MY TURN-In looking at the long term failure to achieve a viable public education system in the United States by those charged with its efficient implementation. It seems clear that this lack of success has a great deal to do with leadership at all levels of public education that is more concerned with politically correct slogans than a pragmatically driven system of public education.
To illustrate this point, one need only take note of recent unemployment figures here in California that point out a rather disturbing piece of information: While there is a significant increase in the number of jobs being offered, there remains a dearth of well-trained and qualified applicants for these positions.
While the aggregate cost of public education has reached an annualized figure of close to $1.2 trillion a year and student debt has also reached the trillion dollar level, the actual level of employable skills achieved at both the K-12 and college levels remains abysmal. More than half of college graduates today graduate with a mortgage-sized student debt … but without the house to go with it … and are working at relatively low-paying jobs that do not require a college degree.
It is also worth pointing out that while our national rhetoric exclusively continues to unquestioningly define educational success as going to college, the total capacity of all colleges and universities in the United States is somewhere between 30-40% of high school graduates. So what is everybody else supposed to do to be gainfully employed as productive members of society, so they can stay out of expensive privatized jails that now warehouse 2.4 million of our population incarcerated at an annual average cost of $50,000 per person?
When I went to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in the 1950s and 60s, in addition to a college track for students, all students were required to take a shop class or home economics classes that gave them skills in wood, metal, electrical, automotive, and other practical and employable skills like drafting.
Education was not seen as an either/or election, but rather as giving students more education options. It was designed so that ultimate professional choices could be made from a position with many acquired areas of skill and knowledge as opposed to the narrow educational tracking that presently exists … allows the majority of students to finish their formal education without employable skills.
Journeyman level skills in automotive, plumbing, woodworking, metalworking, and electrical have given me both the ability to pay for three academic degrees, but these skills have also offered me at times alternative professions that allow me to remain gainfully employed, if my integrity as a teacher requires it.
Over the last half-century, there has developed a more and more disturbing trend that is deconstructing what had been an elaborate system of apprenticeship education that literally goes back to the renaissance and before.
Under this educational model, young people interested in guild trades working with wood, stone, gold, or the fabrication of instruments, could develop the necessary expertise by doing apprenticeships or internships. Now internships, where they exist, for the most part are a form of free labor exploitation with no job at the end of the rainbow.
In a corporate environment where everything is driven by continuing to augment profits year after year with no consideration as to whether this deconstruction of specialized skills is sustainable over time in a reality that exclusively pledges allegiance to the cheapest labor, while dismantling our country's ability to maintain its own infrastructure with its own domestic work force.
Everything has become disposable at a cost that continues to stress the biosphere and exacerbate global warming through repetitious production of items with an ever shorter period of calculated obsolescence. It's hard to have a trash pickup day go by without one seeing Ikea built- not-to-last furniture at the curbside.
Probably the most profound example I have recently seen as to of how we are systematically dismantling our society's productive capable was experienced when I recently visited family in Rome, Italy. My brother-in-law has a workshop he calls Alterego, where he makes both traditional and electrified wooden instruments.
The craftsman who actually builds each instrument in a manner that hasn't much deviated since before the renaissance is 80 years old and without an apprentice to carry on this 500 year plus tradition. He might be the last to carry on this invaluable craft, because he has been unable to find an apprentice to train in the skills he received.
As a society, we are at a crossroads. We can either keep going down the exclusively profit-driven road toward our own deconstruction as a highly evolved post-industrial society or we can use cutting edge technology to create a new renaissance where knowledge and skill is disseminated and not purposefully hidden or allowed to die.
If those in power have any intelligence and not just money, they would realize that they would probably benefit disproportionately from allowing this rebirth of the Yankee ingenuity that once made us great.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 39
Pub: May 13, 2014
