Montgomery Public Schools: To what end with career preparation?
Begin with the end in mind. That is one of the seven habits of highly effective people, according to Stephen Covey, author of the influential book of that title.
“The end” that Covey admonishes us to conceive at the outset is the purpose or final product of our effort. And that habit is as applicable to a people — a community of people, including a city — as it is to an individual.
What is the end of public education? Specifically, high-school education?
Sadly — no, catastrophically — Montgomery Public Schools Superintendent Melvin Brown apparently believes that end is career preparation, at least for a segment of Montgomery students. His vision is common today among educators, politicians, public intellectuals, and, by trickle down, the rest of us.
Last month, the Montgomery Advertiser reported that Brown considers “career academies” a possibility for Montgomery public high school students. Brown told the Advertiser, “[I]f you have programs that are specifically geared for engineering, architecture, art, law and justice... then those types of things make more sense to me, and I think would be more usable for kids who are interested in specific industries.”
Plato, the father of the academy, would be horrified. For Plato, a thinker who conceived education as a turning around — from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth, from the ignoble to the noble, career academy is an oxymoron. Likewise, our nation’s founding fathers — who held liberal (not technical) education indispensable to democracy — would agree that “career academy” is a corruption of Plato’s concept of academy.
Secondarily, our interests in high school are often fleeting. The great majority of us over the age of 30 will, I think, acknowledge that even if we had a specific career interest in high school, that interest changed or faded as we matured, even if we pursued it.
Regardless, career preparation (often called technical education), at least direct career preparation, is premature in high school. What then is the end of public high-school education? Other than general observations, any attempt to answer that question is beyond the scope of this article. But, at minimum, that end is a literate student, graduate, and public. Traditionally, that literacy was broad, extending beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. It included at least initial exposure to, if not yet (at age 17 or 18) understanding of, what it means to be human (hence, the humanities). Specifically, it exposed students to the distinction between man as man, man as citizen, and man as producer and consumer. Cultivating only the third of this trio — producer and consumer--is the end and limit of technical education — and therefore the limit of its possessor.
Unlike technical education, an education to literacy would permit and equip a graduate to go in many different directions upon graduation, including immediate (career) employment, if he or she chose to do so. But no graduate should be limited to that choice, at least intellectually and aspirationally. (Though some will be, at least immediately, due to life circumstances or personal choice.) And those directions would not be limited to the economic realm of producer and consumer. Instead, the graduate would be broader than that: on his or her way to becoming both a human being and a citizen, not merely a producer and consumer.
The substance, method, and — before them — purpose of public education are in a plural democracy controversial and contingent — and must be publicly and freely discussed, debated, and determined. But our point of departure in that discussion and debate must be that public education produce more and other than a narrow, short-sighted, uncritical yet employable pupil, graduate, and population. The end.
Bart Spung is a nonpracticing lawyer and lives in Montgomery.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Montgomery Public Schools: To what end with career preparation?
