09.02.07
Education *Is* Your Local Advantage
As you’ve probably noticed, this blog speaks fairly often about policy issues that affect smaller businesses. One of the biggest issues we deal with is education. There are a couple of really big reasons for this.
First of all, most of us have children, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and neighbors going through some level of the educational system. It is in our interests to see that they get what they need to step into their futures.
Secondly, as small business owners or prospective small business owners, the fruit of our local educational systems are the raw materials that can and hopefully will make us different from our competitors.
Local educator Rick Piercy said it this way:
Piercy described public education as an assembly-line system that worked well in its time, when large populations of manual laborers were needed, but times have changed and America is now competing in a global economy.
“We take kids by chronological age, we put them in a group and move them down the line year by year,” he said.
Like an auto-assembly line that produces essentially the same car with minor differences — some with air conditioning, some with automatic transmission — America’s schools have little of the versatility needed in the 21st century.
“Everybody who liked the comfort of not changing keeps things mired,” he said, urging a willingness to radically rethink the way America’s children are educated.
We really need to take a look at what he’s saying. Monolithic, assembly-line, age-divided education has not worked since at least the late 1970s, as the first twinges of global competition wiped out manual labor in textiles and clothing and began crushing our steel, shipbuilding, and automobile manufacturing industries.
Unfortunately, his charter school has become mostly a smaller version of a regular school, as California has cracked down on the independent study and other innovative methods that enabled motivated students to actually learn something that interests them and prepare for their futures.
Having spent some time supervising recent graduates in quick-service restaurants (”fast food”), I can tell you that most students are not prepared for the workplace:
- They are not prepared to work with people of varying ages and skillsets as equals.
- They are not prepared to work with supervisors who may not be older than they are.
- They are not prepared to look at things from a long-term perspective:
When I ask someone to sweep the floor, I do not just mean sweep right where you are standing. I mean- Get the broom
- Sweep the floor, beginning at the front of the area, making sure to get under and behind any obstacles such as tables, chairs, appliances, or equipment.
- Get the dustpan and take up the garbage you just swept up. Place the garbage in the trash.
- Check to see if the trash needs to be emptied. If so, empty the trash cans by taking the bagged trash out, making sure the can is clean and dry and putting a replacement bag into the can. Tie the bagged trash and take it out to the dumpster.
- Put the broom and dustpan away. Get out the wet floor signs and place them in the area. Fill the mop bucket with hot water and the appropriate cleaning chemical. Take the mop and bucket and mop the same area, ensuring that you do not leave the area too wet.
- Empty the mop bucket in the assigned area and clean the mop and bucket before you put them away.
When you tell a recent high school graduate to sweep, the result is:
- High school drop out: refuses to do the job. Considers it beneath him.
- Continuation school graduate: “Why do you always tell me to do it? I have never seen Betty sweep the floor. Tell her to do it.”
- Public school graduate: sweeps a ten feet by ten feet area around where he is standing, without getting underneath or behind anything, leaves a pile of dirt and garbage on the floor; requires specific direction at every phase of the job
- Charter school graduate or home school graduate: these are the only young employees that will carry out the full cleaning process described above
Why do you think this is? The school system gives specific, step-by-step directions on a daily basis. You don’t give students a schedule of what chapters to read and what work to turn in at the beginning of the semester, because some students will complete the entire schedule in two or three weeks. They will then quickly become bored and begin to entertain themselves, distracting other children in the process. So instead, we teach children to require close supervision in order to accomplish even routine tasks.
When my nephew Pikachu moved from one school to another in a different city, his teacher kept punishing him because of his mathematics work. He had learned to do the problems he was presented, but he did them the way they did it in Victorville, not the way they did it in his new city. He got the correct answer, but did not follow the specific sequence of steps that the teacher wanted him to follow.
The school system in your local area needs to be fully-controlled by local interests. Are most of the area's graduates likely to remain in the area? If so, students need to learn general entry-level skills for jobs in your area, without shortchanging those who will go to college or move to a different area. As long as the state and federal governments are setting standards and ignoring local needs, schools will continue to fail, because they will fail to adapt to local needs and conditions.
One exception that I can think of: in areas like South Los Angeles, schools need to have outside help, particularly the help of good-sized owner-managed businesses. These students need to learn entrepreneurship and then be launched out with some financing, so they can help to change their communities. Even there, once they are aware of what they need to do, outside control needs to go away so the schools can adapt to the needs of their communities.
