In a parallel way, there is a need to stop thinking of workplaces as factories and offices, and of a job or career as a necessary means of supporting oneself after leaving school and before retirement. Work should be thought of as a natural act--as natural as breathing. As long as humans live and breathe, they work.
Learning has been placed inside the system of education, and work inside the system of employment. In the process, they have been disconnected and have been robbed of much of their natural vitality. To work is to do something outside of oneself--to create something in relation to others. Work enables us to move beyond isolation and alienation and into relationship with the larger community. To learn is to understand the world and our place in it--to figure things out. Learning is a joyous act that gives meaning to our existence.
Though Americans have categorized and effectively separated them, work and learning in their natural states are interconnected. To work, we need to figure things out. We learn naturally in the course of working. To learn something, we need to try it out, to apply it, to see if it works. If we did not expend so much energy trying to organize things to keep work and learning apart, housing them in separate institutions, they could infuse each other with their purpose and energy. How do we keep them apart?
Policymakers in the United States set up schools in buildings with classrooms and laboratories that are designed to impart knowledge and skills. They set education apart from the rest of the life of the community, which is organized around work. Laws and
*requirements keep young persons in school as long as is considered feasible. If young people leave before completing their secondary education, they and the school are deemed to have failed. If they work while they are going to school, it is considered a necessary evil that detracts from the really important thing--their education.
In the workplace, employers would like young workers to come to them as fully prepared as possible, so that they can get right to work. These young workers are then expected to learn quickly on the job. From time to time, training programs are run for workers, though this is deemed to be a necessary and costly evil that detracts from the really important thing--getting the work done.
Nations need to envision new ways of integrating learning and work that revitalize both schools and workplaces and help young persons to better prepare for work and careers in the emerging global economy. To do this, they will have to create new partnerships to bridge the gap between education and work. And to bridge this gap, they will first need to bridge gaps within education and gaps within the workplace.
Unless such connections are developed among the separate disciplines around some central and unifying themes or tasks, students themselves are left to integrate their learning in the various disciplines in the school curriculum. This is a great deal to ask of young learners who lack the life experiences that provide a context for adult learners. The late Ernest Boyer (1993), perhaps one of the most visionary educational leaders in America, suggested that the school curriculum be organized around certain "core commonalities," including the life cycle, the use of symbols, the arts, and work. In relation to the world of work, learning could be organized around the exploration of career options and the preparation for work.
The task of integrating vocational and academic education around common themes is made difficult by the superior status afforded in the American educational system to academic subjects. Vocational education, no matter how rigorous its coursework and no matter how many of its graduates continue their education at the postsecondary level, is seen by academic educators at both the secondary and postsecondary levels as an inferior course of study. A clear indication of this difference in status is the difficulty encountered in state after state gaining acceptance for courses of applied academics offered under Tech Prep education (Hull, 1994, p. 127).
The issue of status in the American educational system that makes it difficult to integrate learning on a horizontal basis across disciplines, also makes it difficult to integrate learning on a vertical basis from elementary to middle, to secondary, and to postsecondary education. Unfortunately, each higher level of education accords a lower status to the level which precedes it. Again, with reference to Tech Prep education, faculty at postsecondary institutions often bring to joint curriculum planning with secondary educators a sense of superiority that poses an impediment which such joint planning must then strive to overcome. This lack of vertical integration becomes a serious impediment to preparing young persons for work and careers because it makes it difficult to lay a foundation of career awareness and workplace readiness skills in the early years of schooling.
This same issue of status within the educational system also makes it difficult for alternative learning programs, summer job programs, programs for dropouts under the federal Job Training Partnership Act, and adult education programs to connect with regular school programs. This is unfortunate because programs that exist on the fringes of a system, as do vocational education, alternative education, dropout programs, and adult education, have the most vital and real connections with the world that exists outside the school. By not according respect to these programs and taking from them features to include in the regular school program, students are deprived of new ways of learning that reflect current and emerging workplace requirements.
A last issue to be touched upon within education involves the relationship between school administrators and teachers represented by teachers' unions. Unless there is a healthy relationship between school administrators and teachers' unions in which decisions regarding the operation of schools are made jointly, it will prove difficult, if not impossible, to move toward new teaching arrangements that will be necessary to bridge the gap between education and work. To offer work-based learning opportunities, teachers will have to spend a good deal of time outside schools in work sites arranging for work experiences and supervising students engaged in such work experiences. If teachers through teachers' unions are engaged in designing such work-based learning opportunities, it makes it a good deal more likely they will willingly engage in the new teaching arrangements needed to implement them.
Within these employers, public sector employers are not usually considered part of the "business community," though they often employ large numbers of individuals. In New York State, for example, 18 percent of the work force is employed in public sector organizations, including schools, colleges, prisons, and government. There is a gap between public sector and private sector employers, who do not often meet and deal with each other on the basis of being employers.
Further complicating the workplace is the relationship between management and organized labor, who are not always united. It becomes critical in building bridges between education and work to fully include organized labor in joint program design and operation. This is especially critical because of the natural concern on the part of existing workers that students in the workplace could be taking work away from adult workers, especially in areas of the country and in industries where there are high levels of unemployment. This issue has come up in recent years in relation to the establishment of youth apprenticeship programs in the United States.
This full involvement of workplace partners in educational programs that connect learning and work needs to begin at the earliest design phase. Workplace representatives need to help to establish learner outcomes and standards that form the basis of the school curriculum. There is a natural concern on the part of educators that employers might seek to reduce education to preparing students narrowly for employment in a particular job, and that such narrow preparation would not be consistent with the broader mission of education. Experience indicates that this fear is not well-founded. In school district after school district that has reached out to employers to help define learning outcomes and standards, the experience has been a positive one. Educators and employers have united to produce learner outcomes that prepare students both for productive employment and for effective participation in all aspects of adult life. In doing so, they have discovered that the attributes of good citizenship and a commitment to rigorous and continuous learning stand a student well in the workplace and in other aspects of life, including the pursuit of further education.
Based on these learner outcomes and standards, educators and employers can then jointly design ways of restructuring education so that students can engage in a mix of school-based and work-based learning. To implement new programs which blend learning experiences in school with those in the workplace, teachers will need time to work with workplace representatives to design instructional activities that use workplace experiences to help students learn; practice; and apply knowledge, skills, and habits of learning and working. Employers will need to designate workplace mentors who will work with students at work sites to help them relate their workplace experiences to what is being learned in school. It will be one of the responsibilities of the education and workplace partners to make time available for teachers and workplace mentors to carry out these important roles.
Such new programs will require flexibility in both the schedules of the workplace and of the participating schools. Leaders in education and in the employer community will need to ensure that both school and work schedules are modified.
To engage in such program design, implementation, evaluation, and continuous improvement, it will be necessary to establish partnerships which are well-organized and operate reliably over extended periods of time. This means that some form of ongoing organizational and governance structure will need to be created, codified, and maintained. Since partnership efforts take a good deal of time and effort on the part of the participants, it is important for partnerships to be clear about the results they will strive to achieve. Further, it is important for the partners to achieve some positive outcomes relatively early in the partnership process in order to build commitment to the ongoing and longer-term work of the partnership.
From the perspective of parents, they are generally interested in their sons and daughters pursuing the highest level of education. They encourage this pursuit of higher education based on the belief that the higher the level of education achieved, the more successful their sons and daughters will be in adult life. Parents can be expected to resist work and career-oriented options if they believe they have lower social status and will lead to lower lifetime earnings.
Working against the involvement of parents is the diminishing participation of parents in school activities as children move from elementary school into middle school and high school. A new study of the American family found that by the time students reach high school, nearly half of them have parents who do not participate in any school activities (Zill & Nord, 1994). In order to actively involve parents in career exploration and planning with their sons and daughters, it appears that we will have to begin this process in the elementary grades while there is still a high level of parent participation, and then devise strategies to keep parents engaged in the process of career planning and preparation as their sons and daughters move into middle and secondary education.
From the perspective of students, they are also generally interested in pursuing further education in the belief that it will open up better employment and career opportunities. What is less clear is the connection they see between what they are learning in school and work. We do know that somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of American high school students work for pay after school, on weekends, or in the summer. Most of these students do not see a great deal of connection between the work they do outside school and the learning that occurs in school.
A nationwide survey of 14- to 18-year-olds conducted by Bruskin Goldring Research in 1994 at the request of the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor revealed an interest on the part of students in new ways of learning that link what is taught in school with work. The following were among the highlights of the survey:
At the national level, the federal government, through its policies and legislation, can encourage schools and employers to work together. The federal government can also effectively model behavior that it would like to see occur at the local and state levels. A clear example of this is the very positive joint effort underway at the national level between the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor in support of school-to-work efforts. This positive joint effort makes it more likely that state departments of education and labor, local employment service offices, and schools will work together to put in place school-to-work systems.
Also at the national level, leadership can be demonstrated by national organizations that are nongovernmental in nature. Positive labor-management cooperation can be promoted when national business organizations and national labor organizations join forces in support of efforts which connect education with the workplace. Leadership at the national level can also be of critical importance in bridging gaps within education between work-oriented and academic education.
In this vertical partnership, it is vitally important that local partnerships influence state-level policies and legislation, and that both local- and state-level partnerships influence federal-level policies and legislation. This communication from practitioners and implementers to policymakers and designers of legislation can ensure that there is "top down support for bottom up reform."
First, schools might acknowledge to themselves, to the communities they serve, and to their students that they are, in fact, enterprises. Schools are businesses. They have employees, unions, executives, budgets, retirement plans, and boards of directors. Schools are the first workplace to which students are exposed, and I suspect schools may have a deep and lasting effect on the attitude of students toward work. Why not envision schools as a student's first exposure to a workplace, and education as an opportunity for students to experience work on a continuing basis as they are growing up?
Schools, faced with limited budgets and more work than can be carried out by existing staff, might consider appropriate ways for students to begin to assume some degree of responsibility for operating schools. Students could serve as tutors, as teaching assistants, and as recordkeepers. They could help with the business operations of schools in terms of answering telephones, helping with correspondence, and assisting with bookkeeping and accounting. It seems to me that there are a number of jobs that students could perform in schools that would not take work away from the existing staff, but, rather, would free that staff to do more creative, developmental work. Such work on the part of staff might include designing and managing work-based learning opportunities at work sites, working with employers to establish learner outcomes and standards, and designing instructional and assessment strategies that integrate learning and work.
Second, schools might choose to overcome what seems to me to be a central problem of secondary schools as we have created them. We put too many young people together in one place with too few adults to work with them. This constitutes an unnatural ratio of young people to adults, and it occurs in no other aspect of community life. With students in their teenage years, such massing of students can often lead to disruptive behavior and even situations of violence. Might it not be more sensible to educate smaller numbers of teenage students mixed in with adults on a full-time basis in real settings in the community? We might envision secondary-level education being offered in actual workplaces that would be redesigned to accommodate such learning.
These learning workplaces or learning enterprises would combine learning and working for students, and working and learning for the workers. We could think of the students as "learner-workers" and the regular employees as "worker-learners." Might not both young learners and adult workers profit from participating in a workplace that blended learning and working in the course of carrying out its business? Could we imagine teenage students being placed in cohorts of say 50 or 100 in workplaces? Might we not be able to tap the collective wisdom and imagination of employers, workers, teachers, students, and parents to create the Learning Airport, the Learning Factory, the Learning Office, the Learning Hospital, the Learning Government Agency, and the Learning Shopping Mall? If we did this, might we not find fresh ways of re-inventing and re-engineering both learning and work that could revitalize and re-energize both education and the workplace?
I end with a question posed by Ernest Boyer (1993):
What does it mean to be an educated person? It means respecting the miracle of life. It means being empowered in the use of language. It means responding aesthetically to the aesthetic. Being truly educated means understanding our membership in groups and institutions. It means having reverence for the natural world. It means affirming the dignity of work and, above all, being an educated person means being guided by values and beliefs and connecting the lessons of the classroom to the realities of life.Those in government, education, business, and labor need to work together in effective and productive partnerships at all levels so that the system helps to develop educated persons who connect what they are learning in school to the realities of life.
* Metis Associates, Albany, New York (formerly the Office of Workforce Preparation and Continuing Education, New York State Education Department)
Hull, D. (1994). Opening minds, opening doors. Waco, TX: CORD Communications, Inc.
Zill, N., & Nord, C. W. (1994). Running in place. Washington, DC: Child Trends.
