Talk about preparing kids for the real world. Four public high schools in Detroit have partnered with Walmart to train 60 students to work at its stores:
Advocates say with Detroit's unofficial unemployment rate nearing 50%, jobs at Walmart are a golden opportunity. Sean Vann, principal of the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, has 30 students in the program. He told the Detroit Free Press he's enthusiastic because along with earning money, since the schools are in the suburbs, the students will be around people from different cultures.
Not everyone, however, is convinced that it's such a good idea:
Donna Stern, a representative of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is outraged. "They're going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school."
What do you think, Neatoramanauts? Better a crappy job than no job at all?
*BWHAHAHAHAHA!*
Pull the other one!
If you know about the American school system. You know it's based off of the Persian system. Which was designed to squelch radicals and free thinkers.
At least with this program your kid has a job.
Looking back, there were times when I'm sure that my employer would have been more productive without me than with me, but in the course of that job I learned a lot about dealing with people, being responsible, and eventually as I neared the end of high-school, supervising others and getting the best out of them.
This crappy job also gave me something else, that proved to be the most valuable. The name and phone number of a previous supervisor that I could put on my resume. For every internship or summer job that I applied for in my college years, poor Dan got a phone call from someone asking if I showed up on time, was I responsible, did I show initiative.
In any place a poor supervisor can make life hell, and poor attitude can make any job hell. But a Walmart job needn't be crappy, even for a cosmopolitan aristocratic famous author:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_K8hD47GcZBkh1v3SjNYldI
My first job was working in a poultry slaughter house. I cannot describe the constant filth and reek of the offal, blood and feces. Thirty five years later I still can't look at a raw chicken without feeling disgust. At least Walmart is air-conditioned and clean.
I kept that first job three years, it helped pay for my college and motivated me to eventually become a professor. I have to wonder what sort of twisted logic would oppose trying to teach a work ethic to students in an area where the unemployment rate is 50%?
Detroit has a jobless rate of 11.2 now, so maybe it worked fantastically, however, that really old article above was using a guess at the U6 'underemployed' number so if they were all hired as part-timers it wouldn't have decreased much.
Curiously, where does one come across a two year old article in their daily internet touring? Google also did not show anything remotely recent (other than the Neatorama post) so I really do wonder!
A Walmart job is still a job and someone has to do it. If it's a bunch of High School kids doing it, earning some money and learning some responsibility, then hell, more power to them.