Education and Employment

Public Education and Employment

Public education has always been based on the idea that it should prepare learners for employment. In its simplest form, the mission of American public education was to teach children to read and write. These basic skills were considered to be vocational skills, and those who did not have literacy skills were relegated to forms of employment now called menial labor.

Twentieth-century industrialization brought increased job specialization, and with that specialization, American schools adjusted their curricula to ensure that students were prepared for the workplace. Soldiers who had not finished high school before entering World War II were allowed to acquire a General Education Diploma (GED), which was developed specifically for the returning troops. In the 1960s and 1970s, high school students learned to type on manual typewriters, in preparation for clerical jobs. Today, however, office clerical staff must know how to use computers, word-processing programs, and spreadsheets to qualify for entry-level employment. The stakes of employment have grown and so has the pressure on educators.

Complaints about public education failures expose the link between education and employment. The city of Chicago encountered a serious dilemma involving education and employment in the latter years of the 1990s. Local high schools were graduating students with literacy skills so poor that local employers complained to the mayor's office that high school-educated employees could not write well enough to meet the demands of entry-level jobs. Chicago's mayor pressured public educators, and now a standardized test measures students' abilities in junior high school prior to senior high. Employment pressure curtailed the practice of social promotion.

The notion that a good education is necessary to earn a good income is firmly engrained in American thinking about employment. But what is a good income? Between the 1960s and 1990s, the federal government increased the minimum wage, in an effort to provide workers who had the lowest levels of education with income sufficient to support a household. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labor unions emerged to ensure that workers had sufficient income to support families. Today, supporting a family means being able to buy or rent a residence, purchase groceries and clothes, and have sufficient cash to make initial payments on a car or other expensive item that most workers cannot afford to purchase fully at the time of sale. Credit cards are now a handy way for workers to obtain a short-term loan, in order to buy goods today and pay for them tomorrow.

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