Catching up to our past: Vocational education, andragogy, and real work
✍ Scribed by Timothy G. Hatcher; Carol Cutler-White
- Book ID
- 102256937
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 51 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This editorial is about the cyclic nature of life in general, and work and learning in particular. Bikers have a saying: "What goes around comes around." This holds true for almost everything, including work, learning, education, and even the field of human resource development, and it brings us to where we are today in the middle of a financial crisis with rampant unemployment. Comparison of the current crisis to the Great Depression may be true in a number of ways, especially with regard to rebuilding the economy through large construction projects.
Although there is no quick fix to the current unemployment crisis, there is an attempt to return the unemployed to work, with much of the money targeted toward skilled workers. The fiscal stimulus monies 1 from the Obama administration are just beginning to flow into local infrastructure projects. A portion of this money is earmarked for rebuilding infrastructure, modernizing public facilities, and alternative energy power generation, projects that will take workers who have skills and who get their hands dirty daily. Sure, there will be a need for engineers and designers, but this is construction work that needs skilled hands driven by practical knowledge. The problem addressed here is that we do not have such skilled workers, or at least not enough because we have been too busy making sure everyone has a four-year degree or an MBA instead of a certificate in welding or an associate of applied science degree in construction technology. Vocational skills have been replaced by generic business or liberal arts-related curricula, and because of that we are not prepared as a society to build much of anything.
Supposedly, the "public" demanded that their precious offspring get a four-year degree, that vocational education was for "those kids" whose dad worked down at the factory, or what were called "shop dunks" who always