It has become more and more clear since I have had kids in public school that we have gotten so far off base on our teaching priorities. It is a wonder any kids graduating high school or college these days are even able to survive in the real world. Over the last 50 years we have focused education more on Math and Science and less on Life skills and Trades.

I remember the first week of boot camp in the Navy. They taught us how to brush our teeth, use soap, shave your face, how to put on deodorant, we were told that taking a shower was a daily requirement. Why was this needed? You would be surprised to know how many people out there that are high school graduates that cannot perform these simple daily tasks. You might be even more surprised to know how many people still failed to shower daily or brush their teeth. There is a disconnect in our public school system that needs to be fixed.

Starting at the kindergarten age level, some of these basics should be taught in public school, not just their importance, but the actual task should be demonstrated and learned. This should be homework. Did you brush your teeth? Did you bathe lat night? Did you wash your hands after you went to the bathroom? These skill should advance with age all the way up through high school. Now at the high school age level, each year there should be a mandatory life skills class. These classes should involve basic cooking, cleaning, grooming, etc. But we need to go deeper than that. How to file taxes, how to balance a check book, how to build credit, how to build a resume, how to save for retirement, how to VOTE!!

Our public schools are spitting out one of three types of kids. 1. College bound. 2. Military bound. 3. Work force bound. All three routes have their pros and cons. But with the public school system today, the only choices that will get you anywhere in life are one of the first two. If you decide to enter the work force after graduation, you deserve to have the opportunity to succeed. The Public school system is not preparing kids to enter the work force today. It is not preparing them for life. It is not preparing them to be useful members of society.

If you look at the history of our school system you will see a trend over the last 50 years or so. Physical education, wood shop, auto shop, metal shop, home economics were all highly utilized classes 50 years ago, but not anymore. Many high school graduates were able to leave school with enough knowledge in manual labor to get an entry level job in a skilled trade. They were raised with a good work ethic and received on the job training.  Worked for 30+ years and were able to retire in their 60’s. This country was built by these people. Yet these skilled tradesmen are slowly disappearing. It is becoming more and more difficult every year to hire skilled trade workers.

This is my theory on what is happening. Lets look at our first group of kids. These kids that go off to college and get a good education, find a job in a high tech market, doctors, lawyers, IT, health care industry. That is great…we need more of those people. But I think there is a large number of these kids that are going off to college in hopes to perform one of these jobs, but are not cut out for it. Maybe not smart enough, or decide it is not for them. These kids finish college with a Art major degree of some kind that is almost useless. So they end up getting into some type of work where the market is flooded with semi intelligent, unskilled, inexperienced people. They either go on unemployment or work minimum wage jobs constantly bitching about how little they get paid. Or they bounce from job to job because they cant find the right fit for them. They have little benefit in our society and end up working dead end jobs most of their life. Or they go into politics!!

Then you have your Military bound kids. In the past this would have been an excellent route to take. The majority of the time, you join the military, learn a trade. You leave the military with good knowledge of the trade and a few years of job experience. Say you spent 4 years in the Navy and learn an excellent trade, lets use HVAC and Refrigeration as an example. You get out of the Navy and get an entry level job…so far so good. You work your way up to a journeyman level in your trade and have 15-20 years of good hard working trade experience. You are raising a family and are ready for a change. You have done your share of back breaking work and you want to move up in your company into more of a middle management position. Unfortunately, you lack the formal education requirement. That is the direction companies have been moving. Now even though you have many years of life and trade experience, they think it is better for their business to hire someone with minimal or no experience to manage a team of HVAC guys just because he has a college education!! So you work until you are in your early 60’s, riddled with pain and multiple surgeries to keep your overly worked body running until you are eligible for social security…you retire, live miserably for a few more year then you die!

Now lets look at our last group of kids. These poor menaces to society are dead set on getting a good paying job right out of high school. Some of them are not that clueless, they know they will have to start from the bottom, but many of them think they can just hit the ground running. Unfortunately they lack any type of life skills. You see they were not taught in school about saving money or paying bills. They also did not get any type of trade instruction. Most of them can’t operate the simplest of tools, or even recognize them. They have zero work ethic, because Mommy and Daddy paid for everything their whole life and didn’t make them earn anything! Most of them are out of shape slobs, because there was no more required physical education, and sports in high school were too expensive for their parents to afford. They played video games most of their life and barely passed high school with a C average. These kids end up mooching off their parents well into their 20’s and join the art majors in the unemployment line working for minimum wage. Most of them never actually stay working for the same place more than a couple of years…picture the 40 year old waiter at Applebee’s you saw last weekend…that is the type of guy that went straight out into the work force after high school.

We can salvage this, we can fix this. But I fear it will only get worse before it gets better. I expect 20 years from now, when you air conditioner breaks…you will have to pay and arm and a leg, give up your first born and mortgage your house to get a skilled HVAC guy to come over and fix it. Same goes for any pluming or electrical work you need done. Hopefully some college trained engineer designs a robot capable of performing these tasks, because our society is forcing people to steer clear of these skilled trades. The guys I learned the trade from are becoming scarce. Guys like me with a ton of Refrigeration knowledge are becoming few and far between. The longer this keeps up, the less people there will be in the world with this…Tribal knowledge as I like to call it. More and more of it is lost everyday.

It is quite simple really. My solution to the problem starts in the High schools and works its way down to kindergarten. We make a mandatory life skills class in all high schools throughout the United States. This class is mandatory your senior year to graduate. Each year we add a life skills class to the age group below it, 11th, 10th, 9th, and so on.  Each class curriculum is tailored for the types of life skills you should know by that age. We also bring back mandatory Physical education. I am sick and tired of hearing about how obese today’s youth is, and all the assholes blaming it on fast food and soft drinks. Take my son Tyler for example, this kids eats junk all the time…but he is very physically active, plays sports, loves the outdoors. He is healthy and in shape. If he ate McDonalds everyday and kept up his same physical activity level, he would never get fat! It is quite simple really. Limit their time on the video games and make them go outside and play!! Bring back physical education and for Christ sake, let your kids play any and all sports that interest them from a young age!! Don’t force them to play soccer and only soccer, let them try all the sports and choose for themselves what they like. Don’t force them to play only your favorite sport that you sucked at when you were a kid!

We also must bring the trade classes back into the high schools. We need to make at least one 4 year trade class mandatory for graduation from high school. Wood shop, Auto shop, Metal shop. We need to add a Construction and Trades class that includes basic electrical, plumbing and HVAC. This will at least give the kids that have no desire to go to college or the military something to fall back on. They can leave high school with knowledge of a trade, or multiple trades and get a decent paying job. It gives the kids that don’t make it through college or the military something to fall back on as well. Until that engineer designs the robot to do all this work, these jobs will be in high demand.

This all goes back to the dumbing down of our society that I covered in one of my other blogs…Common Sense…If we keep it up, there will be no one left to fix your A/C, toilet, light fixtures or appliances. There will be plenty of people that can design new buildings but no one left to build them. There will be lots of scientists designing new seed crops, but no one left to farm them. Make your kids do chores. Make them go outside and play. Teach them about your trade. Show them how to cook. Give your kids your Tribal Knowledge, because our school system will not.

Dick