Posted on 04/23/2016 5:24:04 PM PDT by Lorianne
Since the turn of the 20th century, our country’s educational priorities have decisively abandoned the hands for the head. In 2011, the Pathways to Prosperity Project, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., released a study demonstrating that the “college for all” movement is unrealistic and that the United States is unequivocally failing to prepare millions of young people to become employable adults—with perilous economic and social consequences. The objective of the project is to launch a national conversation about the goals and structure of American high schools.
Charlie Myers of the Woonsocket Area Career and Technical Center in Rhode Island asks, “Can we help young people find a passion to develop skills in school that will help them build their career in our industry?” He explains, “Craftspeople in our country learned not to teach others how and why they did things, because those persons could take their jobs. It was survival, but now we are reaping the harvest: There are virtually no young people coming in behind us. Our industry needs to show the earning potential of an apprenticeship of six years versus the debt of six years of school. We need to do more with education and outreach from elementary school and up.”
Last year, the budget for the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship was $28 million, compared to similar funding in England of $2 billion. Widespread, formal apprenticeships are foreign to many Americans, but expanding the use of this proven training model of educating and training workers, which dates back to the Middle Ages, would go a long way toward solving the workforce issues we face.
(Excerpt) Read more at finehomebuilding.com ...
All the young men profiled are the kind of people we are going to need in the coming years ... smart, ambitious, willing to learn and enjoy working with their hands as well as their intellect.
It starts with offering 1000 of the nations’ High School valedictorians $200k to NOT go to college. That will get the wheels rollin’.
Better yet offer it to those who have completed 1 year of college(Steve Jobs,Bill Gates).
Now that credit hours cost REAL money, most of the course offerings need to be rejected as useless.
There are lots of unemployed middle aged guys or even those in their fifties who wouldn’t mind learning skills. The trades shouldn’t just be looking at younger set for those interested in becoming skilled trades persons.
That’s true. Trade schools should be open to all ages.
bump
This must be the first article I’ve ever seen posted from Fine Homebuilding mag. It’s a great magazine and Taunton Press (so far) seems to be weathering the storms that are killing so many great mags.
It’s one of my favorite magazines,:)
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