Re: school, work, and education

Louise Yarnall (lyarnall who-is-at ucla.edu)
Wed, 02 Dec 1998 10:01:38 -0800

I've been a bit surprised by the XMCA members who so strongly oppose
"school to work." Far from being a plot to force young people in
subservience to The Man, I think that -- if done right -- and there's the
rub -- it may represent an opportunity to breathe real world relevance into
the perennially dull, oppressive, sheltered, unrealistic, infantilized K-12
educational environment. This issue becomes particularly important to
teen-agers who are hungry for grown-up roles and responsibilities and tired
of being talked down to by surrogate "mommies" and "daddies" in school.
One of the things that school so utterly fails to prepare young people for
is the real world. Why? What's wrong with injecting reality into school?

Louise


>Jay Lemke said:

>I think that it _is_ important for us to know just what aspects of the
>curriculum actually do have any justification in terms of what people do
>outside of schools. I am as suspicious of academic-humanistic
>justifications for why we should all learn to read Shakespeare as I am of
>scientific-traditional ones for why we should all study the parts of the
>flower, as I am of vocationalist ones which justify multimedia literacy
>skills by their applications to reading blueprints and user manuals.
Louise Yarnall
Freelance writer & Research assistant
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Science
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