Teaching and Corporate Responsibilities

I've heard a lot, over the last few years, that students are leaving school unprepared for the world of work, and the solution is to teach work-specific skills to students before they graduate. On the surface this makes sense, particularly if we only look at the last 20 years of employment. However, if we go a bit further back, we'll find that this argument doesn't make any sense.

60 years ago, even 40 years ago, work-ready meant something else. When my parents were starting work, their companies took them on, fresh from university, expecting to have to train them. That was how businesses got employees that knew what to do - they taught them. This was true whether someone was hired for management or the mailroom. The new person was always taught by someone with more experience. What they were taught, and how intense the training was depended on the company and the position, but the basic fact of training was a part of the job.

Sometime between about 1975 and 1990 we seemed to lose sight of the fact that employee training is an employer's responsibility. This was fairly predictable, as a new generation of management graduates had been taught that shareholder value was the most important thing to consider, and training seemed like an undesirable expense. This is the same school of thought that brought about the end of pensions, and the end of employee/employer loyalty.

Employers are really good at convincing governments of their perspectives (Adam Smith warned against allowing them to do this as far back as 1776). It's even easier when they own the newspapers and are allowed to sway public opinion in their favour. It didn't take long for government to start talking about how schools are failing our children, by not getting them ready for the world of work. It's rhetoric that took 20 years to stick, but has a growing base of support among government, people, and business, despite there being no evidence that educational quality has declined since employers stopped taking responsibility for training.

Like the banking crisis, making people 'work-ready' is another way of making costs and losses the responsibility of the taxpayer, while diverting ever-increasing profits to a smaller and smaller number of people. Allowing businesses to frame the conversation will always result in the public losing out, and will over time, result in the public not knowing there was anything to ever lose.

Our education system isn't failing our children, we are. We allowed it to start, we have allowed it to continue, and at the end of the day, we are the only ones who can stop it, thereby leaving a better world to our children.