Jim Hite
EXPANDING THE VISION OF OUR YOUNG PEOPLE

A very interesting article appeared in the forum section of a recent edition of USA Today.

The author described a new and novel approach to innercity education, undertaken by a national network of 19 Catholic schools which were facing closure due to high tuition unaffordable by the mostly poor families in the neighborhood.

In the mid-1990s, a management consultant in Chicago suggested having businesses hire students, with the pay going to the school as payment for tuition. The success of the experiment in that city led to its expansion and in 2004, such a school opened in East Harlem.

Five days each month, the students travel to Manhattan and work as employees, learning business and personal skills that prepare them for life after high school. The school trains the students to speak with adults and teaches them how to shake hands, how to look adults in the eye, even how to dress for work. They are then sent into the corporate world to apply these skills in their day-to-day activities.

The students, whose school provides rigorous academics, find that they need to pay attention in English class so they can write better letters and memos. They push their math skills to the limit to understand better the operations of financial institutions. And all the while, they are making the connection between high school and the adult world.

The article points out how few high school students see such a connection. Whether poor, middle class, or well to do, students live in what the author calls a "bizarre teen vortex that celebrates TV, clothes, and other trivia."

One of the girls from East Harlem said her neighborhood friends come home from school and spend hours watching TV, adding that their only goal is to get married, preferably to a rich husband.

All well and good, we say, but that's New York, Chicago, Denver. We cannot replicate that program, based on a private school, in the public school domain.

All true! For example, I have no idea how the work portion could be adapted to any rural/small town public school, as the types of jobs mentioned above just don't exist.

However, one idea to be drawn is that there must be some connection between high school and the adult world. I know that many in this community, as elsewhere, are devoting their time and effort to mentoring young people. Many individuals and organizations work diligently to help students in both rural and urban America see beyond their own little world.

Every effort must be made to attack the limited vision so many young people accept without question. To a great extent, I think that the narrow and confrontational attitudes so visible in our world today flow directly from this limited view of the world which is itself both unrealistic and extremely self-centered. Far too many adults have never left their teen years, that safe cocoon of small vision and selfsatisfaction. What is new and different is feared, denigrated, dismissed.

Every once in a while, a phrase similar to this appears on a church marquee: Without vision, the people perish.

Expanding the world of our young people, as well as our own, is a most worthy use of our time and talents.