Delivering a speech on the state of the US of A, the President delivered a couple of interesting thought, the first (speaking of putting teachers back into work) seemed to sum up the role of education as the process that delivers earning potential. I quote the (perhaps less) esteemed gentleman:
"Let's put teachers back into work so our kids can get good grades, go to college, graduate and get good jobs."
Back in the dim and distant past an English teacher (Colin Chapman - but not the Lotus chappie) told our class that as the number of people going to university rose and as access to higher education became easier the day would come when, "You'd need a degree to become a dustman!"
Labour Day 2011 saw the President in Detroit and one of the reports on the day consisted of interviews with people in that place, the majority of whom were unemployed, regarding their situation. One young man had been unemployed for four years and spoke of the ways that he and his wife struggled to make ends meet. He, like a few others interviewed were graduates and in fact he'd completed postgraduate studies but was unable to find work. He spoke of how McDonald's had opened a new restaurant and that he'd have killed to get a job there but the queues were too long. Another man interviewed had a doctoral qualification and yet was working as a scrap man to pay rent and eat. Eloquent and educated his words brought me back to that lesson in the late sixties and the teacher's words.
Seems my English teacher might just have been a visionary!
We need to pray and work with those who are marginalised by the recession(s) and the financial instability caused by the greed of others. Oh yeah, and get our attitudes to education sorted - we need more vocations and less pushing our children into areas that are merely 'earners'.
Pax
2 comments:
What we have is educational inflation. When it was a scarce resource it had enormous value. Now we are approaching the situation where 50% of a cohort go into university-level education, is it surprising that it is less and less the passport to a rewarding career (in whatever sense one wishes to read that)? One can't help feeling that this target, like the raising of the school leaving age a few decades ago, is becoming simply a way of massaging the employment figures so that youth unemployment becomes apparent only later in life.
And the worst thing about it is that now these young people who can't find jobs are also saddled with mountains of personal debt. Ok, it may not be repayable until you hit a certain level of income, but it remains there, and just grows.
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