Issue

Of course. Freud said that the healthy adult should have the capacities "to love and to work." Economic reality also requires that students complete high school to have any shot at decent employment.Most students acknowledge they are in school for occupational reasons. Yet high schools, dominated by the academic track, are distant from the real world of jobs and economic responsibilities. A more work-oriented curriculum would remedy the disjuncture.This does not mean conventional vocational education: job specific, low-level coursework intended for the "manually minded." The "new vocationalism" integrates academic and occupational education for a wide range of occupations and students. Career Academies (schools-within-schools), schools with career-oriented clusters or majors, and occupational magnet schools combine academic subjects with technical instruction, providing broad work-related contexts for learning. They also encourage more active instruction, by promoting the project-oriented, student-centered, and interdisciplinary methods of the best vocational education.Eighty years ago, John Dewey claimed that "Education through occupations . . . combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method." Dewey lost out—to an education that divorces academic subjects from applications, disparages economic concerns, and segregates students within job-specific tracks. His vision remains powerful, however, and more practical than ever.—W. Norton Grubb is a professor in the School of Education, the University of California, Berkeley, and site director of the National Center for Research in Vocational Education.

Yes—to a limited degree. Mortimer Adler and the Paideia group have emphasized that all students should be taught the same quality curriculum, and that this curriculum should include the rudiments of what Adler termed the "manual arts." Adler also objected strenuously to any sort of strictly vocational track.A decade after the launch of the Paideia plan, I believe passionately that most American high schools need to be detracked, and that all students need to be enrolled in the same high-quality academic curriculum.The U.S. Department of Labor's Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) stressed that beyond a "three-part foundation" (basic skills, thinking skills, and personal qualities), all graduates of American schools need the ability to: identify, organize, plan, and allocate resources; work well with others; acquire useful information; understand complex interrelationships; and work with a variety of technologies.In other words, all graduates of American schools, including the college-bound, need to be flexible team members and lifelong learners.These skill areas, which stress communication, cooperation, application, and constant learning, should be the basis of all coursework in American high schools, making the distinction between "academic" and "vocational," or "abstract" and "applied," much less significant. In sum, all students should be taught the same quality, academic curriculum; and they should be taught that curriculum in a way that prepares them to be both lifelong learners and always employable.—Terry Roberts is executive director of the National Paideia Center in the School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The question reflects the continuing concerns Americans have about the purpose of education in an evolving democratic society. Several recent national reports have touted school-to-work programs as a priority within the school reform movement. Supporters assert that these programs will provide transition systems for the "forgotten half" of the school population who do not enter college. This is a worthy goal, but one that requires scrutiny.Many studies have shown that public schools tend to reinforce extant social class structures. Are the new work-linked curriculums simply repackaged and recycled old vocational tracks? Are vocal political and economic interests pushing curriculum reforms toward self-serving and narrow goals? In the long run, will individual and community interests be well served?What should be taught? Both the academy and the workplace have identified several broad-based arenas as essential; they include communications, reading and writing, human relations, thinking and reasoning skills. We should avoid programs that emphasize narrow, discrete workplace competencies.If our society is to continue to work toward the democratic ideal, its members must possess a broad range of skills, attitudes, and knowledge. As the dialogue continues, it is imperative that we identify and focus on these essentials that will enable citizens to grow and flourish in a rapidly changing society.—Melanie Biermann is an assistant professor of social studies education at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va.

If any students should experience work-related education, then all students should experience it. Otherwise those students who experience work education and those who don't are kept in separate tracks. Well-intentioned people, recognizing how we fail to provide for the noncollege-bound, suggest work education for them. The problem is at the front end: how do we know who is or isn't going to college? Such tracking is typically based on the income and education levels of one's parents—which have nothing to do with one's intellectual capacity.All students should have work-related education, and such experiences should be deeply integrated with academic learning. Work-related education should examine the role of work in one's life and society, should be linked to community development activities, and should be based on broad, industrywide themes rather than on narrow skill training for specific occupations. Only 27 percent of all high school students in the United States who train for specific occupations ever enter a related field for even a single day, and the average American changes jobs eight times in a lifetime.There should be no programs for the noncollege-bound! Even those who don't go on to further learning are better served when not segregated from those who do. As John Dewey wrote in 1913: "Everyone should be united against every proposition, in whatever form advanced, to separate training of intelligence and character from training for narrow, industrial efficiency." Or, as my grandmother used to say, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't!"—Larry Rosenstock is executive director of the Rindge School of Technical Arts in Cambridge, Mass., and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.