Hi Vivian,
First of all, congratulations on an excellent paper (FWers: accessible from
Vivian's posting of 4 March).
It needs a more considered response than I can give it, or have time to
give it, but here are a few comments.
On point 2, I would suggest that young people leave their local communities
and home towns for the cities not only because they are looking for better
job opportunities but because they want to meet other young people and to
share in the exciting activities that they have seen on TV. We no longer
have the traditional initiation rites for young people in our communities,
welcoming them into adulthood. The nearest alternative they have is to head
for the big cities and find some space or status there.
Those who ask young people of 15 or 16 years of age in English villages
about their lives come up with the same answer repeatedly: "We are bored".
It's only when they are a few years older -- if they still remain in the
village -- that they will say: "There are no jobs."
There are very few examples in developed countries where this effect may be
clearly seen because local communities are nearly always bereft of jobs.
However, there are some interesting clues -- for example, the Old Amish in
America and the kibbutzim in Israel. In the latter case, the young people
are conscripted into the army and so have to leave their kibbutz anyway. In
the former case, the significiant exodus into the cities is voluntary.
However, in both cases, when the young people are a little older and want
to settle down and raise a family they return to the support of their
community, availability of grandparents, etc. In both cases, there are jobs
for them, of course.
The only reason I have for saying this is that this trend is probably
unstoppable.
Anyway, this brings us back to the main problem. Later on you mention
another feature of the New Zealand economy -- the lack of trade/vocational
skills. This is something that we suffer from too. It is very difficult to
find good plumbers, carpenters, electricians and so forth. When you have
found one and want to use him again you find that he's so busy that he
can't come for weeks. Like you in New Zealand with your Modern
Apprenticeship schemes, it has become fashionable in England recently to
promote vocational subjects in schools. (The problem here is that our
centralised educational state system has already crammed the syllabus with
so many other, apparently important, subjects, that some will have to be
dropped.)
When I was involved with the Jobs for Coventry Foundation in the early 80s
we discovered that the unemployed youngsters who came to us after 12 years
of schooling not only had a low level of literacy and numeracy, but were
also inept at quite basic skills. For example, many of the boys had no idea
how to hold and use a saw or hammer nails! They needed weeks of basic
training before they could transfer into our training units where real
job-skills were taught.
We have a particular problem in England because, for century-old historical
reasons, and quite unlike countries such as America and Germany, there is a
strong prejudice against jobs where you get your hands dirty. Nevertheless,
the same deficiency in basic skills seems to be fairly widespread in most
developed countries -- and this also seems to be the case in New Zealand
from what you say.
Because of my experience in Jobs for Coventry and then, subsequently, in
starting the Job Society in England -- both of which turned out to be
deeply disappointing (despite exertions which were considerably more than
I've ever had to make in starting two businesses since then) -- I've
thought long and hard about the problem of youth unemployment.
I've slowly come to the conclusion since being on FW list that the only
answer lies in a reformation of the typical school system that's found in
developed countries. In particular, we need a well-rounded education of all
the basic mental and physical skills at an early an age as possible. We
also need schools which can adapt to the local culture (particularly in our
underclass housing estates). In short, we need to allow experimentation and
competition between different sorts of school. We also need to be able to
introduce skilled tradesmen and others with practical skills into our
schools and avoid rigid entry qualifications for teachers.
It seems to me that the only way this can be done is to introduce school
vouchers so that parents can choose the type of school -- state or private
-- that they think will be best for their children. This, of course, meets
with fierce resistance from teaching unions and the educational
bureaucracies, but early indications from the few experiments in America
suggest that this is a promising way forward. For example, Cleveland
awarded 4,456 school vouchers to children between 5 and 14 and 66% of the
parents say they are "very satisfied" with the quality of the schools they
chose compared with 30% of the parents without vouchers whose children had
to attend state schools.
It's far too soon to start to judge the efficacy of school vouchers as
regards future job skills and academic abilities, but the voucher system
could hardly produce worse results than the state system is yielding so far
(at least in England and America) in many inner city areas. I'm in little
doubt that the voucher system is the only answer and that it will be
inevitable over the longer term. This is something that you might like to
consider for New Zealand.
Keith Hudson
__________________________________________________________
“Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
order to discover if they have something to say.” John D. Barrow
_________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_________________________________________________
