Education, Part 6a
Hundred Flowers Campaign, China, 1956
A Different Kind of
Preparation for Work
Some of the literature of the “Activity Theory” camp is
about adult education, and about what they call “remediation”. This is the term
for what is done to patch up in a classroom, or institutional environment, the
gaps which were left in the student’s education by previous institutional
efforts of the student, with other teachers.
This is an apologetic kind of way of approaching the general
raising of the population’s cultural level. It takes for granted that the
remedy for the failure of one institution or set of institutions is another,
rather similar institution, or in other words, more of the same.
Hence we did not include Mike Rose’s article, based on US
experience, called “Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational
Divide”. But Helen Worthen’s criticism of Rose’s article is more interesting,
and more to the point for our purposes than Rose’s article itself, so it is
today’s attached text, with the title “A Different Kind of Preparation for Work”.
Starting from Mike Rose’s enthusiastic advocacy, Worthen
works back to something like Jean Lave’s insight, arguing that it is not the
skills that are used on the job, but the skill of having and improving the job
that are more crucial. And these are general and social skills, and even
political skills.
The heart of the matter seems to be contained in these two
paragraphs of Worthen’s:
‘But coming to this project as someone with deep experience in the
teachers union (and one that considers itself part of the broader labor
movement), I could not help noticing that the majority of vocational classes
were taught from the employer’s point of view, not from the worker’s point of
view. (Exceptions were some joint college-union programs in the building trades
and one union-sponsored food service delivery program, which were very
interesting.) Thus the students learned nothing about labor and employment law,
workers’ compensation, occupational safety and health or – especially – how to
read, enforce or negotiate a contract, nothing about labor history or the
history of labor struggles in their field, nothing about what union might or
might not represent them. They might not even know how to read a paycheck to
see if they were being paid as employees or independent contractors. They would
be delivered to their first job interview as naïve about the social relations
of their work as if they had just graduated from high school.
‘Labor education takes as its content domain all of these social
relations. Mostly sited in land-grant universities around the US, and in some
places in community colleges, labor education is the “applied” side of labor
studies, which is an academic sister to labor education. Labor education is
usually extension education, outreach to working people and the labor movement
the way agricultural extension is outreach to farmers and agribusiness. Labor
education programs burgeoned during the 1940s – 1960s; in the last forty years,
they have become targets of the conservative political agenda. There is no
doubt that the literacy artifacts of labor education qualify as requiring
advanced academic skills: reading and analyzing legal documents including court
cases, labor board decisions, arbitrations; reading and writing contracts,
grievances, safety complaints; doing strategic planning; administering an
organization including budgeting; running elections; producing newsletters or
websites; dealing with the media, just to begin the list. These are not taught
as bitted-down (fragmented) skills, however, and the labor education classroom
does not in any way resemble the remediation classroom. People with advanced
degrees (social workers, teachers, nurses, grad students) sit next to and learn
from custodians, bus drivers, clerical workers, homecare workers or
construction workers. Teaching is very
student-centered and strongly non-competitive.
In the best classes, a community of practice is being created. Yet it
would be very hard to argue that this is not “preparation for work.” Nor would you be able to place a class like
this on one side or the other of the “academic divide.”’
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: A Different Kind of Preparation for Work, Helena Worthen, 2012.
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