The ideal of the educated person as a well-rounded individual who can think for himself is a relic of the past. A good little worker bee is what educational reformers want to make of the contemporary student.
Imagine Samuel Johnson standing in an unemployment line. If he were alive today, this prototypical renaissance man would be considered unhirable. However renowned he was for his wit and learning, the fact remains that the poor fellow had no "skills." What Dr. Johnson would need to compete in our technological age is "training." And the would-be scholars of today are going to get plenty of it. They'll run little risk of acquiring unmarketable wisdom, for educational reformers are feverishly restructuring our nation's school system to ensure the production of the proper workforce for the 21st Century.
The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 uses federal mandates and funding to force radical transformation of our public schools. The School-to-Work plan is to provide children with specific job training, rather than a well-rounded education, so that they will be better able to serve the needs of the coming global economy. School-to-Work is now being implemented nationwide through state laws, federal and state regulations, and federal mandates controlling the granting of School-to-Work funds.
School-to-Work substitutes vocational training for traditional academic pursuits. It shifts the focus of our educational institutions from the child's intellectual needs to the mundane requirements of management. Nor will students select the jobs they wish to train for; the jobs will, in effect, select them! Workforce development boards will be established to determine what jobs will be needed in the future. Schools will then design curricula to meet these bureaucratically-determined labor needs, using counselors and computers to "match" kids with careers. Completion of vocational training will entitle students not to a diploma, but a Certificate of Initial Mastery. They won't be able to "leave home without it."
The goal of School-to-Work is not to graduate literate, rational individuals, but to mass-produce the compliant "team players" so beloved by business. Standards of academic achievement will be discarded, competition of any kind forbidden. Students will be judged as a group, they'll "teach" each other, and by making frequent field trips to firms and factories they'll absorb an ethos by osmosis.
School-to-Work laws and regulations require vocational training to start "at the earliest possible age, but beginning no later than middle school grades." Ten-year-old children and their parents are not likely to have career paths mapped out so far in advance, but that's already been taken care of. So-called experts will make all the necessary arrangements! Computer profiles will track each student's "progress," and make confidential data easily accessible to the government bureaucrats and employers who will decide their future.
School-to-Work threatens the intellectual development, the privacy, and the future of every student in America. And the planned economy for which they're being molded is destined to fail.
