Where Are the Replacements?

Last week I hurt my hands. Deep cuts in both and had to go to the Hand Center for repair. It was a most enlightening experience. At the front desk the receptionists carefully took my data and retrieved my records. Then everything was checked to make sure nothing had changed from my previous visit. They wanted to know what medications I take, none, if my physical condition had changed, no, and even to what I had for breakfast and what vitamins I take. I was taken back to X-ray and the technician carefully photographed my hands to ensure that nothing was broken. Then back to the waiting room.

After only a short wait the nurse came and I was ushered back to the surgery area. There a gurney had been prepared for me with two wings sticking out from the central area. It looked like a cross. I noted the white sterile sheets. Then two nurses came and installed tourniquets on my arms in case of problems. Then they carefully washed my hands and arms and held my arms high while another nurse brought sterile towels to dry them. One even cleaned the dried blood from under my fingernails. Then the doctor came and I was totally covered with more sterile sheets, blue this time. The doctor worked rapidly. Blocks were injected in both hands and I lost all feeling. But the doctor was good. In thirty minutes I was sewed back together, the bandages were installed and I was ready to leave surgery. Then I got the going away interview. The nurse sat down and told me how to hold my hands, above my heart for 48 hours. I had to even sleep on my back and rest both hands on pillows. There were many instructions, future appointments were made and finally I was allowed to leave.

While I was lying on the gurney I began to observe how well trained these people were. They were well read, highly educated and totally disciplined. They were all able to operate together like an efficient, well oiled machine. Then a thought hit me right between the eyes..

Where are the replacements for these people going to come from?

Our elementary and secondary schools are not preparing young students in any way for these highly trained jobs. Students are not taught discipline, rigorous lessons requiring well written, terse and informative sentences. They are not taught mathematics to compute the dosage of the Block injected into my hand. Where are the students that understand the need for those sterile sheets. Better yet, where are the students of today that will be able to supply those sterile sheets needed tomorrow? Who in the educational establishment even understands the critical demands made on all those people who supplied my needs when I needed them desperately?

In the Indiana P-16 Plan there is not even one word mention of the needs of the medical professional. The needs of our society were ignored. Not a single person on the edRoundtable was associated with any medical facility. How could that board make any logical suggestions for future education, which they didn’t by the way, if there were no medical persons on that board.

Missing from the edRoundtable were all the professions, no seismologists, no astronomers, no engineers, no physicists, no cryogenicists, no brain surgeons, no computer programmers, no semiconductor engineers or any representative of dozens more highly trained fields. There were no carpenters. Carpenters use mathematics every day, just as do surveyors and aeronautical engineers. How about machinists, they also use mathematics every day. How many school teachers have ever run a lathe? It takes 40 years just to become a master wood worker. How many are in our school system? They certainly weren’t on that Roundtable board.

Yet the educational establishment chose to say that they alone had the foresight to be able to see, forecast and provide the education needed for all those careers. This from a group of people who admit they cannot even train students to read before the end of the third grade. (See the Indiana P-16 Plan.)

If our society is to have trained replacements for all those people who helped repair my hands last week that training must start in the first grade with students who can read at the end of the first semester. The children of today are being short-changed by our education system and if the present system is not corrected our society will be short-changed in fifteen years when we need replacements for today’s highly-trained professionals.