What about the kids who love something like vetinary work, so they volunteer to help at an animal clinic? I’m assuming this is the intention of the volunteer hours, that students give back to and become involved in community life. Since this is very common within a home-based educational setting, the schools are late to come on board. I would not, however, think that because a student is interested in the hospitality or food service industry as a career, that they should work for free at McDonalds. I don’t see how that would even be possible from a legal liability standpoint. What happens if the student is injured on the job?

Like a lot of things, this volunteering sounds like a good idea–and there is not the infrastructure to support it. The schools don’t have to be involved in helping the student with volunteer placements, only with approving them and handling the paper work.

Big business has shaped American education since the time of the Rockefellers. What shocks me is not the idea of volunteer hours, but of food and drink mandated by a certain company for a school, advertising in school bathroom stalls, or of educational modules provided by companies with their own business slant. Think major old companies designing slick curriculums on environmental management. Shudder.

We have co-ops and apprenticeships that count for high school credits here (in Canada), too. I don’t have a problem with this; I think it’s a good thing for the most part. But there’s a world of difference between learning the skills that you need to be a plumber, or an electrician, or a carpenter, and flipping burgers. That difference is the difference between education and credentialing. McDonald’s can credential—that’s a decision that the state makes—but they’re sure as hell not able to educate.

There’s no educational difference between a kid who drops out at 16 and works at McDonald’s and a kid who goes to work for McDonald’s at 16 instead of going to school. There may be a difference in credentials, since the latter now gets a diploma, but this just devalues the diploma. The kid is no more educated.

People here tend to take GCSEs (generally between 9 and 11 of them) at 16 and either vocational qualifications (GNVQs) or A-Levels (3-5 academic certificates – I have 4) at 18. So both those kids would have a crop of GCSEs; plus it’s pretty normal to drop out of academic-only education at 16 and move on to something more useful – most of the nursing students I know switched to nursing NVQs instead of academic learning at 16, for example, and there’s nothing odd or inferior about it. I sure as hell don’t trust Macky D’s to provide that kind of transferable vocational education, but the concept itself is neither new nor bad.

Frito: Yah, I know this place pretty good. I went to law school here.
Joe: In Costco?
Frito: Yah, I couldn’t believe it myself. Luckily, my dad is an alum and pulled some strings.

1) There’s a difference between flipping burgers at McDonald’s and an actual apprenticeship (I support the latter). Training as a plumber at a company means that you can be an independent company, or work for another company, or teach other people how to be plumbers. “Training” at McDonald’s means that you can flip burgers at McDonald’s. They’re not interested in job mobility.

2) If the government is going to decide that kids need to stay in school until 18, then keep them in school, or at least within an environment where they’re being educated. Saying “we’re keeping them in school until 18!” and then deciding “flipping burgers at McDonald’s = school” is disingenuous.

There’s no educational difference between a kid who drops out at 16 and works at McDonald’s and a kid who goes to work for McDonald’s at 16 instead of going to school. There may be a difference in credentials, since the latter now gets a diploma, but this just devalues the diploma. The kid is no more educated.

You’re right, I chose the incorrect word for it.

But I’d like to see evidence of that before slotting into a rant.

I went into a rant? Well, okey dokey. Me, I don’t trust any corporation like McDonald’s to educate its employees adequately. I personally need evidence that they actually are educating their people.

Am I missing something here? Where’s the subsidy? Is there something you’ve read about subsidies that I haven’t? I understood this was an accredited version of some existing privately funded training thing. As for whether they do or do not care about bettering people; they’re one of three corporations who have been given this accreditation thing – the other two are attracting little notice thus far. I’d love to know how competitive that was, what they had to do to convince someone that their training was up to much. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a stitch-up, with little real competition or meagre analysis of what McD’s was doing. But I’d like to see evidence of that before slotting into a rant.

This is what I think people are missing. Establishing a corporate subsidy of education is inviting disaster, since corporations like McDonald’s do not gain from a well-educated workforce, just the opposite. They can leech of an under-educated populace of workers more easily than otherwise. Therefore, establish a dependence on your corporation, within the education system, and expand as needed. There’s no reason for them, logistically, to care about bettering their workers’ station in life. This is the same type of ludicrous bullshit that was tried before in America, albeit, in a different era. Rich companies have zero vested interest in making their employees smarter or more socially mobile. That is capitalism in a nutshell.

My reading of this is that public education isn’t touching Macky D’s at all here – they’re giving private education to their workers that ends in a recognised qualification that they believe will represent transferable skills. Whether it works depends on whether other employers accept the qualification. I could be wrong, but I have yet to see anything even hinting that any public funding will be used for the training. The only real downside I see here is that it will be used for fudging – a kid who quits school to go work at McDs will be said to still be in education even if they manifestly aren’t, just so the targets get met.

As for private money in public education, that’s been going wrong here for long enough already. It’s only relation to this case is the common thread of New Labour’s love of other people’s money.