George Rebane
[This is the corrected form of my Union column for August. In the submitted form I mistakenly assigned PM Cameron to the Labor Party. However, due to a glitch, it did not appear today but will instead publish next Saturday 20aug11 here, hopefully in the corrected version as below. Thanks again to readers for pointing out my blooper. In the post below I have addended comments about a related piece on the “skills gap” that appeared in the 11aug11 WSJ.]
There’s a burr under my blanket about how our young people are short-changed by establishment schools. But before getting to that irritation, we need to frame the issue.
Across the world we have two massive social storms merging into an historical typhoon of unknown proportions. Expanding economic crises due to massive overspending by European Union governments and the United States is colliding with an un(der)employed youth demographic already cooked into developed western societies. The result is growing civil unrest.
Without adding in the so-called Arab Spring uprisings across the middle east and Africa, Europe is showing the strains of belated austerity measures as the growing “number of protests against public-spending cuts have turned violent.” They began last year in Greece and have haphazardly spread across southern Europe, and now we have witnessed days of wanton rioting and looting in the UK.
There Tory Prime Minister Cameron has attempted to sweep it all under the “pure criminality” rug, but when such criminality quickly spread from London to other big cities like Birmingham, Bristol, and Liverpool, then wiser heads know that there is something more than spontaneous hooliganism going on.
We in the US are not immune from this social disease. Here no progressive politician would consider sponsoring a serious cut in the only major entitlements that might slow our fiscal freefall. But cuts will come, they have to. And then we will see the thread count of our civilization’s ‘gossamer veil’. It has ripped before.
So what have we been doing with our young people, those whom we expect to graduate from high school and go on to college or into the job market? Other than giving most of them a second rate education, we send a large fraction of our youth into the job market without even a high school diploma.
Our high schools reached their pinnacle performance in 1969 when 77% of entering students graduated. That was about the time that President Johnson’s Great Society programs began to kick in, and public education started going downhill. Things shifted into a real low gear ten years later when President Jimmy Carter launched one of the most arguably damaging government bureaucracies, the Department of Education – costs skyrocketed, performance plummeted, and graduation rates dropped to about 68%.
Consider that today our secondary public education mills annually pump out about 4.3 million students in their late teens. Of those 1.3 million are dropouts – no diploma. By the way, taking into account people retiring and immigrants arriving explains why the economy needs to add about 250,000 jobs a month.
But these jobs are not being created, and the dropouts go directly to the bottom of the hiring barrel, joining the ranks of the unschooled and unemployed. Dropout rates are disproportionately higher in urban areas where such young become the ignorant and malleable fodder for politicians who promise them checks and jobs they can’t fill.
My regular work with young people on various educational and scholarship programs, gives me a chance to talk about their futures. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that these young people – with or without diplomas – leave high school clueless as to what awaits them in the real world.
The punchline is that almost all the students don’t know what skills are required for various jobs, the kinds of jobs currently in demand, and how technology will impact the future jobs picture. They don’t have a clue because no one has told them. Almost all of them are lackadaisical about what field or career would interest them. They believe there is plenty of time to get all that sorted out after getting into college.
No one told them how life gets faster after you leave high school. No one told them the best subjects to take while you’re making up your mind (today’s answer – science, math, computer programming). Many so-called educators in high school are silent on those topics, and mostly give out self-esteem points if you play sports or sing in a choir. There is little sense of the ‘career urgency’ we all had when we graduated in the dark ages.
So today’s overwhelming fraction of young enter the job markets under-skilled for the available work. Many of them instinctively become sucklings at the public trough, looking for this or that government job where skills are optional. Or they simply join the angry unemployed living on some public transfer payment. What will they do when they learn that their check may no longer be in the mail?
Take some time to talk to your neighborhood teenager.
George Rebane is an entrepreneur and a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).
[Addendum] Democratic Senators Landrieu and Murray wrote ‘How to Close the Skills Gap’ for the 11aug11 WSJ. In it they correctly cite a “skills gap” that prevents most workers, young and old, from filling the jobs that companies have available. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that over three million jobs are currently open, but no qualified workers to take them.
Being of the liberal bent, the good Senators have a hard time finding the proper causes for such a shortfall – at least none that can’t be solved by more federal spending. They are totally blind to the abortion we call public secondary education in America, and instead want to reauthorize, reform, and refund “the Workforce Investment Act, our nation's foundational federal work-force development policy.” Yes, indeed.
In the process, they seem to have rediscovered apprenticeship as a way to get young people into the workplace and have the employer fill in what the schools missed. On a more positive note, in addition to finally realizing that there is a growing skills gap contributing to unemployment, these liberal senators are the first that I have seen who give a nod to the dreadful state of adult literacy in America (oft cited along with innumeracy on these pages, e.g. here and here) – “According to a report by the National Commission on Adult Literacy, 90 million adults have literacy skills so low that success in postsecondary education and training is becoming more and more challenging.”
“More and more challenging” my overtaxed a$$ets! In the aggregate, the high schools are a failed public institution made so by years of indiscriminate government funding and the tender mercies of the teachers’ unions. And these senators prescribe the predictable reprise of perpetually failed prescriptions.
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