Career Integration

Career integration or preferably interdisciplinary delivery of curriculum should require an industry trained or experienced professional not a discussion in an academic classroom of careers...(which is frequently done across California).

Career and technical education in truth is the application and practice of academic disciplines as they apply to the real world.  Therefore, such courses should be requirements for all students as preparation for success in the future.  Recent research supports the participation of students in a strong academic core in addition to two or more career technical courses as being the most succesful - both in college and in the workforce.  In addition students choosing to take both have a high rate of attendence, feel more connected and are better prepared for college and for what life may demand of them.

To ignore career education as a viable and realistic choice for every student is to create unjust discrimination for those who both need and benefit from career-technical education as preparation for the future - and to sell others short of the best education for the future.  It is both narrow in vision, limiting in potential and unrealistic to simply assume every individual is the same - we may be equal, but we are very different.  Indeed America was founded on that premise.

In addition the character development, work ethic, problem solving and general all over approach to life is shaped by real experience - not a lecture, nor reading in a book nor hypothetical situations from a text.  The very word educate implies the practice - the application of facts to learning resulting in wisdom.  

Of course, like Denmark and other European countries, California should value and assess appropriately through project based instruction demanding real knowledge unstead of facts that are memorized as answers to questions for which the correct answers have been pre-selected.  By attempting to make everyone the same we are becoming less and less equal - somewhat "Hitler-tarian" in our current "college bound only" A-G approach to graduation requirements.

Instead of the "us" becoming A UCLA or Stanford graduate we should consider making preparation for gainful employment as a tax paying citizen and a contributing member of society a requirement an addition to current secondary graduation requirements.  This would sure beat building more detention facilitie and cut down on welfare - in addition to decreasing unemployment.  It would result in respect for every job, and simply make a better world.