careers change or disappear?
Career preparation and apprenticeships can be valuable parts of that education. But they can’t be substitutes for it. The most valuable thing we can give today’s kindergarteners isn’t preparation for the jobs we know. It’s the ability to keep learning for the jobs we can’t possibly imagine.
I just hope we don’t make the mistake of preparing another generation for their parents’ world.