Schools As Vocational Training

I am a fan of what we're calling Career and Technical Education (CTE) these days. My old district has been part of a consortium running what we used to call a Vocational Technical School in the county for sixty years, and I am a huge fan. For most of my career, I taught students who split their day between core classes at their "home" school and vocational classes at the Vo-Tech, learning to be welders, heavy equipment operators, beauticians, home health care workers, and a host of other solid blue collar careers. 

The school (called the Tech Center these days) has, over the years, phased programs in and out depending on what the market seemed to be interested in. And that's an appropriate choice; it does students no service to prepare them for jobs that don't exist. 

There is a balance in the program that I always appreciated. My students could work on framing a house in the morning and arguing about MacBeth in the afternoon. They could spend part of their day repairing a mangled fender and part of their day studying the causes of the Civil War. They got elements of both vocational training and a traditional "liberal arts" education.

That strikes me as the right way to go. Education has to prepare a student for life and work. They need to become their best selves and grasp what it means to be fully human in the world, and that includes finding work to do that will allow them to support themselves. 

But when schools become too plugged into the idea of career prep--particularly when they attach themselves to specific jobs for specific employers-- they've lost the plot.

Take for instance the announcement that Mastery Charter Schools are going to "partner" with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) "to create a specialized healthcare curriculum to help its students land industry jobs upon graduation." 

There are several red flags here. One is that the initiative is sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. But what I find particularly ominous is this line:

Graduates of the program will earn industry credentials and certifications, which can be parlayed into high-demand and well-paid jobs within the partnered health system.

When your school program prepares students for employment with one specific employer, I question whose interests are being served.

If the International Dingnozzle Company needs to fill 10 nozzle-maker jobs, it's in their best interests to have 100 qualified applicants to choose from. But if a school focuses specifically on creating the 100 qualified applicants for the 10 jobs, it is doing a huge disservice to the 90 students who aren't going to get the job. 

There has always been and will always be pressure for schools to put corporate interests over the interests of students. The corporate view of students as future "human capital" or meat widgets; they really say dumb things like "Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools," and they are big fans of the neoliberal Democrat idea that if we just make young humans into Really Useful Engines then poverty will be erased and society will be better. And it doesn't hurt that by offloading training costs onto the taxpayers, corporations can save a buck.

Educators must resist that pressure. Public, private, charter, religious, secular-- whatever kind of school you are, if you're not putting student needs and interests, both short term and long term, first, than you are doing it wrong. Is it in the students' interests to collect a set of skills and knowledge that they will be able to trade for money and resources? Absolutely. Is it in the students' interests to design an education around the idea that they will live to work, and that anything that doesn't maximize their usefulness as meat widgets is a waste of their time, and that other folks will tell them what kind of meat widgets they should aspire to be? Absolutely not.