Really Crappy Vocational Training

Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift ~ Bob Dylan

The most common answer to a child who doesn't care for school is that they must suck it up so that they can 1) get a good job or 2) get into a good college so that they can get a good job. No matter what kind of lip service the rest of us give education, the prevailing idea is that it's vocational training.

Really crappy vocational training as it turns out.

By the time a typical American child graduates from high school, they've received some 22,600 hours of schooling and all that qualifies them for is an entry level job, probably at minimum wage. If they go to college for an additional 8,000-10,000 hours, they might qualify for a management training program.

In the end, all that schooling gets reduced to a single line on a resume. If you don't have "connections" (which is the real advantage of attending Ivy League universities) the most important thing a young job seeker can have, the thing that sets them apart, is actual work experience. That makes sense because at the end of the day, employers are hiring people to do a job, not matriculate.

Microsoft's founder Bill Gates famously dropped out of college, but there are millions of other very accomplished people, in all fields, who don't hold degrees. I have a close friend who has worked at the highest level in major corporations, she's run several of her own businesses, and won awards for her accomplishments including being recognized for her accomplishments as a woman in a STEM career. All of that, and to this day she continues to hide the fact that she never graduated from college. Technically, she didn't even graduate from high school. 

And on the flip side, for every MIT graduate who's gone on to great things, there are millions more who hold degrees from prestigious institutions who are, at best, muddling through. 

Of course, when you ask teachers, few of us would say that we're in the business of vocational training, at least not directly. Our job, we say, is to shape young minds, to help children learn how to think, to help them develop the skills and habits of citizenship and responsibility and perseverance and accountability and grit and whatever other buzz word is making the rounds.

But we must also be doing a crappy job at that as well. I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone say, "These kids today, they're doing just great!" When was the last time you read a news article about children taking their civic responsibility seriously or being such hard workers. No, the prevailing theme is that kids today are lazy, entitled, and unmotivated. All they want to do is play video games and dance on TikTok.

The rule of thumb is that if you spend 10,000 hours making a study of something, anything, you will emerge as one of the world's leading experts. After 20,000-30,000 hours of schooling, our children emerge as experts at nothing at all, except, perhaps taking tests and jumping through the other hoops required to "progress" through school, skills that have no relevance beyond school.

What if instead of marching all children through standardized curricula just so they can tick the "education" box on a job application, we committed those tens of thousands of hours to supporting each child in becoming one of the world's leading experts on something, anything. Expose them to the world and let them decide. In the early years, that might mean dinosaurs or princesses or superheroes. Later it might be science or dance or drawing comic books. Maybe they would never quite make it to the level of "world's leading expert," maybe it wouldn't even lead to a job. But they would discover where their curiosity, self-motivation, and the support of caring adults can take them. They would discover what makes them tick, what makes them come alive, and that at the end of the day is what the world needs far more than one more test taker.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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