From the Schoolroom to the Workplace

...Since the report says that unions, being eager to lessen competition on the job market, are largely responsible for laws keeping students in school, it is also noteworthy that in most states where mandatory education ends at 17 or 18 years old, labor is relatively weak, e.g., Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, and Hawaii...

...In regard to school administrators, the report says: "If there is one thing that comes out clearly in studies of problems in the schools, it is that the leadership of the principal is probably the most important factor in explaining whether the schools are meeting their problems successfully or not...

...Consequently, argues the present report, there has been an overconcen-tration on higher education, particularly in the allocation of Federal funds...

...The report also urges selecting sensitive and skilled community coordinators...

...In 1977, 41 states did not make education compulsory beyond 16...

...Whether the young aspirant learned anything in college, or learned something income-producing, was less important than the certification of graduation...

...Common sense suggests that he is likely to pay as much attention to it as he paid to what was happening in the classroom the previous 10 years...

...Nevertheless, in practice it would hot change things very much...

...It goes on to argue for new approaches to training teachers, evaluating educational administrators and developing community coordinators...

...Present methods are deemed ineffective because of "inertia and insulation of schools of education from the problems encountered in the schools, particularly secondary schools with disadvantaged student bodies...

...on-the-job training...

...The final statement, as a result, lacks dimensions of the reality that the authors of the report so eagerly seek in the implementation of their recommendations...

...To the extent that the matter is touched upon at all, it is handled tangentially by designing devices to guide the young into more socially acceptable channels...

...In the case of students who cannot meet these standards," advises the Council, "it should be the responsibility of the school to make certain that the student is referred to a program intended to overcome his or her difficulties...

...But the report pays little attention to this Zeitgeist, merely commenting that "some of these characteristics have marked much of youth in many parts of the world throughout the ages...

...It should be noted, however, that Giving Youth a Better Chance does not stop at advice on how to deal with the disadvantaged and the deprived of secondary school age...

...And if adolescent anxiety and anomie, anger and antagonism are overly plentiful in our time, we ought to ask why, to probe beyond the conventional "boys will be boys...

...The main reason for this...

...In line with liberating many students from the classroom, the very first italicized recommendation is that "the legal age for the end of compulsory schooling should be no later than the 16th birthday...

...The prime virtue of all these proposals is their provocative character...

...Yet the unexpected break in the pattern is itself significant, especially since the thrust here is not primarily to encourage high school kids to go on to college, but to move into the world of "work" or "service" those youngsters who might otherwise become societal as well as school dropouts...

...youth service in civilian or military pursuits...

...The conclusion may have been forced by two developments in the '70s flowing from our commitment to cre-dentialism...

...With a kind of nagging insistence, the Council demands attention to the realities of a student's total existence...

...Whether it be remunerated employment, on-the-job training with minimal compensation, or just volunteer service, the idea is to guide teenagers into the world of work, particularly those who find school a waste or worse...

...The significant point, though, is that young men and women should have options other than the traditional track...

...Although adolescence has historically been an annoyance both to child and to parent, the extent of the "evil" modes vary from era to era...

...It is ironic, therefore, that some of the more questionable implications of the report's own recommendations seem attributable to the failure of those researching, writing and overseeing this volume to invite enough participants from outside the circle of traditional educators...

...The stipulation gives rise to an obvious question: What is to be done with those who do not master the basic skills...

...We have noted," itsays, "that college youth have been assisted by Federal initiatives in the 1970s far more than noncollege youth, and that it is time to redress the balance...

...Almost parallel with the push toward higher education, there began the funding of projects to assist children in the lowest grades, notably those handicapped by poverty and racial exclusion...

...Then we are told that "attendance would not be obligatory, but would be strongly recommended...

...Neither on the Council itself nor among the 25 persons listed as "experts on aspects of youth problems" is there anyone from organized (or unorganized) labor, from either the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers, from social work, sociology, psychiatry, law enforcement, drug programs, corporate personnel management, etc...

...The Council makes only passing reference to these efforts, but it does show that such early programs may easily be negated if not reinforced, and that teen-year experiences and emotions, unless analyzed, anticipated and answered, can produce a legion of antisocial beings...

...The most important single contribution that universities and colleges can make to overcoming the problems of the schools," we are told, "is through radical changes in teacher training...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant President and Educational Director, ILGWU In all, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, which completed its work in January, turned out 20 books...

...No undertaking will succeed, it warns, if it lacks input from those who have hands-on contact with our young people in the many facets of their daily lives...

...Hence there is an urgency to the Council's study of secondary school students, and a logic to its being concerned about those teenagers who are "financially disadvantaged" and "socially deprived"—categories "which account for about 38 per cent of all youths, or about 9 million persons age 16-21...

...The Carnegie report is aware that yourc people as a whole are today troubled by "lack of motivation, boredom, uncertainty and anxiety, lack of faith in the future generally and in their society in particular...

...Those who are listed as "unemployed" or as "societal dropouts," yet are gainfully engaged either full- or part-time in the shadow economy, may well constitute the most troublesome sector of our present-day youth...

...In setting forth its wide range of recommendations, the Council counts upon many societal forces to pitch in: business, unions, social agencies, local government, the family, the church, the school itself...

...In other words one doesn't necessarily have to be poor to be a "disadvantaged" young person...

...In any event, the report fastens on the "deprived" (meaning, in sociologist Martin Trow's definition, those deficient in early education and socialization, and in family financial resources) as they may be influenced by schools...

...Indeed, perhaps the most useful way to view this stimulating collection of proposals from the Carnegie Council is as an agenda for argument, rather than as a manual for conduct...

...The laudable goal is to make education "relevant" to what comes later, and to make the transition from school to society as smooth and natural as possible...

...Yet while zeroing-in on these undergroups is proper when proposing programs that would be largely ignored if they did not seem to engage some pressing "problem," this segregation of the "segregated" may have produced too narrow a perspective...

...Although the teenager in a ghetto or barrio does come out of a special milieu, he or she is also part of an age group with its own mood of the moment...

...Perhaps the Carnegie Council felt that coping with the Zeitgeist would have been a presumptuous extension of its mission...

...One must wonder about the effectiveness of such advice with a 16-year-old student who does not wish to continue in school, who has not yet mastered the basic skills sufficiently to be certified as functionally literate, and who comes out of a disadvantaged or deprived background...

...Second, the nonacademical-ly inclined youngster, dragooned to diploma and college, often found school oppressively irrelevant—and broke loose to break out of this prison...

...enrollment in an apprenticeship program...

...First, those who sweated out their BA's purely for investment purposes found it debased in a crowded field that included sizeable cohorts of PhDs...

...While proposing that 16 be the pivotal age, the report adds: "Every young person who leaves school at age 16 should have mastered the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, and should receive a certificate indicating that he or she has met the standards for basic skills established by the state or by the local school district...

...the Job Corps and similar programs...

...These are the people whose responsibility it is to bridge the gap between school and society by involving parents, business, labor, social agencies, and government (including school personnel) in the task of executing programs that will prepare the teenager for life beyond the classroom...

...enrollment in a community college...

...nine states went a year or two further...

...Through much of the '60s, the common belief was that to get ahead in the world you needed a college degree?or two...

...The degree was expected to play the same role in the 20th century that pedigree played in the 19th century...

...But the Carnegie report does not address the issue of the young men and women who opt out of the established ways for what they consider to be a better way of life...

...This penultimate volume, subtitled "Options for Education, Work and Service," does not strictly fit the series because it focuses on young people roughly 14-21 years old who, if they are in school, are on the secondary level...

...The importance attributed to this proposal is underlined by the fact that it receives a full chapter, entitled "The Importance of Being Sixteen...

...is that there is ample evidence that many young people are held in school too long—in this country and in other industrial countries—and that they would benefit from opportunities for experiences that would seem more challenging and closer to the 'real world' than school, especially the big-city school...

...Running through the long list of innovations is a leitmotif: work...

...They should be institutionally exposed or guided to alternatives—including continuation in school "with greatly increased opportunities for combinations of work experience, training and education" ; enrollment in a middle college that mixes the last years of high school with the first years of college...

...By age 16, many youths?male and female—have already made the decision to pursue the shadow life as a sensible career: self-employed, working at flexi-time, good pay, no taxes, low risk, and high esteem among neighbors...

...That is too easy a dismissal of the specter that haunts our young...

...If caught and sent to prison, the novice criminal gets a higher education in crime—tuition and all expenses paid...

...It offers 44 major recommendations, stated systematically in italics, plus dozens of lesser ones in plain type...

...Moreover, that student very often has a highly realistic alternative available to him in America's vast and growing "shadow economy"—prostitution, procuring, mugging, numbers, shoplifting, burglary, pilferage, gambling, dope, hijacking, picking pockets, extortion, car theft, etc...

...With "one third of our youths ill-educated, ill-employed, ill-equipped to make their way in American society," we face more than lost souls: They are a live volcano whose sporadic sputtering scars our social landscape and whose full eruption could bury us in hot ashes...