Ben Wildavsky’s Wall Street Journal review of Real Education is much better than this. One point: Wildavsky worries that in Murray’s system, capable students will be tracked, early on in their educational careers, into academically undemanding courses and eventually similar jobs. Those who, with a little tough love and nurturing and fine teaching, could have become doctors and lawyers will end up mechanics and plumbers.

While determinative tracking is a bad idea, it is not a bad idea to allow pupils who want to be mechanics and plumbers—regardless of their academic potential—to be... mechanics and plumbers. Instead, we shuttle them as 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds into college-preparatory classes that they don’t enjoy and they feel are wastes of time. Seriously, let’s give these near-adults some educational and vocational options and quit shoving college down their throats. Murray’s book makes some solid and compelling points about this that Wildavsky ignores.

And Liam has been pushing for more of this.

(That’s not some weak attempt at a joke; he really has.)

Joanne Jacobs features a thorough article, from Houston, about the new voc-ed—you know, voc-ed for the 21^st-Century, not your grandfather’s voc-ed, etc. The benefits of such programs are numerous. One ought not forget that, in some ways, high-school students are supremely practical, and 16-year-olds who know either that they aren’t prepared for college or that they don’t want to attend college directly after high school have few reasons to stick around in class and read Lord of the Flies. Many are going to drop out and find jobs that, while low-paying, are at least paying.

A fine method for keeping such students in high school is to provide them with training that is practical and profitable. They’ll stay in school, they’ll graduate, and they’ll emerge with useful skills that can help them find lucrative employment. Some will go to college after several years in the work world, others won’t—but all will be demonstratively better off than if they had attended a regular high school, one with a “college or bust” mindset, and dropped out.

Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).

Not only is career and technical education nothing to laugh at, it’s a way to replace the unrealistic “college for all” bias of public schooling with a greater degree of practical preparation for lucrative and rewarding careers in fields like nursing, desktop publishing, computer networking and the building trades.

This is encouraging:

And here’s the kicker: Two-thirds of CTE students go on to college, and when they do, there’s research suggesting they outperform other students. Those that go straight into the world of work are generally getting jobs in fields where the pay is good and demand is strong.