Today, however, high school diplomas poorly prepare students for finding good jobs. Despite automation and competition from overseas, surveys of businesses consistently show that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms go unfilled.
Can we call a spade a spade? High school does not prepare anyone for a “good job”. High school will hopefully give someone some basic literacy. We hope the graduates are literate enough to read their own diploma. But high school itself does not prepare someone for a particular job.
Neither does college, for that matter, unless someone gets a degree in some specific field which leads to a career field.
High school, at best, will have prepared you to enter the world of work or higher education, but does not, in and of itself, give you job skills or a ticket to a job, just by virtue of having graduated high school.
All K12 education was ever required to do was establish a minimum - minimally literate & enumerate. Any more and it was icing on the cake! Now it can barely do that! Why? Even for that low level requirement there has to be order, structure & no “excuses/pandering regarding students” for that to take place.
We have 10,000 years (actually more!) of examples from ALL CONTINENTS of teachers(masters) educating (training) students (disciples) from flint knapping, hide tanning, plumbing to theoretical physics. The common thread is structure, order & self discipline (primarily by the student!) & practice. Why one needs “Towers of Cluelessness “ like Colleges of Education to pump out theories of education and learning is beyond me! The history of mankind already tells you how to do it; master - student, order - discipline! Anymore and you introduce inefficiency until we get to the chaotic point we are at now.
Focusing on “common sense” would be part of the solution. . . but then who is qualified to teach that these days. Teaching from the Book of Proverbs could be starters. Saw this in the hospital gift shop when I was volunteering. . .had to write it down - memory isn’t what it use to be :) I was going to insert it in the church bulletin for this Sunday but decided against it :) “Common sense is like deodorant. . .the people who need it most don’t use it.”