Why dont elementary, middle school and high schools prepare kids for the job market?

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Well, I don't know about you, but I was taught how to read by the time I was six.
And then I was taught and learned how to calculate percentiles by the time I was about twelve.
An then I was required to take civics and learned how local, state and federal governments were funded when I was about fifteen.
This all happened in public school.

So, by the time I was sixteen and got my first job, I had all the tools under my belt to understand how much of my paycheck would be going to taxes. and why they were taken and when I read the newspaper, I could learn what they'd specifically be used for by my local, state, and federal governments.

These things are taught - some people just don't seem to learn them.

It's called vocational high school - they really do have them and they really do train and certify kids for real jobs.

schools should not be a work training operation, it should be an education operation. Schools should teach people how to live, how to use their brains, should expand their minds. Schools fail miserably.

Vocational training has been in the past used on kids who are not bright enough to be educated, as a way to constructively use the mandated education time, so that they have enough skills to do something productive for society in spite of their lack of ability or willingness to get educated. We should go back to that, it is at least better than warehousing kids as we do currently.

The point of school is to give someone the basic skills to be able to learn on their own.

Took the words out of my mouth - one thing to add to the learn things - also to apply what you have learned.

heh..

yeah....

umm..

I completely agree with this. I think it's more important for them to be teaching kids things like money management, career planning etc than, say, American history.

Thing is, even though I think these life skills are more important than academic study, I'm not fine with cutting any of the academic stuff and schools are having a hard enough time getting kids to learn the existing curriculum.

I wish they could find a way to squeeze it in, it wouldn't have to take up that much time (the basic concepts are pretty simple), and maybe it could be an after-school thing. Something like a partnership with local businesses who employ teenagers where kids come in and get trained on how to find jobs and how to manage their money and work together with the school and their employers.

society is based on work, schools should teach specific job skills

IMO.

wow wtf, society government, they are confusing as ****.

learning dont mean **** if you dont work. is what im trying to say.
hahahaha

aw man, i need to stop trying to investigate things, its result are highly depressing..

its like society and government as a whole refuse to use common sense, or something..

if we all need jobs, why dont they teach us jobs?

college, i understand is fine, but what about people who wouldnt otherwise make ti there?

shouldnt they get something?


shouldnt their be a place that is government owned, where people show up and say "hey! gimme work!"

doesnt it make sense? ****, have them building ****..

i dont know, im the type of person who solves problems.

just makes sense, to umm, solve the biggest ones.

(unemployment?)

yeah like internship!

exactly, well not the same as a regular internship, but like job training in general..

i mean, we all need jobs, they should do a little more preparing kids for the market.

Training the mind, teaching the unformed what the best of humanity can be is the purpose of education. "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he has food for a lifetime" Applies here. Education is a lifetime process, the purpose of school is to teach the unformed how to learn, and to motive them to do it.

I think schools could do better at training kids to learn as well, and I think they spend a bit too much of their focus on getting them to learn by rote.

They don't do very well with critical thinking and logic, as one example.

i ahte how the first budget to get cut is education, utterly useless thinking.

yeah lets cut education for schools, yeah so the generations get less and less education!

like we can afford for americans to get any more stupid.

Yeah, the school system has gone mad for objective measurement, which means teaching facts, not reasoning.

I agree with RG here too, and have said these things about my own elementary and high school educations previously on a2k. There was way too much rote and dogmatism; I didn't hear about logic - much less critical thinking - until my first year of college, and never had any kind of lessons about practical finances. Given that the basics of practical finance aren't all that stiff to teach, I would have preferred to have a few classes in that than my few lectures on "etiquette" or a chance to hear a woman recite "Our Town" once a year, every year as part of a captive audience.

My high schooling ended in 1959, and there were many changes in education since then, as we all know. More recently, rote has taken the stage again. I'm not against having a little bit of rote, but feel the absence of teaching more developed ways of thinking and means of making judgements leaves a population riding a sea of emotion based waves.

Drewdad said:

It's not the school system that's gone mad for objective measurement - it's the government that implemented NCLB and made teaching to the test a distasteful, yet unavoidable (in order to avoid sanctions in terms of funding) part of the job.
Most teachers and administrators I know hate these tests and sincerely regret and resent the loss of classroom time that could be used in much more interesting and productive ways because these standardized tests must now be prepared for and administered.

I think I must have hit the educational psychology wave just right because my education didn't entail a lot of rote for anything - except maybe penmanship.
And standardized testing was not nearly as pervasive then as it is now.
We had math and science labs where we did experiments and played games to reinforce and apply concepts.
I remember the highlight of my fifth grade language arts experience to this day - we were divided into groups and had to write a play, create a script and set, sew costumes, and perform it for the entire school. There was not one adult involved or intervening in any aspect of it. The teacher was as surprised as anyone else when she saw the final result.
They had bookkeeping and auto shop courses in my high school. I think what's happened is there was such an outcry against tracking that now everyone's pushed through the system as if they have the same aptitudes, needs and identical futures (in terms of jobs or careers).
But I don't think it's the educational system that changed on its own - I think it's had to bow to pressures from outside itself.
But still, I see a lot of good opportunities for growth and learning in schools that aren't accessed by people who would rather complain about what's not available than take advantage of what is.