Good Ole Public Schools

Four Detroit public high schools have decided classroom time should be used to train 60 students to work at Walmart. A new partnership gives participants 11 weeks of job-readiness training during the day and a Walmart job after school. Students earn 10 credits toward graduation…

Advocates say with Detroit’s unofficial unemployment rate nearing 50%, jobs at Walmart are a golden opportunity. 
Critics are outraged. “They’re going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school.”

Hmmm…they send them to school to get prepared for life outside the nest.  If you live in Detroit and you’re in an American public school – you’re training for a factory or Wal-Mart.

But on the other hand….being born in Detroit doesn’t mean you have to stay in Detroit.  It’s not Berlin 1980, after all.  And another curiosity…what class(es) did you remove in order to fit Wal-Mart training into the schedule?  Is it the job of the state (public school system) to train kids for jobs?  To take this another step, would they not be even better equipped to work at Wal-Mart if we removed sophomore science classes?  Or junior Language Arts classes?  Or consider this: What if school curriculum in more cities was to be chosen by private companies?  (In Texas it’s being chosen by fundamentalist churches, but that’s another story).  Does this not smack of Costco and Gatorade in Idiocracy?? 

This is all besides the obvious problem that with Detroit continuing to crumble, training for a job at Wal-Mart in the Detroit area might be as productive as training for Wal-Mart jobs in schledder-madoo.  After all, how many Wal-Mart’s can a shrinking city support?    What I mean is that if we’re going to train them for menial labor, aren’t there better choices? 

http://www.good.is/post/detroit-high-schools-teach-how-to-work-at-walmart/?gt1=48001