One recent hot summer afternoon, I stopped to chat with my friend, Cecil Neel, who is an auto-repair mechanic. He was underneath the hood of a car, sweating and working. Cars were stacked up in his lot awaiting repairs.
"Where's your help, Cecil?" I asked.
"You're looking at him," was his reply.
We talked about the shortage of available good mechanics. He had more work than he could get to. A couple of state agencies also wanted him to service and maintain their cars. I walked away pondering Cecil's dilemma.
The next morning, I was riding my bicycle in the neighborhood and ran into my good friend, Wayne Oliver. He pumps and treats water in my hometown of Kuttawa. He was flushing a fire hydrant. He explained that periodic flushing of the lines is required by law. He told me how it was done and why and how fire departments hooked into the hydrants.
I told Wayne that I appreciated his good work, which keeps my water running and makes my life more comfortable. "Wayne, if I don't go to work today, no one will know the difference," I told him. "But if you don't go to work today, the whole town will be calling."
The same day that Cecil and I had our conversation, I also visited an elderly friend of mine in a retirement home in Paducah. He spent his career as a bricklayer.
As I talked to him, I wondered how many foundations he had laid for beautiful homes. How many patios had he constructed for the pleasure of others? How many schools and churches had he helped raise from the dust?
My friend can drive his grandchildren around town and point out various structures he helped to build — most of which will remain standing long after he is gone.
My father said many times: "There will come a day when someone who can work with his hands will make more money than anybody else."
Folks, that time is fast approaching. But it seems our educational system is blind to it.
Here we are in the deepest of economic recessions, with people desperate for jobs, and Cecil Neel can't find a capable, trained mechanic to assist him.
Today, education experts preach the gospel of science, math and computers. They push high-school graduates to go to college. There is a tremendous focus on GPA's, CATS scores, testing and more testing. Many of the national voices of education are encouraging a longer school term, longer school days, more and more time in the classroom for our youngsters. For what?
Could it be that a kid with a summer job helping at an auto repair shop, working for his father down at the bank or working on a ranch out west might receive a broader education than that found in megabytes or algebraic formulas?
Teaching of our young has become an elitist system geared toward making every young man and woman a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist or a computer whiz. In doing so, we have neglected the training and education for the most important jobs in our society.
Vocational school has always been a stepchild of our educational system.
It has been treated more like babysitting for those kids who can't cut it very well in mastering differential calculus or valence charts. But let the heat go off on a sub-zero night and we are calling on those very kids we sent off to shop.
A high school is given high marks for churning out 65 percent of its graduates who enroll in college. These college graduates then join the growing ranks of the jobless, with huge student-loan debts knocking at their doors.
Not every kid can, or should, go to college. The standard of excellence should at least include an alternate question: "How many kids educated at this school have been taught skills which have landed them jobs that make them happy, productive citizens?"
When we talk about, "no child left behind," we might start considering the possibility that some children may not need to be, and should not be, dragged along into the dreary world of computers, doctoral theses or mathematical equations.
As long as we push children in the direction we want them to go — instead of where destiny calls them — there will always be children left behind.
