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April • May 2007 • Vol. XXV No. 4 • An Arnold Publication |
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From the Editor— Failing
Education System Leaves |
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What’s a tweener? According to Jose Anaya, whom I
interviewed for the Training Gold Mine story in this issue, a “tweener” is a
student who generally likes to work with his/her hands and who is bored to
death with the scholarly approach pushed by today’s public school system.
The result is, when a tweener graduates from high school, he/she drops out
and get lost in the system. Anaya calls them “tweeners” because they’re lost
between high school and finding a direction for their lives. There are more
then 2,000,000 tweeners in California alone, he says—youthful flotsam
seeking a direction for their lives. So why does our K-12 school system completely ignore, even disdain, the natural desires of these talented kids to work with their hands? It can’t be because they won’t grow up and pay taxes. As editor of CNC West, I’ve interviewed at least 70 multi-millionaires who dropped out of the system, but eventually found themselves in the metalworking industry. But maybe this attitude isn’t really a new one. Maybe it’s the same attitude faced by one of my personal heroes, Booker T. Washinington, when he created Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. In case you don’t remember, Booker T. was born a slave and was freed by Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. Unfortunately, Booker T.’s family was so poverty stricken that at age 9 he was forced to work in salt furnaces and coal mines. But Booker had intelligence and curiosity, so when he was 16, his parents relented and allowed him to quit work to go to school. They had no money to help him, but that didn’t stop him. He walked 200 miles to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia. He paid his tuition and board by working as the janitor. And, of course, as they say, the rest is history. Booker went on to become a teacher at the Hampton Institute, a respected world figure who spoke before great institutions in both America and Europe. He also wrote a book—Up from Slavery—that had a great influence on this editor’s attitude. But how is Booker’s experience relevant to today’s educational attitudes? Well, you see, Booker dedicated himself to helping his people lift themselves out of poverty. He believed that education was the only vehicle available to do so. As a result, in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a very different kind of school. Booker believed that his fellow ex-slaves needed to learn useful skills that would give them something to sell in the market place, something that people, white or black, would buy. He believed that the first generation of emancipated people should learn things like carpentry, how to make bricks and do masonry and other manual skills. He believed that once they had established themselves financially, their children could move on to higher learning. But that’s where Booker T. ran into the same attitudes we face in education today. The entrenched education establishment refused to go
along with his ideas. They were disdainful of the manual training approach,
as they are now. So, instead of backing Booker’s school, they insisted on
forcing the children into a traditional liberal arts education path,
learning Latin, Greek, great literature—wonderful things to know, but really
useless in helping them earn a living. I believe Booker T. Washington was right in his belief about helping his people. I also believe we face the same foolish, idealist attitudes from today’s educators. You would think that in 150 years those people would learn that one size doesn’t fit all. It never did and never will. Maybe someday we’ll see a resurrection of vocational training for all those tweeners. Maybe. . . C. H. Bush, Editor |
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