Except for the instance below where someone had their head blown off during a game of dice, what is related below by Bob Herbert in today's NYT is reminiscent of what I experienced in 1979 when I started Jobs for Coventry Foundation in Coventry when youth unemployment suddenly hit thousands of youngsters in my home town.
Apart from Elephant Jobs in London, my own organisation was the first privately sponsored outfit that set out to teach job skills to young people when they'd left school at 16. I had a staff of about 30 people and we trained hundreds of young people to be just a little more adequate to cope with applying for jobs and, sometimes, getting them. What we discovered was that, after 10 or 11 years of school the youngsters we were training were almost total alienated from school, demoralised and without almost any skills whatsoever. Never mind reading and writing, many of them couldn't even hold a hammer properly or saw wood. We really had to start teaching skills which they should have been learning from about 11 or 12 years onwards. One of the problems is the idea that, to solve unemployment, children need even more schooling. Dr Andrew Sum, quoted below, mentions lack of diplomas. The British government is making exactly the same mistake today in their education policy. Many children don't need more schooling after puberty, don't want it and certainly don't need diplomas. What they want are jobs. It is only in real life that they can learn the skills which will give them some sort of economic purchase and status in the real world. We need to revise education policy completely. By all means let us give every child a guaranteed 10, 15, 20 years of free education vouchers from the age of 4 or 5. But don't force them all through a common Procrustean process of education which assumes that everybody is eager to learn after the age of puberty. Many young people -- and I met many of these when I worked in industry 30 years ago -- might have started work at 16 with no skills whatsoever and were employed simply sweeping up the shop floor. But in the real world where they were accepted by the adults around them and were given the dignity of a wage packet at the end of the week, they quickly learned new skills and, by the time they were about 30, some of them were quite skilled machinists and would even be motivated to want to return to full-time education. They couldn't do so, of course, because they'd got family commitments by then and couldn't afford it. We don't need more diplomas, or more schooling, or even more help of the sort of that educationists would like to force on young people. We need greater flexibility and greater trust in the young people themselves. I fear that, in England, we will shortly see the resurgence of high unemployment among young people -- of the sort that we had in the 80s, but which has been increasingly disguised in recent years by forcing young people to stay on at school or attend worthless colleges and obtaining worthless diplomas which employers despise but which some politicians affect to say are useful. There are at least 1 million young people in England who are totally unemployed but whose numbers don't appear in the official figures. The government won't be able to afford their present policy of cooking the books for much longer so the true picture will emerge again -- just as is described by Bob Herbert below: <<<<< Young, Jobless, Hopeless By BOB HERBERT CHICAGO — You see them in many parts of the city, hanging out on frigid street corners, skylarking at the malls or bowling alleys, hustling for money wherever they can, drifting in some cases into the devastating clutches of drug-selling, gang membership, prostitution and worse. In Chicago there are nearly 100,000 young people, ages 16 to 24, who are out of work, out of school and all but out of hope. In New York City there are more than 200,000. Nationwide, according to a new study by a team from Northeastern University in Boston, the figure is a staggering 5.5 million and growing. This army of undereducated, jobless young people, disconnected in most instances from society's mainstream, is restless and unhappy, and poses a severe long-term threat to the nation's well-being on many fronts. Audrey Roberts, a 17-year-old who just recently landed a job at a fast-food restaurant on Chicago's West Side, talked to me about some of the experiences she and her out-of-work friends have had to endure. "The stuff you hear about on the news," she said, "that's our everyday life. I've seen girls get raped, beaten up. I saw a boy get his head blown away. That happened right in front of me. I said, 'Oh my God!' I just stood there." The shooting was over a dice game that was being played one afternoon by boys who had nothing better to do with their time, she said. It's an article of faith among politicians and members of the media that the recession we continue to experience is a mild one. But it has hit broad sections of the nation's young people with a ferocity that has left many of them stunned. "I don't think I can take it much longer," said Angjell Brackins, a 19-year-old South Side resident. "I get up in the morning. I take a bath. I put on my clothes. I go outside." She has tried for months to find a job, she said, filling out application after application, to no avail. "I'll do any kind of work if they'll just hire me. It doesn't matter, as long as it's a job." The report from Northeastern, titled "Left Behind in the Labor Market," found that joblessness among out-of-school youths between 16 and 24 had surged by 12 percent since the year 2000. Washington's mindless response to this burgeoning crisis has been to slash — and in some cases eliminate — the few struggling programs aimed at bolstering youth employment and training. Education and career decisions made during the late teens and early 20's are crucial to the lifetime employment and earnings prospects of an individual. Those who do not do well during this period seldom catch up to the rest of the population. "Our ability to generate family stability and safe communities is strongly influenced by this," said Dr. Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern and the lead author of the study. When you have 5 1/2 million young people wandering around without diplomas, without jobs and without prospects, you might as well hand them T-shirts to wear that say "We're Trouble." Without help, they will not become part of a skilled work force. And they will become a drain on the nation's resources. One way or another, the rest of us will end up supporting them. "It's just heartbreaking," said Jack Wuest, who runs the Alternative Schools Network in Chicago, which commissioned the study. "These kids need a fair shake and they're not getting it." The Bush administration, committed to a war with Iraq and obsessed with tax cuts for the wealthy, has no interest in these youngsters. And very few others in a position to help are willing to go to bat for them. In a long series of conversations with young unemployed and undereducated Chicagoans, I did not hear much of anything in the way of aspirations. Whether boys or girls, men or women, those who were interviewed seemed for the most part already defeated. They did not talk about finding the perfect job. They did not talk about being in love and eventually marrying and raising a family. They did not express a desire to someday own their own home. There was, to tell the truth, a remarkable absence of positive comments and emotions of any kind. There was a widespread sense of frustration, and some anger. But mostly there was just sadness. >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
