Career Education Is a Years’ Long Process

 

When I was a teenager, I remember my mother made it her business to enable us to be tested for our abilities and interests.  When I look back it, I suspect it was because I had expressed great confusion about what I wanted to do after high school. My father had said that if I wanted to work in the store, he would take a gun and shoot himself.  My grandparents insisted that being a rabbi was no job for a good Jewish boy. My dad wanted me to be a doctor and that was the end of it. He wouldn’t even allow me to drop Latin even though I was failing in it because he insisted that I needed Latin to get into Medical School and I told him I was not going there. We had a huge fight in the guidance counsellor’s office over that one.  My maternal grandfather insisted that I needed to be a lawyer. So, we went into Toronto and I was subjected to a whack of tests and I can’t even remember if anything ever came of it.  

 

The long and short of it is that I understand full well how important career education is. I taught at a time when it was assumed that there should be classes devoted to career education, with students wrestling with jobs and professions and so forth. When I was a teacher, still, I organized open houses for career exploration, bringing in friends and volunteers from the parent cohort, to talk to students about their jobs and allow students to ask questions about what was involved and what was needed and so forth.  

 

I was never convinced that this was the way to inject thinking about careers and future destinations into classroom programming. So when we began to advocate for career education being part of ongoing conversations, I was all for it.  So we had to try and have programming experiences that exposed students to outdoor education, to university explorations, to responding to stories about teachers or doctors or pharmacists with discussions about those particular careers or professions.  It was not long before we talked about outcomes concerning Career Education being embedded into every grade and every subject.  

 

If we took students to Black Creek Pioneer Village, making sure we drew attention to the farmers and the cooks and what their days might have been like and what kinds of people would find satisfaction in those roles.  Or while conducting science experiments in laboratories set up for that purpose, to talk about what skills scientists need to possess and what education would be required today and is there anyone amongst you who might enjoy something like that?

 

So when I read about special initiatives or software inventories or guest speakers as one shot deals, I shake my heads and realize that career education is something that is part and parcel with knowing our students and helping them come to understand themselves and what they might or might not like and learning how to set goals for oneself and work towards them. That, in the end, is the only way Career Education will achieve what it needs to achieve.