I've written some posts on facebook explaining my belief that schools should teach us basic life skills - like how to cook, manage finances, fix our tires, make a resume, become employable. People protested: "school was always for the intellect! You learn life skills from family!" However, with the nuclear family model and two parents working, this is no longer the case. In different times, most people worked and learned trades from childhood. Only the intellectual elite went to school. Now that EVERYONE MUST spend their day at school by law, we have a RESPONSIBILITY toward citizens - let alone, poor "ghetto" communities - to teach them basic life skills. From a young age, people should be taught good eating habits, good manners, cleaning procedures, basic psychology designed to identify and overcome trauma and mental illness, how to maintain mental and physical health, finances etc. This is most pressing in communities where both parents are forced to work, fathers are often absent, and violence is the norm.
Unless we're ready to admit that forcing everyone to waste their life in school isn't doing any good for the people who need it most, we need to change the framework of school. As it stands now, we force everyone to learn useless rote memorization, and then force companies to hire minorities through affirmative action. Still, there is no way to force people to hire those who are unequipped for the job. Since we have lumped Haitians, Jamaicans, Africans, Americans and so forth into this big group we call "black people," for example, a company can just as easily hire rich, educated black people or well-educated immigrants from other countries. This does not help the ghetto populations who arose from the abuses of slavery and suffered generational trauma. So without getting into all the other potential merits and demerits of affirmative action, this is enough to take pause.
Instead of controlling who companies hire based on social groupings instead of merit, we should work to make the poor employable. It all starts with education, but not the type of education we are giving now. If someone doesn't know how to eat right, their brains won't work to maximum capacity. In some of these areas there is no access to decent food - this needs to change too, and could be provided in schools. There is so much that education COULD do for people who really need it in order to evolve beyond an impossible situation. Then, intellectual focus could go back to being a 'specialization.'
Unless we're ready to admit that forcing everyone to waste their life in school isn't doing any good for the people who need it most, we need to change the framework of school. As it stands now, we force everyone to learn useless rote memorization, and then force companies to hire minorities through affirmative action. Still, there is no way to force people to hire those who are unequipped for the job. Since we have lumped Haitians, Jamaicans, Africans, Americans and so forth into this big group we call "black people," for example, a company can just as easily hire rich, educated black people or well-educated immigrants from other countries. This does not help the ghetto populations who arose from the abuses of slavery and suffered generational trauma. So without getting into all the other potential merits and demerits of affirmative action, this is enough to take pause.
Instead of controlling who companies hire based on social groupings instead of merit, we should work to make the poor employable. It all starts with education, but not the type of education we are giving now. If someone doesn't know how to eat right, their brains won't work to maximum capacity. In some of these areas there is no access to decent food - this needs to change too, and could be provided in schools. There is so much that education COULD do for people who really need it in order to evolve beyond an impossible situation. Then, intellectual focus could go back to being a 'specialization.'
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