Me - thinking about a high school graduation, well, it's taking me back to a long, long, long time ago. Check it out:
History is not kind to idlers. The time is long past when American's destiny was assured simply by an abundance of natural resources and inexhaustible human enthusiasm, and by our relative isolation from the malignant problems of older civilizations. The world is indeed one global village. We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops. America's position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer.
The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs, synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier. If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering.
The year? 1983. A report entitled "A Nation At Risk" took a look at what was being asked of American students, and basically found that the "anything goes" attitude of the 70s had not served the population well. This came out in April of that year, and I remember printing out a copy as validation of my belief that school sucked. Here is another interesting tidbit:
At the same time, the public has no patience with undemanding and superfluous high school offerings. In another survey, more than 75 percent of all those questioned believed every student planning to go to college should take 4 years of mathematics, English, history/U.S. government, and science, with more than 50 percent adding 2 years each of a foreign language and economics or business. The public even supports requiring much of this curriculum for students who do not plan to go to college. These standards far exceed the strictest high school graduation requirements of any State today, and they also exceed the admission standards of all but a handful of our most selective colleges and universities.
Sound familiar? It took Michigan another quarter of a decade to get its act together on that front - even though they knew it back then.
1983 was the year I graduated high school, and I am a living testament to this era. I got away with murder when it came to school work; a very bright, artistically inclined kid, I was an honor roll, over-achiever destined for college when I was a freshman. But high school was a living hell. I was teased for being smart, and I rejected the growing conventional wisdom of the 80s that money was the goal of all achievement. They worshiped the dollar out in Forest Hills, and that just wasn't me. And by the time I left, I was so hopelessly bored with school that there was no way in hell you were dragging me off to college. My art teacher pushed me to consider a career in that field. My choir director took me aside and told me how much he loved my voice, and how powerful it would be if I would just learn to let it loose. He offered to write me a recommendation for college.
Nuh uh. Gonna be a rock star. Gonna go to LA (until I heard about what a Gawd-awful hellhole it was from everyone who had ever been there). I had picked up the guitar and fell totally in love. Roger Waters had given us freaks the perfect anthem in "We don't need no education" and Ronnie Rayguns was guaranteed to nuke the world anyway, so what did it matter? And since the rich children of the upper middle-class always had the best access to mind-altering chemical enhancements (ahem), I spent high school pretty much wasted, and was well on my way to an early adult life of simply partying every waking moment. Rock on!
But it was a different world back then. You could still get a job out of high school and support yourself, and I'm not talking about those well-paid auto jobs (and in GR, it was the well-paid office furniture manufacturing jobs), just a regular job could get you by alright. You wouldn't be rich, you wouldn't be vacationing in Europe, but you could pay the bills. My cool Boomer teachers were OK with my decision to flee academia, figuring I would wise up in a few years and find my way back eventually. Instead, I rocketed up the food chain in the retail music world, which was plentiful in that era, becoming a manager by age 20 and buying a new car, joined a band, had a good time even though for the most part I lacked any real direction in life. And around me, the world slowly moved on, until Best Buy came and wiped out the local music business and destroyed the vague dream I had of opening my own record store.
Game over. Just like that. And while we were slowly losing the global race in manufacturing, the wave of what I just described was taking place in America, that of the national chain stores and service providers wiping out the Mom-and-Pops entrepreneurs out there. The Wal-Marts, the Best Buys, any number of stores selling loss leaders at cost or below has killed the locals, taking that avenue away as well. I find it is still happening in the field I find myself in today, in our brave new internet "information" age that offered a seemingly perfect outlet for my talents - the Facebooks and popular national blogs/media are taking the business from the smaller sites and the local, traditional media news outlets alike. Ruh roh.
Things have changed, especially in the past ten years. The prior world of work was already changing well back in the 70s and 80s as you can see, but during the 00s, it slipped away for good. The cost of living has gone through the roof, something that not many reports touch on these days, but its something that can't be overlooked. It's impossible to leave high school today and expect to support yourself on just an "average" job. And as my example shows, things are rapidly changing as we speak, as this country struggles to find a new identity and position in the global marketplace and the words "long term unemployed" enter the national lexicon.
The scariest part? Some of those long-term people have college degrees. Competition for jobs is looking to be fierce for some time to come. The prior predictions of an abundance of jobs "when those Boomers retire" have evaporated with global competition and increases in productivity - and that has made a college education a MUST in this era.
Sure, you could get lucky, and hit on the right job or right idea at the right time and survive and thrive, but chances are you are going to need to remake yourself as the years roll on. The only way to do that is with a solid educational foundation to start - and we all know it. That's why the loss of the Promise Scholarship in Michigan is so tragic - and will be a black mark on this Legislature for eternity. But, in spite of their short-sightedness, we do have the Promise Zones starting in Michigan and all over the country, districts that are offering college education to local students. Modeled after the Kalamazoo Promise that the President is sure to hit on today, this is the definitely the direction we need to follow - investing in the future of our state and our nation in the form of education for our people, kids and adults alike.
I'll be down there to get some shots of the ceremony today, my natural talent for visual display in photography and the dormant penchant to spill out the words on paper (yes, I had a notion to be a writer when I entered high school) having been reawakened in the past few years. It has served me well, but I have also been extremely lucky - and that luck is sure to run out again. Ask any "traditional" media person out there - they are running for the internet, and are taking it over. Now I wish I had gone to school for photojournalism, so I would have at least a fighting chance in a rapidly evaporating field.
Good luck kids. The only advice I have for you is: Go to college. Play the guitar and love your childhood passions, but don't count on it as any kind of career (unless you are really, really good). Learn. Learn some more. Keep learning, keep growing. And keep your eyes and options open and be ready for change at the drop of a hat, or you will find that the world will move on without you.
Have fun. Oh, and don't smoke.