Learning a Living

Vocational training: the very phrase calls up the smell of plastic ashtrays, the clink of copper trinkets, the ennui of workshops crowded with delinquents manning lathes and squirting grease into crankcases. Vocational training should be a major source of steady employment for U.S. youths. Instead, it has become an educational junkyard for rejects from a college-geared society.

This month Congress acted to inject much-needed relevancy into craft education. Going well beyond the Administration's request of $250 million, the House Education and Labor Committee unanimously approved a $1.2 billion Vocational Education bill to provide for more instructors, modern courses, and more work-study programs for high school shop students.

World of Work. The reform is long overdue. During the post-Sputnik era, so much fanfare was given to college preparation that shop training was neglected--to the detriment of millions of youngsters who had neither the wish nor the wherewithal for higher education. One million students drop out of U.S. high schools each year. Out of every five pupils who entered fifth grade in 1957, according to the U.S. Office of Education, only one has stuck it out to pick up his diploma next year. At the same time, only one in four is receiving vocational training in high school. Thus, American high schools busily churn out millions of students who are supposed to head for post-college careers they will never see. Fully 75% of them have had no training at all for the world of work. Unemployment in the 16-19 age group is 13.6%, the highest of any age group in the land (see BUSINESS). These "push-outs" are the first to be caught by the whipsaw of poverty and despair.

Vocational education has always suffered from an inferiority complex--a product, perhaps, of the "golden streets" myth that made 19th century immigrants feel that a trade was vaguely unAmerican. The fact is that modern technology has done away with many of the most menial tasks and thereby created millions of jobs for such skilled workers as laboratory technicians, draftsmen and electronics specialists. In the most specialized fields, blue-collar workers actually earn more than their white-collar counterparts. Yet once a student forgoes college hopes to enter a vocational program, he runs the risk of fading into instant obsolescence.

In Chicago's Lake View, shop classes in printing set type in letterpress instead of the more advanced offset technique. In Newton (Mass.) High School, electronics students learn radio repair with vacuum tubes instead of solidstate sets. And in classrooms from Bangor, Me., to Beverly Hills, Calif., future auto mechanics finish their courses with out scraping a knuckle inside an automatic transmission (though 80% of U.S. cars are shiftless). One-half of all shop students in the U.S. are plugging away at home economics and agriculture--hardly critical crafts--while only 15% practice more pertinent skills such as industrial design, medical technology and visual communications. "I worked in the shops for four years," says one still-unemployed electronics graduate of The Bronx's Samuel Gompers Vocational and Technical High School. "I couldn't even get a job as an electrician's helper."

Through the Cluster. Dr. Melvin Barlow, staff director of the national Advisory Council on Vocational Education, says the most immediate need is to remove the hammer-and-chisel notions of craft training. Many communities are turning to comprehensive schools where general and vocational instruction are combined under one roof.

Some have introduced vocational "cluster" programs that identify basic principles and skills underlying many jobs within one occupational area. Thus, a student would plow through an electronies cluster composed of basic electricity, basic electronics, radio repair, metal fabrications, and electronics schematic drafting.

The greatest hope for improved workshop instruction lies in industry's acceptance of its vital stake in skilled craftsmen. In Detroit, the Chrysler Corp. and Michigan Bell Telephone "adopted" their own high schools, then supplied vocational equipment, teachers and on-the-job programs. In Los Angeles, several work-study programs send the youngsters to school for part of the day and then off to work in fields ranging from police duty to auto repair.

If vocational education is to prove viable, it must demonstrate the links between learning and life. Explains Dr. Grant Venn, an associate U.S. commissioner of education: "The problem is that many students drop out because they don't see education giving them a job. If we can give them work, then vocational education can make itself relevant." It must become so, if society's gears, both human and industrial, are to keep turning.

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