Workers

I just returned from a weekend surrounded by my people. I went to a family wedding, then spent the next two days with a variety of sisters, visiting cemeteries in the communities that dot the valley of my childhood home. We placed an abundance of flowers on the graves of loved ones because I've reached that age where I know about as many people underground as I do above-ground. As we visited the cemeteries I encountered a few old friends and several relatives. We chatted, and I realized that, whereas I've moved a long way from the world of my youth, they live right there, still surrounded by people who mostly earn their living through physical labor of some type.

When I was growing up, everyone I knew--including most of my teachers--lived on farms and milked cows or raised cattle or sheep. This involved the related activity of growing feed that could be stored and used to keep these animals alive throughout the long winter. Everywhere I looked there were vast acres filled with grain or hay, carefully cultivated, and then cut and stored, always through the hard work of us people. Again, I repeat, even many of my school teachers had farms and animals and were engaged in this pursuit, despite having graduated from college and being employed in professional, white-collar jobs.

The fact that they farmed as well as taught school, or ran a ranch (a local doctor) or had a herd of sheep (a store owner) seemed normal to me--in fact--it seemed correct. After all, in my mind, farming was the premier job. It was the job that resulted in all the other jobs. It was like this: if there weren't farmers, then there wouldn't have been a tractor dealership, nor a grain mill, nor a creamery/cheese factory, nor the hardware store. Then, there wouldn't be people who needed to shop at the grocery store, or the drugstore, or go to a movie theater, restaurant or bar. There wouldn't be children for teachers to teach, or patients for the hospital. It all started with the farmers; the others just came along to serve his needs.

It may be a faulty concept, but it illustrates my teeny-tiny world at age 10. But I have always been proud of my farm girl roots. I remember once meeting the father of a college roommate. He had a prominent, highly regarded job in a very large city, and had grown up there, been educated there, and was reknown in his world. He asked what my father's profession was, and I proudly told of his dairy farm in Wyoming. The tone of the reply and the expression on this man's face made it clear to me that this pride was wholly unrequited and, in fact, dismissed. At that moment, I lost my respect for that person, and didn't consider him my father's equal. My dad would have shown much more regard for someone's work, regardless of its stature in the world's eye.

This brings me to a pet peeve. I am a teacher, yes. But I think we in America have made a big mistake in educating every student as though they are all going to grow up to be English professors. It doesn't suit everyone. We still need plumbers and mechanics. By insisting that a school's success is only measurable by the number of students who are accepted to a university following their high school graduation, we cheat those kids who would be happier and much more suited to work in the trades. I think that a "degree" has become devalued. There are many students who are completely unsuited for the standard college-prep curriculum. They'd be so much better off in a program that truly taught them a marketable skill. A few high schools here in Las Vegas have been retooled, or built from scratch, to do just that.

But there are far more students who would benefit from that type of education more than they do from the usual "push everyone into the round hole of college-prep" that schools are attempting now. The drop out rate will never go down as long as boys see no point in their literature class when they can already earn money repairing cars. Why not offer a comprehensive course for these natural mechanics that includes reading skills and math but in a context that will be useful for them and help them to become capable of operating a business, or at least managing someone else's shop? Then there would seem like there was a point to the torture that school is for many. Such a torture that they readily drop out and turn to gansterhood for a buck, when they have a talent for so many other jobs that don't require one to write about the motivation of the characters in a book written by a lonely English woman two hundred years ago.

I don't mean to disparage literature--I love it. But we need to find a solution to the thousands of students in our cities that drop out of our traditional schools because they see no point to the education we are forcing on them. There must be another way to help these students gain a skill with which they can support themselves. There is a lot of effort put into building self-esteem, but true self-esteem comes directly from being competent and knowing you can do things for yourself. Here's a link to an article my daughter sent me that articulates this much better than I do. I hope that we can retool our education system and really help our students to gain more from their public education than a sense of frustration and failure.