Vocational Education Quotes
This quotation shows that in 1922 a major state prison was operated at a profit with NO COST to the taxpayer. They key was that the Warden was an experienced successful businessman who put the prison into a number of different businesses which paid the expenses and taught the inmates marketable skills like stone carving. The model however has been opposed by businesses in the area which saw the prison as competition and labor unions which saw the model as taking jobs away from honest, non-criminal workers and not paying high wages.
Romney, the Republican Presidential Candidate, was advocating budgets to cut the Federal expenditures for Collage Student Grants and Loans.
This quotation is an excellent of a particular anti-intellectual view of education that is held by a significant number of Americans. For them, the only societal purpose of education is to prepare students for jobs, not to improve the intellectual quality of life for the student and not to make him/her a better citizen by learning our history and developing critical thinking skills. They argue that education will enlighten students and make them better citizens and better developed people, independent of their vocational choices. They do not claim that schools should not prepare students for jobs, but that job preparation is not the major or only purpose of education.
When her husband was vice president she was at a Job Corps center to speak, but was asked by the press about rumors that her husband has been involved with another woman:
