High schools tend to steer clever students to college; State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron has even proposed requiring every senior to apply to college to be eligible for a diploma.So, the upshot is that Maine is hiring workers from all over the US because participation in their own industries has been discouraged in schools.
"There's been a generational shift," says Maddox of Washburn & Doughty. "The emphasis is on white-collar desk jobs, not blue-collar jobs. There's an embarrassment with getting your hands dirty."
The interesting this is that there are millions of unused college degrees. Billions of dollars and billions of study hours spent on education unrelated to the careers of final choice. Let's put the hands back in learning and give our children a full exposure to the wonders of their own creativity. Let's create a wholeness in American education, where students learn by doing, and their self-discovered knowledge leads to further doing, greater knowledge and experience, whether in boatyards, or in the laboratories and classrooms of the great universities.
Or to put it in another way, let's give students a range of choices, a variety of experiences so they can decide how they want to direct their lives.
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