Job Ready, Job Ready, Job Ready
The parrot chorus of private colleges
It is general knowledge that a parrot is not a bird of prey. And yet.
When I listen to the appeals to prospective students from small private colleges, I think of the parrot. Each repeats the other. Being distinctive is thrown overboard. It’s we make you: job ready, job ready, job ready.
And that means? I think the message is assumed. We’ll teach you what will make you employable at the highest paygrade out there. A hundred and more years ago it might have been cursive script. Tomorrow, perhaps, it is doing the bidding of the next generation AI robot.
Now it’s a combination of accounting, business law, sales and finance. Also a good grounding in conventional thinking.
But what is “job ready?” And more important what is the job?
Could “job ready” in the 21st century mean something more than secure first employment? What work should we prepare ourselves to undertake?
Kennedy said in his inaugural address:
“With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.”
God’s work? Something greater than our own comfort for which we should be “ready,” prepared?
Should your political science course walk the dirt roads of a Nairobi slum. Should your speech classes teach you to speak to the Rotary Club or to people homeless after a train spill of poison chemicals? Do you read the history told by settlers or as seen by those whose land is conquered?
Do we learn in social psychology to fit in to our workplaces with emotional intelligence or band together with others to make all places of this world fit for the human spirit.
What is “the job?” What is the calling? PR parrots seek our time and our money and appeal to our greed. We are preyed on by the repetitious squawk. Preparation should not be machining our “peg” to fit the all too fleeting set of places in the great machinery of society.
The job of the future is kindness and awareness. A mind open enough to hear the distant sob of children and hard enough to crack apart the most cynical rationales.
We must prepare a generation to struggle toward, not wait for, the day when, in the words of Martin Luthor King,
all of God's children… will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”