To Thine Own Self be True.

In my last segment I wrote about a recent trip to a Kansas Job Corps training center and I would like now to take a moment to mull over the significance of one observation I made during that visit. Basically, I found that the vast majority of students at the center had chosen to pursue careers that would historically have placed them with their specific gender. In other words, at least on the day I visited, the construction trades classes were filled with male students and the health industry classes - where students trained to become Certified Nursing Assistants - were filled with women. There were exceptions. There was one man in the nursing class I visited. There was one woman in the security/law enforcement class. But, by and large, the students had headed themselves toward professions that were historically populated by their own sex.

If the Job Corps center is any indication (and I believe it is), then the sometimes frantic efforts of feminist policy makers have produced limited results. There are exceptions. I know for a fact that there are far more women doctors and lawyers than there were a generation or two ago. But, by and large, and despite liberal social pressure (also known as political correctness) and liberal policies and laws, women still gravitate toward historically female occupations, just as men tend to gravitate toward historically male occupations.

That is probably why feminists have recently concentrated on forcing employers to pay "equally" for "equivalent" jobs. To such policy makers' minds, a truck driver with three months training should be paid the same as a secretary with three months training. In other words, the market forces be damned. The fact that both the truck driver and the secretary are both free at any time to leave their respective professions and pursue the other's vocation is irrelevant.

This, of course, heralds the feminists' latest attempt at social engineering, as well as a change of tactics. They apparently believed, at one time, that the world would be a better place with more female truck drivers, cement workers and plumbers. (They didn't seem so concerned about there being more male teachers, librarians and nurses. But that is fodder for some future editorial). However, much to their collective disappointment, Rosie the Riveter proved to be largely a result of war time necessity and not a symbol for a new paradigm.

I know for a fact that many are not happy with this fact. A great deal of vocational training funds are contingent upon schools and training centers placing more and more trainees in "non-traditional" classes. The fact that when left to make their own choices, students chose not to pursue a feminist utopia, seems to be setting hard with many liberals.

In essence, choice is good. Government funded schools and training centers should be required to allow both girls and boys to pursue any profession they wish. However, when the students have made their choices, the schools should not be pressured to change the students' minds. This is basically the difference between the very American ideal of freedom and social engineering - where people are denied choice in some misguided effort to build a specific future.

Job Corps. A model for the future?

This past week, myself and two other adult sponsors took a group of 15 small town high school students to the Flint Hills Job Corps Center, located near Manhattan, Kansas. It was an eye opening experience for our students. Coming from a small town, rural environment, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a largely black, largely urban student body. Such experiences, I believe are good. You need to see the world outside your comfort zone and, I'm sure, an eye-opening trip to rural American would probably be likewise enlightening for many of the Job Corps students.

As for myself, I came away from the Center as an even stronger supporter of vocational training than I had been before. Dedicated to training 16 to 24 year old students for "high demand, high paying" employment, the Job Corps is trying to realistically fulfill a societal need for trained workers while also preparing young people for the outside world. The students are provided with free room and board, education and even a small amount of money. In exchange, the students are expected to mature into skilled, productive workers and citizens.

Does the Corps sometimes fail? You bet. Not all the students graduate. Some get into trouble along the way and are thrown out of the program, others simply don't have what it takes - in determination and/or intelligence - to complete their program. Such is life, I'm afraid - a hard learned lesson that most of us have seen or even experienced on our way to adulthood and gainful employment.

Also, I'm sure, the Job Corps sometimes gets it wrong in its pursuit of "high demand, high paying" jobs. No one has a crystal ball when trying to estimate tomorrow's job market and I'm sure that sometimes those in charge of the Job Corps find themselves training students for jobs that end up being neither high demand nor high paying and, perhaps, are even non-existent by the time the student is trained. I was happy to learn, however, that Job Corps is attempting to evolve, to weed out programs that no longer meet the proper criteria while, at the same time, developing new programs. For instance, an office skills program at the Flint Hills Center was recently discontinued. It's pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that the secretarial jobs the students were preparing for proved to be low paying and perhaps dead-ended.

So, at least at first glace, it appears the Job Corp administrators - at least those at the Kansas center - are trying to look at the world with a mature and realistic eye. You get rid of what doesn't work and try something new until you find something that does work - a rarity in the governmental world.

I can't help but wonder if the Job Corps wouldn't prove to be a good model for a larger training system, one that hopefully would help revive our faltering economy. It seems to me that a skilled work force would do far more to revitalize our national economy than anything resulting from the hundreds of billions of dollars that our federal government is pouring into banking and the auto industry.

The Obama administration wishes to expand unemployment benefits. But for whom? For laid off industrial workers waiting for jobs that have already disappeared and are not coming back. And for how long should the benefits be continued? Six months? A year? And then what for the still unemployed worker? A low skill, low paying job? Welfare? That seems to me to be a poor investment for tax payer money, as well as a poor investment of time on the part of the ex-worker.

How about instead linking unemployment benefits to training? The Job Corps typically trains a student from six months to two years and a similar investment for older, unemployed workers might seem to be a huge investment. But we need to ask ourselves about the end product. Under the current system, we end up with an underemployed worker with outdated skills. Under an expanded training program - based on a Job Corps model but intended for older workers - we would likely end up with a retrained worker, ready once again to be a productive employee, only this time with 21st century skills.

Such a move would not be without sacrifices on the part of the worker and his or her family. Unemployment benefits, even those continued for months or even years, will never be enough to keep up a mortgage or even a car payment. But under a training program - unlike the current system - the worker would end up being a trained, employable citizen.

We all need to think outside our comfort zone. Just like the rural students visiting an urban Job Corps center, we need to think outside our past experiences. We need to realize that economies work from the bottom up and that, rather than pouring an obscene amount of tax payer money down the banking and industrial rat holes, we would do far better training our unemployed workers for the 21st century.