out·post, \ˈaut-ˌpōst\, noun: an outlying or frontier settlement
ob·serv·er, \əb-ˈzər-vər\, noun: a representative sent to observe but not participate in an activity
Saturday, March 10, 2012
By John A. Ostenburg
High school educators often find themselves arguing over how much of the curriculum should be devoted to college preparation and how much should focus on career training.
Parents usually jump into the conflict also, with some pressuring schools to do more to assure that the student is job-ready upon graduation from secondary school, while others want their sons and daughters to be admitted to a top-notch college, even – perhaps – to be so well prepared as to gain some scholarship assistance that will offset the high costs of today’s university education.
And now the discussion has reached the highest level of public policy: it’s become a debating point for presidential candidates.
The stage for the debate was set by President Barack Obama in this year’s State of the Union address when he proposed making it easier for young Americans to gain better job preparation and to go to college. He has said subsequent to that address that the 21st century workplace often requires that workers have training beyond what they may have received in high school. Among his administration’s policies is funding to enhance the opportunity for America’s students to gain job skills by making education and training available to them after they’ve earned the high school diploma.
GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum doesn’t agree. The President’s “a snob” because of that plan, Mr. Santorum recently told a Michigan Tea Party rally as he commented on the President’s call for all students to be prepared to engage in some form of post-secondary education. “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college,” the former senator from Pennsylvania told the Tea Party activists. “What a snob,” he said to cheers from the TP-folk.
Of course, Mr. Santorum had it wrong on several fronts.
First of all, the President hasn’t said that every American should go to college. He’s said that every American should have the opportunity to go to college, or to receive some form of post-secondary training, if he or she so desires. The Obama policy proposal is for the government to make sure anyone who has the desire for post-secondary education can afford to see that desire fulfilled.
Secondly, Mr. Santorum truly is mentally captured in a previous century if he thinks it’s snobbish to be well enough trained to get a job. The last folks to advocate that approach, to my knowledge, were the Luddites of two centuries ago. Really, is that what the Tea Party-goers want? To go back to a time when ignorance so prevailed that angry mobs destroyed mechanized equipment as it was introduced into the workplace of a new industrialized world?
Unfortunately, comments such as that made by Rick Santorum do great harm to the education movement in America. Perhaps it was true decades ago that entering the manufacturing workforce required little formal educational training – not even a high school diploma – but that’s not the case today. The kind of equipment found in most of today’s manufacturing workplaces is highly sophisticated and requires a trained workforce for its operation. One of the reasons manufacturing plants are coming back to the U.S. after the hiatus of operating abroad is because the new equipment needed for their operations demands a better prepared workforce than what is found in many of the countries where the companies moved their plants over the last quarter of a century. American workers offer the best potential for those plants to operate at highest levels of capacity, but those workers need to have skill levels that stay consistent with the demands of the new equipment.
Is it snobbish to think we owe our students the opportunity to acquire those skill levels?
A former boss of mine liked the adage that “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” and it’s an observation truly applicable to Mr. Santorum. Indeed, he was right when he told the same Tea Party group that “Not all folks are gifted in the same way.” That’s an observation that President Obama certainly would agree with. That’s why he has stressed that all avenues of post-secondary education and training should be made available to interested students. For some it’s going to be a college degree; for some it may be an associate’s degree from a community college; and for some it will be merely one or two training courses. It’s up to the student to decide, and to decide at his or her own pace.
But after sharing that one iota of good sense, Mr. Santorum went back to his old campaign pathology, telling the TP-folk that President Obama wants everyone to go to college because that way the liberal professors can “indoctrinate them.” He explained, “Oh, I understand why he (President Obama) wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” Bet that scared the pants off a whole lot of those white folks in his audience!
If the American public can step beyond the idiocy of sound-bite statements such as that made by Mr. Santorum, perhaps we can get to the development of educational policy that deals with the true issues involving both college-preparation and job-training. It’s not – as Mr. Santorum would like us to believe – an “either/or” situation. Rather, it’s “a both/and” situation. America’s students can have both preparation for college and training for a job.
Of course, achieving that end requires that education be entrusted to the educators without the intrusion of the Rick Santorums of the world. Teachers and school administrators have it within their ability to develop curricula that simultaneously go in both directions, especially as relate to preparation for the new manufacturing workplace.
Will students need computer skills for the new workplace? Most definitely. The assembly line of yesterday has been replaced by a new assembly line that’s controlled by a touch-screen monitor and a keyboard.
Will students need good math skills for the new workplace? Most definitely. Math is the basis for most of the programming that is used in modernized manufacturing.
Will students need good communication skills for the new workplace? Most definitely. The ability to communicate efficiently and effectively is a basic requirement for almost every job that becomes available today.
Will students need the ability to think clearly and make decisions on the spot? Most definitely. Jobs of the future increasingly will require clear thinking that reaches far beyond rote memorization of mechanical procedures.
So where’s the conflict? Well, there isn’t one.
Academic coursework at the secondary level as we prepare to satisfy job requirements for the balance of the 21st century needs to be integrated in such a fashion that the student has the necessary basic educational preparation so as to move with ease into whichever career path he or she may choose. Without question, a college education will be needed for some career choices, e.g., medicine, law, teaching, etc., and high schools need to make sure students desiring to go in those directions are adequately prepared.
When in comes to preparation for jobs in the manufacturing sector, however, a basic set of educational skills are required regardless of what avenue the student eventually might choose to pursue. If those basic skills are fostered, a student looking toward a manufacturing career can leave high school and go immediately to a good paying job; or can be prepared to enhance his or her skills through post-secondary training courses or by acquiring an associate’s degree at a community college; or can pursue college work in areas of engineering, management, or any one of several specialized areas.
What public policymakers should be doing is providing the proper atmosphere for educational professionals to develop curricula that lead to those ends. What they should not be doing is denigrating the importance of education at any level, be it pre-school, primary, secondary, post-secondary, or graduate-level.
Hear that, Mr. Santorum?
John A. Ostenburg is in his fourth four-year term as mayor of Park Forest, Illinois, and formerly served in the Illinois House of Representatives. He retired in July 2010 as the chief of staff for the Chicago Teachers Union after holding various CTU posts over a 15-year period. A former newspaper reporter and editor, he also has been a teacher and/or administrator at elementary, secondary, community college, and university levels. E-mail him at JOstenburg@aol.com.