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Learning to Work or Learning to Live? |
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BY DAN DAVIDSON
 While it seems to be mere common sense to say that education ought to help prepare students to find jobs, and that this necessarily means that it should prepare them in some way to serve the needs of the businesses that might employ them, no one seems to know quite what that means in practical terms.
About the only subjects that would seem to fill this bill quite naturally are the old core subjects of English, mathematics, science and social studies but, once again, there isn't any general agreement on what elements of these subjects would best address the need.
Here we may run into a distinction between education, which has broader social and individual goals, and training, which readies the individual for a specific set of tasks.
If education is supposed to help shape well-rounded individuals with the capacity to adapt to the changing circumstances they may encounter in life, then English Literature may be what is needed rather than Business Communications. This is not to deny that a specific employment objective may actually require an individual to learn more about the latter subject.
The school system can, however, only address an issue like this in the most general of terms. In the real job world it is most likely that the accounting procedures, the data base programs, the financial software, the paper forms and the actual hardware used to manipulate them will be specific to the individual employer and will not have been things that the prospective employee could have learned within the school system.
There are things that schools can teach which do directly impact workplace performance. These are things that fall within the affective domain, the area of the personality which processes attitudes. Departments of education tend to downplay these things, and yet they are the very areas which Canada's Auditor General has suggested have the most impact on the Yukon's graduation rates.
Ontario, for instance, has recently discouraged teachers from assigning grades based on anything other than the actual work produced related to a subject; this work is described as Learning Outcomes. No marks may be deducted for late assignments. Failed tests are to be re-written - multiple times if necessary. Class attendance is not to be a factor in deciding a grade standing. Neither is behaviour.
Other departments of education in Canada have enacted similar policies.
In the Yukon, a kind of “no student left behind” policy has been quietly working its way into practice, to the extent that schools are being encouraged to have students who realistically have no chance of graduating with their peers (due to low marks, attendance, or the total absence of required courses) walk across the platform with everyone else at commencement ceremonies.
The excuse given for such policies is that student self-esteem is far more important to individual development than student accomplishment. A more realistic evaluation would be to say that self-esteem flourishes along with accomplishment and that both enhance individual development.
In the business world, employees who do not show up, are continually tardy, perform below a required level of proficiency and fail to do the work assigned to them, do not get to keep their jobs and certainly are not promoted to higher levels of responsibility.
(The recent debacle in the American financial markets is, we hope, an exception to what is supposed to be the rule.)
Is school about learning to work or about learning to live? I'd suggest that the latter emphasis is the higher level to aim for, and that it would necessarily include the former objective.
Dan Davidson is a retired teacher with 32 years experience in the classroom, administration and counselling in rural Yukon schools. He served with the Yukon Teachers' Association in various executive positions. He has pursued a sidebar career in journalism during the same time period.
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