Education in India

The case for working with your hands

is the subject of a book by Matthew Crawford titled Shop Class to Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. In an article he wrote in the New York Times, Crawford, a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, describes the insidious nature of his own experience of being a knowledge worker and how and why he chose to switch careers to running his own bike repair shop, very satisfyingly at that.

Ian Jack, writing about Crawford's book in The Guardian, wonders if our rush to embrace higher education has started to become economically destructive.

In this context, I remember an engineering student fresh out of college who had applied for a job, some job, about ten years ago, when I was looking to hire someone for some simple HTML work at Cricinfo. He knew no HTML at all, but said he was willing to learn. I was thinking of giving him a chance to learn on the job and prove himself, but was taken aback by his salary expectation and his justification for it. He wanted a monthly salary of Rs. 8,000. His justification was that even a mason was paid as much. When I pointed out that the mason built something and added value, whereas he knew nothing to start with and had to learn before he could prove he could add value, it didn't cut. His point was that he was an "engineer'.

Crawford, in his New York Times piece, argues for exposing children to some trade or craft involving hands on work, early on in their lives.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Experiential learning - a college class turns publisher

The idea of students running a business as part of their learning experience is something that I have been thinking about for a while. This could work within a school or college environment. IBM and Kinkos have tried something along these lines. I came across another experiment in experiential or work-based learning, which is really exciting - more so because of my interest in publishing.

Loyola College (in Baltimore, USA) has hit upon a brilliant idea, which they claim is the first of its kind. A couple of professors in the Communications Department of Loyola College have set up Apprentice House, a non-profit student-run publishing company.

Apprentice House is a non-profit student-run publishing activity originating in the book publishing course under Prof. Andrew Ciofalo in the Department of Communication at Loyola College In Maryland. The organization is an activity of an advanced elective in our journalism concentration, Book Publishing (CJ365). When the class is not in session the publishing activities are carried forward by a co-curricular organization, The Apprentice House Book Publishing Club, which pursues publishing activities through Resonant Publishing, whose principal, Dr. Kevin Atticks, is a member of the Communication faculty.

Apprentice House is an imprint of Resonant Publishing, a publishing company headed by Dr. Kevin Atticks of Loyola's Dept. of Communication. Book projects are coordinated by publication teams – Loyola communication students – and supervised by a Board of Advisors. Students are responsible for manuscript selection, editing, author contact, permissions, pricing, production, design, marketing and publicity. Those who complete the course and other students interested in working for Apprentice House can register for a follow-up Practicum in Book Publishing under the direction of Dr. Atticks.

Apprentice House is just one of many experiential learning opportunities available to Loyola students in our Communication disciplines of journalism, advertising, public relations, digital media, radio and television.

The Apprentice House Board of Advisors consists of Loyola faculty and administration members, and publishing professionals from the Baltimore community. Find out more about our current Board of Advisors.

Student project teams rotate with each semester, though some students choose to work with Apprentice House throughout their college career.

The Greyhound, the student newspaper of Loyola College adds,

Apprentice House, Loyola College's non-profit student-staffed publishing company, will officially launch tomorrow, Wednesday, Nov. 16 with a reception in the Hug Lounge of the Humanities Center from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The publisher's catalogue of recently published and forthcoming books will be announced at the reception. The Apprentice House, which was founded in 2004 by Professor Andrew Ciafalo is an activity of the Communication Department that enables students to manage the publication of original manuscripts from proposal to finished book.

"Apprentice House extends Loyola's Communication Department's emphasis on experiential learning in a new direction: book publishing. I believe we are the only undergraduate program in the country offering such opportunities," said Ciafalo.

Five books have been published under the Apprentice House imprint.

According to POD-DY Mouth, Apprentice House will be using the Print-on-demand (POD) publishing model. A remark by POD-DY Mouth sums up the initiative nicely "What better way to learn how publishing works--and I mean really works: editing, deadlines, promotion, book covers, pricing, distribution--than to start an imprint and run with it."

Something like this is eminently doable here in India - worth pursuing.

Students run a business as part of their curriculum without getting paid

The Mackinac Centre for Public Policy (USA) reports on a very interesting experiment which warmed the cockles of my heart.

Through a pilot partnership program with the office-supply firm Kinko's, Southfield High School has opened its very own student-run Kinko's store, which provides services to the school district as well as to area citizens.

The store is part of the curriculum offered by the Global Business and Information Technology Academy within Southfield High. Students in business classes are assigned to work at the store, handling all areas of operation from marketing to management. The store provides office products such as business cards and services such as copying and flier production to its clientele. The equipment to establish the store is sold by Kinko's to the school district at cost, and all profits from the store are redirected into store operations and a scholarship program for seniors in the Academy. The school saves money on equipment, receives higher quality services and products, and the profits return to the school and students rather than to a vendor.

Tina Richmond, the Kinko's liaison for Southfield High, explained that the Southfield program is a way for the company to advertise its name, while providing great service and educational opportunities to the school district and its students.

Southfield Public Schools administrators praise the program, saying it has improved education and office services within the district, and will continue to grow taking on more of the district's office service needs and providing excellent, quality results.

"It's a win-win situation," says Margaret Holcomb, Southfield School District's business partnership director.

Southfield High is not the only school that has implemented the in-house office store idea. Mackenzie High in Detroit has teamed up with IBM to open MacTech, a full-service office-supply store. MacTech provides both services and supplies, including word processing, lamination, flyer design, resume creation, and business cards to school staff, students, businesses, community organizations, and even other schools. As with the Southfield-Kinko's partnership, the profits generated by MacTech are redirected to the school.

Although these business-school partnership programs are in their infancy stage, they nevertheless are a good example of how public schools can use the private sector to improve education for students. Schools can receive higher-quality products and services and reap profits by contracting with businesses that employ their students.

Meanwhile, students have the chance to learn valuable skills that will serve them well for years to come as well as opening doors to future internship and training possibilities with the firms. And isn't that what education is all about?

IBM provides more details on its initiative at Mackenzie High School in Detroit.

MACTECH, a full-service office store based on the “Office Max/Kinko’s” concept, is located in Detroit’s David Mackenzie High School and is operated by its students. Growing out of The Detroit Compact Program, a consortium of businesses and corporations working with middle and high schools, this student-run business is part of the high school’s Business Services and Technology Department and the Tech Prep Partnership 2000 Consortium’s curriculum development initiative.

Students have an opportunity to work in an entrepreneurial business setting and be trained in the “office store” concept while attending school. The two-year Office Technology and Production curriculum offers classes in two-hour blocks, designed to provide practical work experience in office and computer skills, communication arts, accounting, sales, product services and advertising. Asof September 1998, 75 students are participating in this program.

MACTECH serves students and staff, the local school community, individuals, businesses, organizations and youth clubs in the Detroit metropolitan area. Services include business cards, graphics, resumes, reproduction, lamination, binding, address labels, flyers, word processing, enlargement, bulletins and more. Students are trained in taking information from a customer, filling out and completing work orders, laying out business cards, and more. Currently, MACTECH fills 20 to 30 customer orders weekly — both large and small jobs. The students run the store as a business, and the revenue they generate helps the school purchase equipment. Since the students work as part of the curriculum, they are not paid.

Because of the similarity of the MACTECH curriculum training to the products and services available in the IBM Business Support Center in Southfield, MI, students are trained on computers and software at the Center. As part of their training, students also time-stamp their work and record the specific times they enter and leave the Center. This gives students an understanding of what it is like to be in a real work environment and be evaluated as if they were working at a regular job. IBM personnel provide additional quality work site experiences for students — such as job shadowing and field trips — as well as the office furniture, equipment and supplies that make the setting and
environment conducive to business and industry standards.

The hands-on training and skills students receive have the potential of providing a program of study that will increase motivation and achievement; develop students’ interests, abilities, and acquisition of knowledge and skills; and provide them with office skills that will prepare them for employment opportunities at IBM or other similar businesses. Their growth will encourage them to seek higher education. School staff noted that this is the first such school-to-career program in Detroit to be housed in a general rather than a vocational high school. This school-to-career curriculum is also designed to prepare students for careers in desktop publishing and the graphic arts field, as well as the fast-growing field of document generation and processing and of office technology.

I had earlier described a similar possibility at the college level and possibilities at the school level.