As students enter the college ranks, they are given many opportunities to investigate the world of work through cooperative houses, internships and summer jobs. The push becomes to learn about the vocation one has chosen and build a foundation for the future. What might we suggest to parents dealing with small children, teachers trying to mold youngsters in classrooms and children growing toward a life that will focus on one particular issue? Work. I would propose a fairly easy plan. Why not suggest to friends and parents that they talk to their children about how work helps the family or how the responsibility to carry out tasks builds a foundation for future good work? Since life is a journey through work, one should look at everything done by people as critical elements in the creation of good human beings.

Perhaps creating a mentality for early co-ops and internships as well as continually greater responsibilities for the worker would instill in children a work ethic that would last their whole lives. If one thinks about it carefully, one might come to the conclusion that the real movers and shakers in the world built their existences on knowing how to work and finding value in everything at which they worked.

They saw value in being trusted to get the trash taken out every Tuesday. When they shoveled the snow from the driveway, they knew the exercise was valuable and that freeing the driveway provided a service to the family. Work was not done purely for monetary reward; it transcended cash in the pocket and rose to a higher level of worth.

When students are in college and think about co-ops, internships or summer jobs, hopefully, they think about how these jobs will benefit their search for a permanent job after graduation. Why not carry this concept of value to the youngest children? If everyone thought early in life about how each separate task they performed had an ultimate value in life, a greater number of people might think of work as something more than drudgery or simply an act that produces some form of payment.

Thinking about work does not begin as one graduates from high school or college. The formation of knowledge, skills, disposition and feelings about how to function as a competent and compatible worker in the real world begins shortly after birth. We start to learn how to function as part of the working world long before we receive our first paycheck. It is therefore necessary to begin a process where educators, parents and children can be given the chance to participate in the means to prepare for the work that comes naturally to most of us.

Cooperative education, internships and experiential learning are proving to be important tools in preparing older students to adjust from the more relaxed world of childhood to the real world of work. It really is a beginning, a beginning that should be pushed back 12 to 14 years to when the child is in a much better position to really learn the qualities of work.

All of the things that make cooperative education, internships and experiential learning so valuable to students in the latter part of their formal education should not be lost to the earlier generation. By incorporating the foundations of cooperative education, internships and experiential learning into the early lives of children, we can create a stronger work force than we ever have seen before.

Craig Gunn is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.