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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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Vocational training for particular tasks in the industrial process should be done by industry itself and on the job, not by the schools or in classrooms. The curriculum of basic schooling, from the first grade through college, should be wholly liberal and essentially the same for all. In view of the wide range of abilities and aptitudes with which the schools have to deal, that curriculum must be adapted to different children in different ways. In other words, we must solve the problem of how to give all the children -- the least gifted as well as the most gifted -- the same kind of liberal education that was given in the past only to the few. Upon our success in solving that problem the future of democracy depends. -- Mortimer Adler |
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The Paideia Program The World of Work by James O'Toole
Ours is an advanced, postindustrial economy in which machines are coming to do most of society's labor. Most of the "work" that will remain will be good work -- work that requires human intelligence, not animal strength. In such an economy, the skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, observing, measuring, and calculating are essential preparations for any job youth may want to pursue in the future. In the fast changing world in which specific vocational training will be quickly outmoded by technological, economic, and social advances, the only appropriate career education is learning how to learn, so that one can quickly prepare for new jobs and career opportunities as they come along. As Robert M. Hutchins once wrote:
Since The Paideia Program offers the only practical preparation for such an unpredictable future, the general course of study we advocate is the right preparation for the vocations common to all: citizenship, the pursuits of leisure, and earning a living. |
The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus, by Mortimer J. Adler
Paideia Problems and Possibilities. by Mortimer J. Adler
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As the industries supplying services and information come to dominate the American economy, professional, technical, clerical, managerial, and other service occupations will engage the vast majority of young Americans who enter the labor market. Many jobs now require, or will soon require, advanced schooling. The existing institutions of higher education are equipped to provide this advanced professional, managerial, and technical education. Indeed, it is the kind of schooling most of these institutions are best equipped to provide. It is fast becoming the only kind of schooling that highly specialized faculties are willing to provide. The existing system of higher education is thus already geared to the advanced preparation for work that will be its prime responsibility as soon as "general" education is recognized as the responsibility of basic schooling. There will, of course, be many graduates of Paideia schools who will not wish to pursue advanced training. It is therefore essential that vocational training should be available to them at cost-free public institutions, after they graduate from basic schooling. These institutions would be staffed by the vocational teachers in the existing high schools and community colleges, thus preventing severe dislocations for vocational teachers or institutions. The eighteen-year-olds who voluntarily choose to enter vocational training will be qualitatively different from today's vocational students: "they will have had an excellent general education". This will better serve the ends of equality than any form of vocational education ever tried. Differences among social groups will be greatly reduced when all eighteen-year-olds will have had the same preparation. Differences in occupations will remain, but differences in opportunity, class, and culture will be much less. Vocational educators will then have a more satisfying role and they will not be forced to do remedial teaching. Instead, they will be free to do what they are best prepared to do and most interested in doing: technical training and coaching. Training in the useful arts and crafts is offered in the first twelve years of Paideia schooling, but we believe nonetheless that there is a need for a bridge between schooling and the working world all students will enter. Most pressingly, this bridge is needed to help adolescents understand the nature of the world of work, which includes the career choices they will have to face. Consequently, consideration should be given to providing all students in the twelfth (last year) of basic schooling with some kind of work-and-study experience. This experience might range from volunteer work in a hospital, to part-time paid work in a factory, office, newspaper, or government bureau, to participation in Junior Achievement. What is fundamental is that young people come to understand through experience both the necessity for work and its responsibilities -- the attitudes, habits, constraints and satisfactions inseparable from employment. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans are currently engaged in such informative activities. In the Paideia curriculum, these activities should entail no time away from class; that is, the time spent working should be after school hours, on weekends, or during the summer months. From such jobs would follow a number of educational advantages.
The shortage of such opportunities for work is, of course, a practical limitation to this proposal, which is why we advance it as an option only. But there is, of course, no limit to the number of young people who could be engaged in Junior Achievement activities and, since these are far more readily malleable to educational ends, they may be the preferable alternative. It should also be remembered that apart from work in the market place, work habits can be formed by school work and homework. Both are real work and differ from jobs only in that they are not paid and that they are done for oneself and not for others. Homework, especially, should serve to develop habits of good work. Increased amounts of homework would reduce the number of hours wasted watching television; and homework carefully corrected and repeated if slovenly done, would introduce young Americans to the routine of hard and exact work to which West European, Japanese, Chinese and Russian youth are accustomed at an early age.
Chapter 12, from The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus, by Mortimer J. Adler.
More about The Paideia Program can be found in The Radical Academy by CLICKING HERE. |
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