THE VOCATIONAL/ACADEMIC SPLIT

ABIGAEL D. PINEDA

With many others, I view schools as internalizing certain myths about human beings and their ability to learn which are well established in ou society. Schools are not strongly countervailing institutions. And the circumstances of schooling make it harder rather than easier to follow alternative assumptions and beliefs.

One of these myths, a convenient one, is that there are essentially two kinds of people. Those of one group- perhaps our academically oriented group of early elementary students-learn to use their heads and should go on to work with thei heads. Those of anothermaybe those who preferred painting –learn to use their hands. School is where one cultivates the heads. Consequently, “headedness “more than “handedness” is needed for an valued in school.

Teachers in elementary schools and academic subjects are reinforced in many ways in the belief that their job is to develop minds and that is best done through the academic subjects and an academic kind of teaching. Like other citizens, they tend not to see manual activity as both intimately connected with the mind and an alternative mode of learning. Arts and crafts tend to become supplemental, a relaxed, undemanding relief from the reading, writing, and arithmetic that really count, but of little value in themselves. Learning becomes a one-lane street, heavily dependent on symbols and the manipulation of symbols and not on things, the manipulation of things, and relating these things to symbols.

Those children who appear to relate most readily to the manual mode and least readily to linguistic and numerical symbols often are those judged as poor and slow learners. (This concept of poor and slow, in contrast to good and fast- and the relative irrevocability of these attributes-also is well-established myth not countered in schools.) Their manual propensitities are viewed moe as evidences of a non academic bent than a fruitful, alternative avenue to be utilized in learning to read, write, spell and compute.

The higher grades bring with them a heavier instructional emphasis involving telling,questioning, taking quizzes, and an avoidance of so called learning by doing-except in the arts,physical education, and vocational education. What begins to emerge is a picture not of two kinds of instructional activities in each class appealing to alternative modes of learning, but of two curricular division in secondary schools. On one side are the most more prestigious academic subjects, largely shunning manual activity as a mode of learning. On the other side are the nonacademics, generally characterized by the trappings of academic teachings but providing more opportunities to cultivate handedness and often featuring aesthetic qualities.

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The author is SST-II at Remedios High School, Remedios, Lubao