Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
4 April 2012
I cannot understand why there seems to be reluctance and even resistance to the idea that a critical outcome of education is to get a job. Note that I have said “a critical outcome” and made no claim that it is the only outcome. But I must say that without the capability of getting a job after 10, 12, and 13 perhaps even 20 years of formal education all other outcomes are made to look rather meaningless and trite.
When I went to school, (yes, this usually breaks out a chorus of simulated violin playing, shouts of “he’ll tell us about walking to school barefoot in the snow into the teeth of a raging gale next” and many other kinds of loving derision) we knew why – it was to get a job. Indeed at the age of 12, I was enrolled in a technical secondary school to become a carpenter. The course of my life was fixed on that job or so I thought.
It is a whole other story, intervention by well-meaning educators who classed me as “academic” and despatched me into 10 years of academic learning, the most perplexing years of my life when I most flirted with failure. The removal of the goal of a clear job for a future shaped rather amorphously which only later crystallised into teaching as a job, certainly made my pathway rockier than it needed to be.
Take the espoused goal of creating a lifelong learner. I’ll show you a lifelong learner when a person has demonstrated that they are – it is not a soft prediction that one makes. Many seemingly self-educated people are not lifelong learners. To say “I am a lifelong learner” can only be the conclusion drawn after looking back on at least a chunk of a life and being able to document clearly the evidence.
You see, what we need from educational experiences is the capability to do whatever is asked of us next. That is why I am frustrated by the unwillingness of education systems to accept that the key purpose of each stage of formal education is to prepare students for the next stage of their lives – education, eventually being a responsible adult, and, yes, finally getting a job.
Then there is the nonsense that we are in the business of preparing people to have “at least seven careers” as I read somewhere last week. This is baloney. Rare people have two careers perhaps but most, if they have a career at all, have one. “Career” is a qualitative judgment about a continuous quality of achievement in an area of employment. It might mean that a person has different jobs; indeed it is probably essential that they do, but they are changes and growth within a field not a succession of wild swings between “careers”.
Education would do well to set as a key goal, the aim of getting each and every student into a job.
Yes there are issues of unemployment but remember that the creation of unemployment is the outcome of a deliberate ideological stance about how economies best run. We could have full employment if we so wished and were prepared to pay for it and perhaps the western world will return to that one day. Who knows?. Or could we return?
Alongside the issue of youth unemployment we have another mammoth in the house, the unemployable youth. The skills of employment are not hard to define and one list is about as good as another.
Reliability, punctuality, pride in work, ability to work unsupervised, knowing what productivity means, ability to learn, enthusiasm all occur to me. A better, much more worthy, can be seen at http://www.quintcareers.com/job_skills_values.html . These should be a given if an education system is half good. But too often students have simply not acquired them. This is not simply the fault of the system or those who teach but we should ask questions about why this simple catalogue of dispositions and skills evades so many learners.
And the answer is clearly, because they cannot see a connection between what they are doing and the life of working in a job or jobs. Unemployment is a scourge of that we can be certain. The wonderful and gruesome and dispiriting TV series, Boys from the Blackstuff, a British television drama series from the early 1980s sticks in the mind for its main character Yosser Hughes who was somewhat demented by not having a job and the devastation that brought into his life. He had a couple of catchphrases, “Gizza’ job!” and “I can do that!” which summed up the continual torture of unemployment.
Of course the 1980s a time of serious unemployment among adults who lost their jobs. Now the issues seems increasingly to be among the young who have never had jobs.
Can education hold its head up high and say that we are doing our best? Or even that we are addressing the issue?
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