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This article discusses the career education concept and its need, significant events, critical issues, and recommendations to make it a viable educational thrust for handicapped students. The authors contend that career education should encompass the knowledges, skills, and attitudes needed for the various life roles and settings that comprise an individual's life, including employment. This will require curriculum efforts to be more extensively directed toward teaching daily living, personal-social, and occupational competencies, as well as basic subject skills. Career education includes the academic/work study curriculum design, but it goes one more step by requiring all teachers to relate their subject matter to its career implications. In addition, it requires a shared responsibility and cooperative relationship among all school disciplines and substantial involvement of parents and community agencies and industries in all phases of education.

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A concerned group of t e a c h e r s w o r k i n g on a C a r e e r Education P l a n for t h e i r district wrote in 1985: "Too often educators get c a u g h t up in 'trends' and subject m a t t e r forgetting the total educational process." T h e y quoted the words of N a o m i J. White which continue to ring too t r u e even today:I have taught in high school for ten years. During that time I have given assignments, among others, to a murderer, an evangelist, a pugilist, a thief, and an imbecile. The murderer was a quiet little boy who sat on the front seat and regarded me with pale blue eyes: the evangelist, easily the most popular boy in school, had .the lead in the junior play; the pugilist lounged by the window and let loose at intervals a raucous laugh that startled even the geraniums: the thief was a gay-hearted Lothario with a song on his lips; and the imbecile, a soft-eyed little animal seeking the shadows.The murderer awaits death in the state penitentiary; the evangelist has lain a year now in the village churchyard; the pugilist lost an eye in a brawl in Hong Kong; the thief, by standing on tiptoe, can see the windows of my room from the county jail; the once gentle-eyed little moron beats his head against a padded wall in the state asylum. All of these pupils once sat in my room and looked at me gravely across worn brown desks. I must have been a great help to these pupils--I taught them the rhyming scheme of the Elizabethan sonnet and how to diagram a complete sentence (White, 1937).A l t h o u g h this was w r i t t e n forty y e a r s ago, too m a n y students such as these continue to receive a n education t h a t fails to m e e t t h e i r particular needs a n d l e a r n i n g style. Considerable resistance and m i s u nd e r s t a n d i n g still exists by educators who k n o w little a b o u t disabling D o n n E. Brolin is Professor of Education and Director, CEPP, U n i v e r s i t y of MissouriColumbia.