ShareThisBy JOSE DE LA ISLA
Scripps Howard News Service
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Real estate agent Sylvia Reyes and I were meeting for lunch. She provides advice to homebuyers with an evening radio program.
Her 13-year-old son, Carlos, an eighth-grader, came with her. He enters high school this year. Sylvia is very petite and her son is already taller than she is. But they clearly act like a team.
They had just come from seeing a client.
"I want him to learn my business, especially about taking clients around to show them homes," she explained.
I told her how my father took me to his office and on weekends we went to community fund-raisers. There I saw how adults shook hands, made small talk and asked about relatives and acquaintances.
It was his way to remove me from the family cocoon and my adolescent cliques and into the world of adults. A decade or so later, I spent an afternoon in the San Francisco Bay Area with former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, who had served in the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations.
He described how he had come out of retirement to write "The Boundless Resource" and form the National Manpower Institute. He proposed councils to expose young people to the "world of work," as the term was popularized in the late 1970s. The concept eventually became the national School-To-Work program.
The idea was to connect high-school students in "proto-internships" to individual role models or companies with similar career or trade interests.
I headed up the council in Oakland, Calif. We devised a system allowing school counselors to make appointments for students who would meet men and women in the trades and professions at their places of business. In three years, we arranged hundreds of such encounters.
What surprised me most was how isolated young persons' lives can be and what little knowledge they had, even about their parents' work environments. A most pleasant surprise was how willing small-business operators, union leaders, bankers, local government officials, school and community-college leaders and others were willing to support the concept.
About that time, Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, started up the "take your daughter to work" concept that caught on nationwide.
The program I headed had federal funding and, like many such projects, ran its three-year life course. Local budgets were tight, and the experiment closed not long after I had left for another position.
An Exxon executive who volunteers in a high-school mentoring program described to me not long ago how many of the students he works with venture out no farther than five miles from the communities where they live. On one outing to Rice University, the young people were so excited many of them called their parents on their cell phones exclaiming to their moms and dads that they wanted to go to college there.
Matriculating at an expensive private institution was an unrealistic expectation for almost all of them, but they retained a visual image about college. It cracked open a door for them to take the next step.
This isn't a bad time to rethink past experiments and find ways to empower thoughtful parents, relatives, friends, community leaders and others to go beyond mentoring by strangers and focus on their own.
That's what Sylvia is doing. She, her son Carlos, and this society will be better for it.
(Jose de la Isla, author of "The Rise of Hispanic Political Power," writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3(at)yahoo.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
