Ed, At 17:08 06/10/02 -0400, you wrote: (EW) <<<< I guess it boils down to a question of what education is for and what it is expected to do. Because the job market can change quickly, perhaps what is most needed is a sound but nevertheless general education that gives people the flexibility to move with trends in the labour market or with discoveries about themselves as they proceed through life (I started as an artist and turned out to be an economist - Egad!!). >>>>
Fascinating! I, too, desperately wanted to be an artist when I was at school. Drawing was by far and away my best skill but I was deflected away from art as a future job by school and parents. I realise now I should have kept to this because, if there's one thing I could always make a good living at, it's being an artist. Indeed, when I went through my mid-life "passage" (to use Gail Sheehy's expression) in my early 50s -- a washed-up industrial chemist with no future job prospects -- I automatically fell back on art and after some sketching and selling on-the-spot-portraits and architectural drawings on the streets of Bath started my own architectural art business which then grew to over 20 staff in a couple of years. I don't have that many staff now for reasons of long-term security of the business (there's a recession coming!) but even now, if I wished to, I could simply walk down a flight of stairs to my architectural business and easily earn about four times the rate of the pension that I now draw from it. But, as it happens, I regard writing as a more skilled activity than art, and this is what I like to do when I'm not dealing with my music business. Strangely enough, the other thing that I loved to do as a very young child was to make booklets -- that is, stitching or stapling pages together and illustrating/writing them. (We couldn't afford a stapler but I used to pry them out of magazines and re-use them.) Amazingly I find myself repeating this operation also! This time with respect to my music business. In recent weeks I've been much involved in setting up a physical operation for binding and distributing music octavos (in America, not here). So I've had a second childhood twice over! I must now be brief in commenting on yours: (EW) <<<< Turning out millers in six months may be a great accomplishment, but those millers may be stuck in a year and half when something happens that renders them irrelevant. We've had something like that happen in the Ottawa area, known as "Silicon Valley North". Ever so many people trained as computer scientist or technicians only to be confronted with devastating negative turn-around in that industry. >>>> I disagree. I believe that when someone learns a skill to a reasonably high level then the skills and confidence it engenders is transferable. This is why I believe that every schoolchild should be able to learn a real "adult" skill from puberty onwards if they want to. (Some children -- the more academic types -- will not want to, of course.) I don't know how you can teach children to be "flexible" (the constant refrain of educators these days) unless you give them the experience and confidence of learning a real skill (even if it's not a modern job skill). I'm wary about teaching flexibility -- that's an abstract noun, not a skill. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
