Taking them back to school.

I heard on the radio this morning that 2 out of 3 high school students in Georgia don’t graduate in a traditional high school program. Wow. In an effort to demonstrate that Georgia has an educated work-force the state department of education has decided to implement different educational tracks within the high school curriculum.

The idea is that the student can decide what he or she would like to study, within the parameters of the offerings.

I’ve said this for years, not everyone is cut out for college. In this day of ever rising post-secondary educational costs, it’s lunacy to send every high school graduate onto higher learning, especially with no job at the end of the rainbow.

More and more people are graduating with outrageous student loan debt. Considering that there is no guarantee of a job, even with a diploma, how are these kids ever going to pay this back? So many people in their early twenties are saddled with crippling debt, and the jobs they get aren’t worth the decades of payments they will be paying for their degrees in underwater basket-weaving or “business” or whatever it is that those idiots I taught in public schools major in.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in the value of a good Liberal Arts education. I really enjoyed my seven years of studying English. I even used it for a couple of years when I taught it, but let’s be real; the college diploma that I have is just the minimum threshold of most corporate “management” jobs. It didn’t and doesn’t qualify me to do anything in particular; it merely indicates that I am trainable.

So what did I learn in school that was immediately translatable into a job skill? Typing.

Is it so bad to acknowledge that not every kid has the desire or the interest in going to college? The trend has been to sell college to everyone. If your grades are sub-par, you can start at the local community college and then transfer to a state school. Go on-line! Financial Aid is available! It’s silly.

What’s interesting about Vocation School is that typically there is a rigorous entrance requirement. Students are generally juniors and seniors, must have above a 2.0 grade point average, and must have passing grades on their state/federal achievement tests. In fact, in Florida, the Votech scores were higher than the traditional high school scores.

So what could a young person study at the high school level that would qualify them for a job once they graduate?

Secretarial: I’m sure that we can think of a better name for it. In my day it was shorthand, typing, bookkeeping and ‘business’, these days I’d think it would include database, spreadsheets, word processing and ‘business’. You get the idea. Send the little buggers out to their entry-level jobs right from jump-street. Do you really need a college diploma to be a customer service rep?

Healthcare: At the magnet high school where I taught, we had a program that graduated Licensed Practical Nurses. There’s a nursing shortage and many nursing skills are not strictly academic, but are also practical, learned in the field. There could be Certified Nursing Assistants, Phlebotomists, Medical Assistants, Medical Billing and Coding, pretty much anything one of those ads that are on in the middle of the day promise. All of these can be learned by high school seniors.

Trades: There is a paucity of electricians and plumbers. Why not get the kids apprenticed and learning something that they can earn a great living at? Skilled trades are always in demand and they offer an opportunity for growth and an above average wage.

Cosmetology: Hair, lots of people are interested in doing it, playing with it, styling it, and it’s one of those things that needs monthly maintenance.

Computer Science: Let’s face it, some of these kids are really good hackers. Why not direct that energy someplace useful? Train them in Oracle, Cisco and other certifications. Again, they can start as juniors and seniors and graduate earning right away.

The reason the vocational schools have dwindled is because in the seventies someone realized that minorities and women were shunted into what had previously been perceived as ‘dead-end’ jobs and the white males were advised to go onto college. Look around, that’s no longer the case. What I observed were frustrated kids who had no aptitude or interest in a traditional college-track education wasting away and causing trouble in a traditional classroom.

Will there be issues with racism and sexism? Of course, there are issues now. The kids dropping out aren’t the same across the board. It’s the poor, minorities and girls. Gee, that matches up pretty well with the traditional targets of discrimination. At least let’s stop pretending that anyone can be anything they want to be. It’s not true, it’s never been true.

The sooner common sense makes a return to all sectors of public life, the better off we’ll all be.