Provide Students with the Skills They Need

Hoerner (1993) asks the question, "Are educators today helping young people think through how they are going to be productive individuals--or are they just too busy disseminating knowledge?" (p. 1). He uses the term work-based to describe an educational system that takes responsibility to prepare everyone for further learning and productive employment.

Work-based learning can be defined in two ways. The first definition is more familiar--learning experiences that occur in a work setting or an in-school simulation. Hoerner (1993) urges consideration of a second, more comprehensive definition of work-based learning: "The knowledge/learning imparted to every student from the beginning of schooling, which maintains a theme or focus that people work in order to live and that there is a positive 'connectedness' between the schooling process and living productive lives" (p. 6).

Hoerner suggests that the second definition, though absent from most school systems, is one that needs to be developed greatly. He emphasizes the observation of Boyer (1992): Children grow up not knowing that people work in order to live; young people must understand that everyone, in addition to being a consumer, must also be a producer in society.

For most students, school-to-work transition will not be a choice between work and postsecondary education. The traditional life pattern in the United States and most industrialized nations tends to separate education, work, and leisure. The resulting life pattern suggests that education is for the young, work is for the middle-aged, and leisure is for the elderly (Cross, 1990). However, education and work are not linear events, and most students will combine work and postsecondary education after high school. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said, "You can't really separate school from work these days..." (Reich, 1994). The K-12 educational experience must help every student develop and successfully complete a unique plan for further education and work.

Smeltzer (1994) speaks to the need to create new school-to-life and school-to-work systems that unite otherwise disjointed school improvement efforts and make them a coherent part of systemic reform. He says that neither schools nor students need more short-term programs layered on top of an already overwhelming plethora of reform initiatives. Instead, he has the following recommendation: