. . . and his name is Bob.
Leah Sargeant has an incisive piece about vocational training in the magazine that’s a must-read. So often, the discussion around higher education is either elitist — aspiring students must attend college to get ahead — or reactionary — college is worthless, and technical degrees and the trades are the way. Each suggests the false dichotomy that a student must be one thing or another — a MIG welder or a lawyer. There’s no reason Americans can’t know the innards of Black’s Law Dictionary just as well as proper drive-roll tension for the wire feed on a Miller welding rig (or Vulcan, if you’re a Harbor Freight fellow).
Sargeant writes:
Vocational education can be an improvement over the “college for everyone” status quo. But if vocational classes become a more common alternative track, the college-bound will be shortchanged. Not everyone will be an auto mechanic, a plumber, or a tailor, but everyone benefits from basic literacy in these disciplines, as much as in biology. Vocational education and home-economics classes are powerful tools to create good citizens, whatever the career path they lead people to. Education in how to shape the physical world is education in how to reckon with reality — education sorely needed as Big Tech pushes us into the virtual and unreal.
A couple of things:
While in high school, I took a class called Small Engines, wherein we were each provided a Kohler lawnmower engine and instructed to tear it down and rebuild it. The process was a baffling and euphoric experience, restoring the viscera of a once-solid engine so it would ultimately begrudgingly putter (I never claimed to be Cooter Davenport). Once in the Navy, I’d learn refrigeration, hydraulics, (some) nuclear engineering, calibration, and cryogenics; however, it was in Mr. Dekker’s shop class that I first learned I could bring an engine back to life. All students should know that feeling, even if some are uninterested or never wish to pick up a wrench again. If nothing else, they’ll be more grateful for their mechanic’s expertise later in life.
As good as the trades can be, we should be honest about their trade-offs — such vocations have their downsides in terms of relatively capped earning potential as well as pronounced physical degradation. I was a residential air-conditioning repairman during my first summer out of the Navy. It was an entertaining but laborious way to make a living, conducted from the “new guy truck,” an aged Ford E-150 van. That worthy vehicle leaned to the left, was home to inherited spit bottles from the previous guy, and had a hole in the cargo bay. If one wasn’t careful, a few 40 mfd capacitors might be rolling down I-43 behind you on the curves in greater Green Bay. My co-workers were older, with multiple surgeries of the knees, shoulders, and back among them because of the job’s demands. The following spring, I looked to start my own A/C company but thought of Dan hobbling from his truck in his mid-40s. I applied to National Review’s summer internship that very day. The trades comprise strenuous work, and a body can only take so much of a beating over decades — they’re a fine and admirable life, but they come at a cost just the same as any other profession.
There’s an honesty to shop work that one cannot replicate elsewhere. It is a desirable outcome if Americans of all occupations better understand their fellow citizens’ technical and intellectual labor. I believe it was a commenter on the original post who said, “You can lie to others or yourself, but you can’t lie to the engine.” One cannot cajole or intimidate these blocks of physics and their equivalents — though many of us have tried while priming and pull-starting a two-stroke snowblower with gelled fuel lines in below-freezing temperatures.
You can read Sargeant’s brilliant piece in its entirety here.