A Missouri government program teaches the unemployed valuable skills:
For Miklos, technology is a bit of a mystery.
“Cell phones are a new thing,” he said, “and I’ve just recently found out how to send pictures on my cell phone.”
He knows he’s at a disadvantage in today’s workplace.
“The young kids today, they get taught that in school. They’re a whiz at it. You see them with both hands and all ten fingers [texting].”
Thanks to the Work Ready Missouri program and the Taney County auditor, he is getting up to speed. The program teaches new skills for new careers.
Is that seriously going to land him a new job?
No, but it’s what the community organizers and liberal arts majors that the program employs know how to teach, so that’s what the program participant learns.
And when the program fails, you want to know why it will fail? Because they didn’t have enough money.
At my last public library job, I spent about half of my time teaching people in the community basic computer skills. My best students started out unable to type and ended with a working knowledge of search engines, email, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
There are a lot of people without even the most basic of computer skills that have tremendous difficulty getting started, or are suddenly faced with a fairly complex computer task. Such as when the state government decided that one could now only petition for a divorce online. Or when a job application could only be entered online.
Maybe this is a wasteful program, or the private sector could do a better job. But there are a lot of people who are significantly held back because they lack basic computer skills and don’t know how to acquire them.
There are a lot of people who are significantly disadvantaged because they don’t have this or that or know this or that. I remain wholly unconvinced that the government is the moral or practical avenue for rectifying individual lackings.