Youth organizations and Winning

My freind and I have been co-writing engineering graphic workbooks for about ten years. In the beginning, we were both teaching graphics so this was a natural extension of our work. In later years, I have moved away from that field but I still enjoy working with this subject even through the time I have to devote to it is much more limited. I was first exposed to drafting as a student in high school and I was so proud of those drawings because I felt like I could really draw even if it wasn’t art. It was a great feeling.

Every student needs to have an opportunity to learn something that gives them that same sense of success. For some this makes the difference between staying in school and leaving early. It also needs to be a real achievement, not a participation award. Unfortunately, those opportunities are dying. In an era when success is measured by standardized test scores, there are fewer and fewer programs that give students something tangible to hold on to. Even in career and technical education, the youth programs now depend on testing to determine winners at competitions.

Students no longer travel to large halls to exhibit their work, admire the work of their peers and then return home reach the mark set by their peers. Part of this is due to the over involvement of parents who rob their children of the sense of achievement by doing the work for them. Using tests helps to weed out this type of abuse. Part is this is due to cost; most organizations do not want the event to last any longer than needed so often only the judges now view the work and everyone removes their work after judging. This allows everyone to leave as quickly as possible after the awards.

For these reasons, the focus is now on the winner rather than the work. At the last science fair for which I volunteered, the projects did not even stay up long enough for the participants to view the winning entries. I never did know what the students had done to merit their awards. They did not have an opportunity to stand by their work and receive the accolades that their work deserved. The other students did not have a chance to see what a winning entry looked like.

This is a real loss. As a student, I went to several of these types of events and although I did not receive many ribbons, I was proud to be there and to be part of my group. I was impressed by that my peers had created such wonderful work and this made me believe that I could also create wonderful work because people my age had done those beautiful projects. How lucky I was to have a great drafting teacher who gave me the opportunity to learn the value of striving for improvement rather than one who just tallied up the wins. It easier to believe that you can achieve something when you see achievement as a process rather than as a strike of genius.

On Internet Trolls & Technical and Occupational Education

As many of you may know, my department at the university is slated to be closed this year. I am an Associate Professor of Technical and Occupational Education at The University of Southern Mississippi. This means that my colleagues and I will very likely lose our jobs. Since two of us are tenured faculty members and one of us is a tenured track faculty member, this has been reported a good bit in the regional news and has even merited an article in the September 28th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Glynn, D., When Tenured Professors are Laid Off, What Recourse?).

Up until today, I have refrained from commenting on this issue since it has received more than its due share of attention; however, today I read a comment that I cannot let pass. It was posted as a comment to The Chronicle of Higher Education article mentioned above.

Kudos for getting rid of "technical and occupational education", whetever [sic] it means. Let's teach our students some knowledge that can help them be competitive [sic] workforce, rather than demagogy.

This was from a post signed physicsprof.

I will tell you what it means.

Technical and occupational education teaches individuals to teach their trade to others. If you own a car that runs, have working plumbing in your home, can flip a switch to turn on your lights, you have benefited from the skills of someone who studied a technical and occupational field. If you have had your teeth cleaned, buried a loved one, purchased a wrought iron fence, eaten produce that was fresh and enjoyed a fine meal prepared by a chef, your life has been improved by technical and occupational education. If you are sitting on a manufactured piece of furniture to write comments on that last article you read on a working computer, you can thank someone who was trained in technical and occupational education. Over thirty occupations that affect you every day of your life are part of this field and it is one of the largest educational endeavors in the country and has been for more than two hundred years. It provides education for direct employment for thousands of individuals not pursuing a baccalaureate degree and provides others with marketable skills that make the pursuit of that degree possible without having to depend on student loans.

This field is based on the belief that every individual deserves the right to earn a fair wage as they develop from beginner to apprentice to master craftsman. It was founded by individuals such as John Dewey, Charles Prosser, Charles Allen, and Rufus Stimson who celebrated the contributions of the working class and is dedicated to making the lives of these individuals as intellectually rich as possible by developing the “head, heart and hand” of every person. I can think of no endeavor that is further from demagoguery than technical and occupational education. It empowers others rather than consolidating power and provides a path for every motivated individual to improve their status in life by becoming an active, contributing member of our society.

This is what the writer of that post missed. Such people are called “trolls” on the Internet. They live for the quick comment, the witty retort, and the barely distilled knot of opinion paraded as wisdom.

This means that instead of an active dialogue regarding how we train teachers of technical and industrial subjects, the intellectual debate has been reduced to a game of “gotcha”. Although this is true of many topics, in this case, the topic happens to be one that I know something about and have spent my life studying.

This individual could not be bothered to type a search term into Google to learn what Technical and Occupational Education is before he added his two slugs worth to the discussion.

The Internet was once hailed a brave new world where there would be a free exchange of ideas, open to all without cost or at a very low cost. Such an opportunity carries with it a responsibility; you must spend some time actually reviewing and studying the issues you write about. This is not only so that your own comments will be worth reading but it is also important for you to be a wise consumer of information on this very open market. How sad that virtual discussions so quickly dissolve into na-na taunts that would not be out of place on a kindergarten playground.

I look forward to day when we grow up enough to match the potential of our technology.