Two doctors offer this suggestion:

Quote:Elite students also need some experience with the work that other Americans do. To find out how the other half lives, maybe students should labor at construction sites, on road gangs, or in factories. Maybe they should do basic agricultural work like picking a crop or hoeing beans. They could flip hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant or shoulder any of the other humble jobs held by unprivileged citizens.

A summer spent at an unrewarding, dead-end job might be a powerful stimulus for students to study with renewed vigor when they return to school in the fall.

Come down from the ivory tower

(09-21-2014 09:04 PM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  Two doctors offer this suggestion:

Quote:Elite students also need some experience with the work that other Americans do. To find out how the other half lives, maybe students should labor at construction sites, on road gangs, or in factories. Maybe they should do basic agricultural work like picking a crop or hoeing beans. They could flip hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant or shoulder any of the other humble jobs held by unprivileged citizens.

A summer spent at an unrewarding, dead-end job might be a powerful stimulus for students to study with renewed vigor when they return to school in the fall.

Come down from the ivory tower

Elite students don't need the motivation if they are elite students. I do agree that there are many, many students that could use some manuel labor though.

FYI, you have to pay money to read the article. Can you cut/paste it or at least give a synopsis?

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(09-21-2014 09:04 PM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  Two doctors offer this suggestion:

Quote:Elite students also need some experience with the work that other Americans do. To find out how the other half lives, maybe students should labor at construction sites, on road gangs, or in factories. Maybe they should do basic agricultural work like picking a crop or hoeing beans. They could flip hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant or shoulder any of the other humble jobs held by unprivileged citizens.

A summer spent at an unrewarding, dead-end job might be a powerful stimulus for students to study with renewed vigor when they return to school in the fall.

Come down from the ivory tower

That used to be the way it was done. But leftists' impact on labor laws and regulations makes that much harder for businesses to do.

(09-21-2014 09:04 PM)QuestionSocratic Wrote:  Two doctors offer this suggestion:

Quote:Elite students also need some experience with the work that other Americans do. To find out how the other half lives, maybe students should labor at construction sites, on road gangs, or in factories. Maybe they should do basic agricultural work like picking a crop or hoeing beans. They could flip hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant or shoulder any of the other humble jobs held by unprivileged citizens.

A summer spent at an unrewarding, dead-end job might be a powerful stimulus for students to study with renewed vigor when they return to school in the fall.

Come down from the ivory tower

I remember working in the Oil fields during 3 summers of college. I still can remember each summer, about 2 weeks into working, thinking - "I'm not doing this kind of work for the rest of my life!" Nothing wrong with earning a living doing manual labor mind you, it's a good, honest way to make a living. I just knew it wasn't for me, that I'd rather earn my money using my mind and not my back........

Kind of condescending to the "masses" don't you think? That someone has to "come down" to their level?

OK.

Quote:Come Down From the Ivory Tower
Proposing a different course of real-world education

By DR. ROBERT M. DOROGHAZI DR. JOSEPH S. ALPERT
Sept. 20, 2014 3:45 a.m. ET
Has the traditional school calendar outlived its usefulness? Many authorities are suggesting that it is time to update our educational system and prepare college students for the real world by having them go to school year-round.

More and more, we hear suggestions that the three summers between the years of college should be filled with academic activity.

One summer could be spent working in an area of specific student interest. A student interested in chemistry could work in a chemistry lab; someone with a particular interest in history could assist a history professor or an author of historical novels.

One summer could be spent studying at an institution outside the U.S.

The third summer could be spent performing an internship in the student's future profession. A student interested in aviation might be employed by an aircraft manufacturer; someone approaching a business career might work in a corporate office; a finance major might work at a bank or brokerage.

Universities are actively and aggressively seeking financial support and partnerships with business to fund programs such as these.

Second Thoughts
It's good that they are thinking, but are their thoughts headed in the right direction? College students spend four academic years in the ivory towers of academe; summer interns too often find themselves in professional ivory towers. Elite students also need some experience with the work that other Americans do.

To find out how the other half lives, maybe students should labor at construction sites, on road gangs, or in factories. Maybe they should do basic agricultural work like picking a crop or hoeing beans. They could flip hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant or shoulder any of the other humble jobs held by unprivileged citizens.

A summer spent at an unrewarding, dead-end job might be a powerful stimulus for students to study with renewed vigor when they return to school in the fall.

The authors spent their summers in a variety of such jobs, including retail clerking, shoveling slag and chipping fire brick off the walls of soaking pits with an air hammer and crowbar at the local steel mill, tending bar, and doing maintenance jobs in city parks.

Summer and school-time jobs benefited us in a variety of ways, including increasing our communications skills with non-native English speakers and co-workers who were not college or even high school graduates.

In the long run, a course of study that included laborious jobs could improve employee relations and efficiency: Executives who worked their way up from the mailroom or loading dock will have a better idea of what can be expected of the employees and what the employees expect of their leaders. A boss who has done time on the front lines may have credibility with the rank and file and with other executives that an M.B.A. degree does not confer.

Lacking Experience
As physicians of an earlier generation, we have seen students entering medical school who have never held a job that involved regular hours with regular paychecks. The percentage of such individuals is rising.

If this trend continues, many of the leaders of tomorrow may finish their prolonged educations without ever having held a real job, never encountering a demanding boss who was not primarily a teacher, and never finding out how long a workday really is.

Things are valued in direct proportion to the costs of obtaining them. People who live in their parents' basements and work full-time while attending a local community college part-time to avoid student debt are likely to have a greater appreciation of the value of their educations than those who have never held a job in the real world.

Exclusive year-round school-based activities might produce a generation of cloistered individuals out of touch with the real world. In this season of beginnings in high schools, colleges, and graduate schools, students and their families ought to place at least as high a priority on having experience in the real-world workforce as they do on extracurricular activities such as music and sports.

Future leaders of business, government, and academe should not spend their formative years in a bubble. Even if they read about the French and Russian revolutions, they may not really understand popular resentment of their elite majesties.

The idea to have students go to school year-round sounds intellectually appealing but could well cause the leaders of tomorrow to be even more separated from the real world. Working with real people, seeing what they must do to make ends meet, day after day, month after month, often for their entire adult life, offers a chance for an important lesson to be learned.

Building Society
We are not suggesting the U.S. undertake a Maoist cultural revolution, banishing students to dig ditches or work in mines. Rather, we suggest that exposure to the real work world and ordinary Americans would be an enlightening educational experience. If students experience an elite educational environment 12 months a year, they might never understand how society really functions.

Denmark requires graduating high school students to work for a year before applying to institutions of higher learning. In Israel, university students serve in the military reserves throughout their studies, and most go on active duty before or after their advanced studies. Doctors and Ph.D.s crawl on their bellies in the desert with the sons and daughters of taxi drivers and mechanics.

American colleges and universities often say they are looking for "well rounded" students. We suggest that when schools review applications, they place a high premium on students who were rounded by punching a time clock or working where they got dirt under their fingernails.

Everybody could use some grounding in the real world and see how the other half live. That's always valuable.