Week 3 - Productive Members of Society

Stacey and others wrote great comments on my "pickle" post from last week. As I started to respond, my reply started to get pretty long. I decided to post it here rather than in the comments because it takes up so much space. This week, Stacey wrote:

Hey Zach! I love the questions you ask, and that we need to ask as teachers, and I feel like we all do a fairly good job of answering them for ourselves and in our groups. The one concept I can't really get past is making students into productive, contributing members of society. We need welders, garbage men, factory workers, yet our school systems have a way of degrading manual labor careers. Those are necessary, productive people, but we feel like unless we have at least one college degree we aren't valuable.

My reply is as follows:

Stacey,

I’m going to reply to your comment here, because I want to address your points and respond to your observations and conclusions on our readings. 

First, I think you raise a great point. Our economy is strong in its diversity. Our social structure would crumble if everyone became teachers or programmers. We need a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs, and we need a lot of students becoming, as we’ve said, “productive, contributing members of society”.

We’ve got to learn that “productive and contributing” can mean a lot of different things. Schools have got to respond to labor trends and train students for what our economy needs. When the threat of nuclear war loomed over us in the 1950s and Russia was building rockets at an astonishing pace, students rushed to become science and math majors. This is what Peddiwell called “doing what the community needs doing”. Twenty-first century factories in America are automated. So in 2016 we don’t need unskilled laborers who paw at widgets going by on an assembly line. We need engineers who can repair and operate the robots that make things like cars and electronics .

At the same time, as a society we’ve got to stop denigrating professions that are treated as socially “lower class”. Parents, educators and all community members should learn to stop treating education for jobs in plumbing, contracting, sanitation as if they are fallbacks or less than desirable paths. A tradesman in the US with the proper education and a strong union affiliation can make make a decent living.

At the same time, we’ve got to acknowledge that our economy and our infrastructure depends on proper education for the people who will enter into these professions. This education needs to be funded, robust, and presented as a viable alternative to a college track or other education.

My friend Dennis is an Italian who moved to Germany because the job opportunities are better there. He’s an industrial plumber. To work as a plumber in Germany you first have to become fluent in German. There is no way around that. I met Dennis while we were both enrolled in a German course for immigrants. While he’s studying and learning the language, he has to do a three year apprenticeship under a master plumber, while attending courses at a career and technical school.  After his three years are up, he’ll take a final exam, his Ausbildung, which he must pass in order to become a licensed plumber, and even after that he’ll have to maintain his licensure by taking extra training courses. My auto mechanic over there was a Master technic, and had to maintain his credentials through regular training and certification. This process is the same in Germany for many professions that Americans call “the trades”. Everyone from plumbers to carpenters has to go through the same process.

This all might seem like a lot of work and runaround to become a plumber, but to me it’s a society saying to it’s members, “we value your profession and your role in the community, and want to make sure you have the education needed to be the best in your field”. It’s also a social contract. When you hire someone for plumbing work in Germany, you can verify that he or she has completed an Ausbildung before being allowed to do any work in the community.

This summer I helped my sister study for her beauty school exam. We went through hundreds of pages of practice exam questions that spanned everything from the chemicals in skincare products to the physics of the alternating current needed to power the electronics the salon employs. Some people see a non college-educated young woman with a beauty school certificate and see a failure. I see a person with a promising career getting education she needs to succeed in a career.

It’s tough in the US without a college degree. I know because one of my parents is without one. Because of degree inflation, a Master’s degree has become the new bachelor’s in a lot of circles. However, we need to stop pretending that everyone should go to college, and we need to make the alternative paths honorable, respected, and just as robust as any other career training in this country. That’s how we’ll produce “productive, contributing members of society”.