Critique of Phyllis Schlafly's "School-to-Work Will Train, Not Educate".

             Marc Tucker's "cradle-to-grave" plan or the more recent "school-to-work" is a form of education in which students are trained for certain jobs in the workforce and are not taught the traditional way of learning basic knowledge and skills. In the position statement "School-to-Work Will Train, Not Educate," the author Phyllis Schlafly explains that school-to-work should be "defunded" because "[t]here's a big difference between educating a child and training him or her to work." She further states that training is "what you do to your dog." Is the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STW) such a horrible educating technique and proposition or can it perhaps improve the global economy? In her opinion, Schlafly believes that school-to-work should be eliminated. She begins by explaining Marc Tucker's, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, "cradle-to-grave" plan written in his famous letter in 1992 and how his idea is to train children so that they could be automatically placed on the labor force. She also makes a distinction between educating and training and explains that educating is developing skills by teaching; and training is to teach someone how to do certain tasks efficiently with consistent practice which is the same we do with animals and what the STW is promoting: "'performance-based' training" where workforce development boards would decide the student's future. She further says that the STW laws to start training students begin too early and that children in elementary school are too young to make their career decisions so individual grades would become mean less because in the STW format, there is "group grading" where students are taught to be "'team workers'" and not individual "achievers.