1) Stripping
2) Stripping as a career
3) Carreer days in general
4) Career days for 8th graders
On stripping in general, I'm of the opinion that it's a practice that everyone should be well versed in, for a number of reasons: it increases body awareness and comfort with one's own sexuality, it attunes one to ones own sexual cues so that one can use them or turn them down as needed (which reduces the likelyhood of becoming a victim of one's own subconscious sexual signals), it is an excellent part of play between couples. Furthermore, stripping is about the tease, and the sexual tease is a lost art in our culture outside of advertising - and I consider that a great loss. Without the tease, sex becomes far more mundane than it would be otherwise - instant gratification and perfunctory sexuality is the dark side of liberated sexual thinking. When sex becomes just about the plumbing, it really isn't all that interesting.
On stripping as a career, my inner feminists are arguing wit each other.
On the one hand, I have personally known and known of women who enjoy dancing and stripping and do it because it really is what they love. I also have known women (and more of them) who have done it for quick money or in sleazy places and find it quite degrading. The issues involved are delicate, adult, and thorny enough that it's as far beyond the comprehension of an 8th grader as is the moral implications of being an infantryman or a navy seal (of course, I haven't seen those careers protested loudly). On career days in general...I must confess that I don't really get it. I find the aptitude tests they administer to be thought-provoking in their questions, but not so much in their scores. If we were in a school system where people were tracked into different high schools based on aptitude and life ambition (as is done in Germany) then we'd be on to something. But, as it stands, we have a social and educational system designed around the very simple proposition of prolonging adolescence beyond all previous limits. Nobody graduates from high school prepared to enter the work force unless they have also been preparing themselves outside of high school. In most cities in this country (excepting the few with strong vocational ed programs) people graduate prepared to go to school (CC or University).
Career days for eigth graders seem even less relevant. Most careers in this world - and the choice between them - require social and moral tradeoffs. If you want to be a clothing designer, you're entering a business that trades in prostitution on one side and slave labor on the other. Entering music or film, you'll be dealing with orgnaized crime. Entering education, you're in for a political career in which the next generation are the pawns in the political game. Entering manufacturing, you may be offered a job in a munitions factory - ditto for the physical and computational sciences. This is not to say that these careers are without merit - far from it - but people who want to participate in such businesses at any more than a novice level will be dealing with complex moral, ethical, and financial tradeoffs. Eighth graders should be made aware of the wonderous variety of potential carreers in our world, of course. They should be encouraged to explore. They should also be learning the art of ethics and decision-making (which they aren't). But "carreer days" have always seemed to me to be a gimicky cutesy way for educators to spend one or two days a year talking about things that should be part of normal classroom discourse.
I know that this is not much in the way of solid answers, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice
-Lokmer