By aevald
Date 08-25-2007 22:15
Edited 08-25-2007 22:18
Hello Kix, during my lifetime I have been a member of or a parent of a member of many different youth organizations and other types of activities. They all have their financial requirements as well as requirements of time and effort on the part of any number of individuals. You can argue the justifications for these financial expenditures until the cows come home, or you can, as I believe you are essentially saying, reap the benefits of the individuals who have participated in these activities. Repeatedly I have seen individuals who have been able to participate in activities that they would not have had the opportunity to do so if left up to the means of their families, and the result of this association has been a role-model for others.
As far as your statement concerning school counselors goes it is no small surprise that you would echo this thought as myself and many others feel the same way. I would take it one step farther though, a lot of parents of the youth today look unfavorably on the trades as a way for their kids to earn a living or make them a lifetime career. "Go to college and make something out of yourself" seems to be the norm for promoting secondary education. Instead of maybe saying, " there are any number of opportunities out there to have a career for yourself, have you considered the trades?" There is also the old misconception that if you aren't the scholarly type that immediately qualifies you for the trades. I would agree that there are certain personality types that might be better suited to a trade type of career, myself for instance, I never could picture myself working in a suit and tie type atmosphere, thus certain facets of the welding trade were a natural for me. The opposite of the traditional thinking would go something like this: many facets of the trades require an enormous capacity and need for critical thinking and any number of other academic type educational skills, so the mistake shouldn't be made to think that a trade career isn't mentally challenging and doesn't require a brain. Where I teach there are a mixture of individuals from various disciplines and experiences, the funny thing is that I already know that these other individuals need to have a great understanding of any number of academic principles and many other things in order to be successful at what they do. Many times they will come over to my area and possibly take some classes or just have myself or one of the students do something for them and then I get to see the look on their faces or hear their comments on how they really had no idea of the many things that a trade requires or how complex and difficult some of the things that we do really are. I get to experience a warm glow inside of me every time that this happens.
One of the things that our government often does is analyze the need for the existence of certain opportunities in our society to the point of absurdity that if they just got behind these things they would waste a lot less time and have more money to realize the successes of these endeavors. For those of you who have to deal with these justification types of policy I'm sure you know what I am referencing. I never promote a system of no checks and balances and I do believe in accountability, however all too often these checks go to the far end of the spectrum.
Back to Skills/USA for a moment, I'm sure that there are possibly issues with the way that it is run in the eyes of some. I don't know if this is a widespread thing or if it is a localized issue. As some of the other posters have alluded to though those who see these problems should speak up as much as possible to see that the issues are corrected, simply bowing out or turning your head the other way doesn't really address any problems. Just my $.02 Regards, aevald