More and more commentators, along with the parents of most students, believe education’s primary goal is preparing students for the workforce, beginning in kindergarten and accelerating in pressure and expense each year. Whether or not you agree with this goal, we need to question not only how education is currently being evaluated but what’s actually being taught, and whether graduates are obtaining well-paying jobs that offer security and gratification.
According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor “Today’s average college graduate will have at least 3 – 5 career changes in their lifetime, and 10 – 14 job changes by age 38.”
Generation Opportunity, a conservative nonprofit advocate for millennials, releases a monthly “Millennial Jobs Report” that slices official labor data and tracks unemployment rates for younger workers. From January, 2015 to May, 2016 the percentage of 18 – 29-year-olds decreased slightly from 15.4 to 13.8 percent, still way above the official national jobless rate of 5.4 percent.
What happens to students who won’t, or can’t, obsess on SAT tests, Core or STEM curricula? They’re herded into programs that lock them into low paying jobs that limit their scope and will be impacted by automation and the evisceration of collective bargaining by the gig economy. (That’s provided they’re docile, if not, we lock ‘em up!)
What can we do about these prognoses? Which are actually ten times worse than mainstream media lead us to believe. We can start by involving teens in program design and allocation. Young people are much more aware than the politicians who represent them of the looming crises that await them. Thanks to Greta, and the throngs of teens she champions, we can no longer claim “we didn’t know” because we’re finally being forced on all sides to do so.
What can educators do? First off, we can stop being stupid. Or to put it more politely, redesign education.
We need to begin by replacing current standardized “academic” programs with settings that teach the hands-on skills required in various fields and careers. These would pay decent wages for real work and would include classes or seminars that examine the background, history, and potential overlap and design of various fields.
We could begin with interdisciplinary courses in housing construction, medicine, and culinary arts. These would pay students to learn not only the practical hands-on skills required, but the history of these fields and the driving forces that did or did not overlap them.
Two exciting new examples exemplify this structure:
- The culinary program The Sioux Chef, directed by Chef Sean Sherman, who was born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and has been cooking in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana for the past twenty-seven years. He works as a caterer and food educator across the country through his business The Sioux Chef, based in South Minneapolis.
- Crossing the Boundary: This course at the Parsons Institute draws on resources from Cooperative Studies, Anthropology, Development Studies, Sociology, Internet Studies, and Economics. This is the first course to explore the theoretical underpinnings and key examples of platform cooperativism in an international context.
Instead of talking about problems for Syrian refugees, Parsons fashion design student Angela Luna researched what problems she could solve via design, by examining images of real refugees, reading articles and calling humanitarian agencies who worked with the migrants. The result was a line of clothing called Adiff that Angela designed for her senior thesis. Each jacket in her line is designed to meet a particular need — a need for shelter, camouflage, sleeping, carrying belongings or children, even flotation.
Each garment is unisex and one-size-fits-all. The collection uses design intervention to address the issues refugees face in their daily lives. An outerwear jacket, for example, can transform into a tent, a backpack, or a sleeping bag. Other jackets can be equipped to transport children, to use as a floatation device, or to increase nighttime visibility. www.adiff.com
See the complete series on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=tlhpQMdONCY
https://event.newschool.edu/whoownstheworld
- Of course there have always been exceptions for the wealthy. The internationally famous designer Isamu Noguchi got his start at the age of eight when his very wise single mother appointed him to design and build their country home and garden. (She’d apprenticed him to a local carpenter after he’d declared his traditional studies boring.)
- Who Owns the World? Cooperative Alternatives to Surveillance Capitalism Now! Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (from the newsletter of the New School in New York.)
