Bring vocational education back

I am so glad I taught at the schools at the time when vocational education was looked upon with enthusiasm. Today at Hot Springs County schools we no longer have the courses for the world of work. Our business education is nil, family and consumer science is nil, industrial arts is not good and auto mechanics is good but should have a full day to meet the student’s needs.

We used to have two full time industrial arts teachers and the person building your house, making changes in your house, roofing are all graduates of the high school program. I am happy to say that our ag program is going great guns so that is good. Vocational education is described as “you learn to do by doing.”

We do have schools in Wyoming that have all of these vocational classes; we still have our state vocational education meetings; we still have our National Vocational Education meetings where teachers get updates on the world of work and come home energized. With only 2.7 of our high school graduates graduating from college are our students educated enough to go to work at good jobs?

I also think this is leading to other areas; for example, how good are our grammar courses in all of our schools? Do they know a subject from a predicate or a noun from a pronoun – those are probably obsolete words. My daughter is a teacher on the university level and I was helping her (I thought) in grading some papers. She made me quit as I had red marks on sentence structure, misspelled words, etc. and I said I would give them an F as the paper did not say anything and comeback was “I can’t do that or I would be fired.” So is that what we expect of our college graduates or is this same thing happening on our high school level?

So many of our schools are not teaching cursive writing; they learn to print and away they go. I have another daughter who works at a hospital and she had an employee come to her to see what his hand written instructions were – the writing was in cursive and he had no idea how to read the paper. My great granddaughter went to a country school in Colorado and when she got to the high school level she was way beyond her classmates in all subjects but band. She writes beautifully and has a good background in all subjects.

Maybe when the federal education group gets out of our “business” we can go back to our teaching. Authors do not write our books – the book companies write whatever and actually sell them to schools. I am not cursing our Federal Government on the Vocational Education Act as it did help students learn how to go out to the world of work.

There are some good vocational education classes in Wyoming, and I wish I could say that we are up to par in this area.