In my last article, I observed “Deep cuts were inevitable and now we are seeing it happen.” Hopefully, we will see more of this cost reduction.

School districts waste a lot of money. Before they get any more funding from local, state or federal sources, they need to re-assess what they are teaching. They are not teaching what needs to be taught in order to prepare for a job in today’s global economy.

THE THREE Rs OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

The whole public school institution was developed to educate a workforce for the Industrial Age. Is it an anachronism today? Summers off are.

“Summers off” relate to having the family together for harvesting crops in the summer. How many school-age children really need to help with the family farm today?

The Three Rs that they still teach are left over from the Industrial Age: Rote, Repetition and Routine instead of what is needed today. The Three Rs were skill sets needed for routine factory jobs. Public schools were implemented to develop an “educated” workforce for factories.

What is needed for today and tomorrow’s jobs is FACT-based education: Flexibility, Adaptability, Creativity, and Technology skills. These are the skill sets that graduates need to compete in today’s workforce.

Unfortunately, schools also retain a lot of deadwood teachers that complain every year about the schools and yet they come back every September to collect a check. Why? They should go out and see how others have to work a full year for what they make in eight months.

One of the readers, a student teacher in music, of last week’s column suggested that I should come in and do her job.

ASPIRING TO BE A TEACHER?

This is in response to my reader who said “Do a year of teaching.” That would be a LOT easier than some of the jobs I worked in. Oh yeah, my first degree was in Music Education (had a full academic scholarship) and I was going to be a teacher (Band Director), but at the time in 1976, there were more teachers than openings.

As far as teaching right after graduating, I subbed day-to-day in Chicago for three months. I saw 20 years in three months, but that's another story. I moved on.

Work at a Big Six Accounting/Consulting firm and put in 70-80 hours a week on the job out-of-town. (that’s fourteen hours-plus days) That makes the ten-hour day the reader (student teacher) complained about, a breeze.

Fly to an assignment every week for 7-8 months straight, deal with ALL the airport security, baggage issues and waiting/delay times every week, every flight. Then, keep working the rest of the year because those salaried jobs are 12 months out of the year, not just eight. Okay, we did get four weeks off for vacation.

Work on mission critical networks where there ARE life-and-death issues tied to it or multi-billion dollar financial liabilities. No, make that trillion dollar liabilities (in the case of the Chicago Merc and GLOBEX), tied to any one-day downtime. Hopefully, this gives you a better appreciation of what some other careers entail.

My advice to aspiring teachers: Don't be like so many teachers who have preceded you. If you are already complaining before you even start and have that "20 year attitude" and you are just in student teaching, get out.

Don't complain in front of the students about your job or try to brainwash them into believing you’re so overworked and their parents have it so easy.

Good luck in your teaching, but if you are whining about it already, leave as you will not add to any student's academic or talent growth. Kids see through teachers that are lazy or just going through the motions. They are smarter than what some teachers AND parents give them credit for.

Be a role model. Be a good example. If you can't, get out. Get into something else.

I have seen the "products" of public school at the university level and have to re-program them to be more flexible, creative and adaptive. They have been trained with the industrial-age skill sets of the three Rs: Rote, Repetition and Routine instead of what is needed today. . Life is not regimentation. And regimentation is what gets ingrained in a Three R approach to education.

As I pointed out in the beginning, what is needed for today’s jobs is FACT-based education: Flexibility, Adaptability, Creativity, and Technology skills. Remember that the next time you write your lesson plans. Hopefully, you are not using the same ones you did fifteen years ago. Times do change.

Carlini-ism - There is a disconnect in teaching industrial age skills for post-information age jobs.