On January 21st,
2018, I met a man who used to be a wood shop teacher at a
Kindergarten-through-8th-grade school in Lake Forest, an affluent
suburb of Chicago, Illinois.
My acquaintance told me
about how he lost his job. He said that, one day, he came in to work
at the school as usual, and a construction worker walked into his
wood shop classroom, and laid some blueprints on a table. When asked
what he was doing there, the construction worker casually informed
the teacher that he and his crew were going to have to start taking
the machines down.
Unbeknownst to the wood
shop teacher until that moment, the school was ending the wood shop
program, and wanted to re-assign the teacher to a different subject.
The reason the school
gave was that there was a safety risk; a student could lose a finger,
or get seriously injured in some other way.
But
on the other hand, high school students would be better able
to understand and adjust to that risk than younger high school
students, so why not allow only seniors and juniors
to take the courses? Students need to acquire hands-on skills at some
point, and they should start acquiring those skills, so that they're
ready to start working when they're 18 (or 16).
Aside
from being better able to respond to dangers in the wood shop, older
students are better able to understand the risks and consequences
associated with using wood cutting equipment. So why not allow
juniors and seniors to sign waivers,
indicating that they understand the risks, and – with parents'
permission – agree to accept them, in exchange for receiving wood
cutting skills.
While
we're on the subject, why don't we make sure that more (or all)
schools, have wood shop, auto shop, and other technical courses and
programs, on site? And
why don't we encourage more schools to take others' lead, and have
one campus for juniors and seniors (who can drive, and take wood and
auto shop), and another campus for underclassmen (i.e., the
freshmen and sophomores who still mostly take the bus to school)?
But
I'm getting off topic.
The
supposed safety risk associated with wood shop classes is just a
ruse, because that risk can be allayed; through proper safety
education, and waiver programs.
But,
of course, waiver programs do not satisfy those who support
terminating wood shop classes. That's because waiver programs do
solve the problem.
Parents
who want to take wood shop classes out of high schools, want to avoid
the risk of liability lawsuits against the school. For a public
school to be found liable for an injury to a student, and have to pay
damages, would be costly to the school (and the local school board)
in terms of both finances and reputation.
It
is my assessment that parents who are against wood shop classes, by
and large, do not care that
waivers and proper safety education solve the problem, because the
waiver system eliminates the possibility that the school could be
found liable to pay damages to an injured student. It does this by
refusing to accept students into wood shop programs if they do not
agree to foreswear suing the school.
This
is a wise policy in my opinion. The intent is to reduce the chance
that a student will behave carelessly in a wood shop classroom.
What
upsets parents who are against wood shop classes, is that solving
this problem exposes their real agenda. That's because the ulterior
motive behind the opposition to wood shop classes is more than just
safety concerns, and concerns about legal and financial risks to the
school.
People
who enter the trades – such as construction, automobile repair and
maintenance, electrician work, heating and cooling, plumbing, etc.
- are generally not regarded in a positive light by wealthy
suburbanites.
The
wealthy tend to see those types of jobs as somehow “beneath”
themselves and their children; particularly construction and auto
repair. And plumbers? Forget about it. Plumbers are garbagemen
in the eyes of many of these people.
But
then, of course, “garbagemen” are really sanitation engineers.
People who get really good at automobile repair and maintenance, end
up offering suggestions that improve the quality of their trade. Wood
shop can lead to wood crafting, not just construction. And
construction, heating and cooling, and plumbing, are all essential
things we need to survive
comfortably in the modern world.
Any
person who takes wood shop or auto shop in high school, or studies
electricity, could become an engineer. Don't believe me? Think of all
the math that goes into the study of those subjects; algebra in
electricity, trigonometry in simple construction, calculus in
advanced construction.
Studying
a skilled trade late in high school could potentially lead a student
to choose a trade school or technical school over a university.
There,
students could study C.A.D. (computer-aided design), 3-D printing technology, CNC machining and die
casting, mechanical engineering, electrical systems engineering,
architecture, bridge design, and more. And the electrical systems,
homes, and bridges that result from those studies, improve all of our
lives.
So
why disparage tradespeople? Why pretend that someone who wants to
work with their hands, learn a trade, develop their skill, and
produce or manufacture
something of value, is only going to be a garbageman for the rest of
their life?
In
Lake Forest, Illinois in particular, and in other nearby affluent
suburbs, there is a sentiment among many well-off parents, who
believe that - to paraphrase the words of my wood shop teacher
acquaintance - “We want our children to be doctors and
lawyers; we don't want them in
construction or plumbing. We pay people to do those things for
us, and we want our children to as well.”
My
friend's portrayal of the attitude among these parents, confirmed my
worst suspicions about this topic, which I had long suspected.
Parents
like that would never
tolerate their child become a skilled tradesman. Even if it meant
cheaper electricity or a better home for themselves. After all, a
person who becomes a skilled tradesman might join a union, or even –
God forbid – become a card-carrying red! A bourgeois parent would
never tolerate it, when they'd rather see their child working in an
office or a trade floor, or better yet managing a workplace from
afar.
The
effect is that any child who grows up wanting to earn an honest
living, without manipulating money or simply managing and moving
resources that somebody else produced, is not going to have an easy
time finding a career in which his parents can take pride.
Perhaps
more importantly, one potential outcome is that many children will
grow up in privilege and opportunity, without any skills or common
knowledge to take advantage of those opportunities.
The
students who would have
studied the trades, but were deterred by their parents' disapproval,
would have found paths to perfectly comfortable livings. In the more
valued of the common trades, tradespeople can even earn six-figure
salaries (that is, if they're particularly skilled in their fields,
or if they become managers). That's a hefty sum, compared to the
salaries earned by most people who graduated college after having
studied humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts.
How
is a wealthy parent harmed by having a child who grows up to be an
industrial engineer, civil engineer, or public works employee (even
if he is a
garbageman)? A parent is only harmed by such an outcome if they have
both 1) an unhealthy sense of identification with their child's
achievements; and 2) a twisted set of values that derides honest work
that hurts no one, based on the field somehow being “dirty” or
“low-class”.
Well,
disparaging people for being “low-class” is how you get
a lower class. Antagonizing
people who perform tasks that are essential to making our lives
easier and more comfortable, is how you get both increased social
division and increased stagnation of infrastructural development.
What
about the rich kids who weren't intelligent enough to become doctors?
What about the kids who studied political science, but were too
honest to defend obviously guilty people or push a political agenda?
How are they supposed
to make ends meet?
It
might sound like I'm saying “the poor rich kids”, and in a way, I
am. But the poor and rich alike deserve
opportunity to acquire skills and become independent, and become
self-employed if they choose, and to choose a field that has meaning
and value to them.
Students
who grow up well-off in the suburbs, grow up disconnected from both
the reality of nature on the
rural farms, and from
the reality of large concentrated numbers of people (and,
importantly, poor people) in the urban centers. So they grow up
without people skills and without connection to animals and
nature, and to the life
processes which sustains human beings. They grow up away from the world of the productive; away from places where food is grown, and things are built and manufactured, alike. Away from the majority of the people, and as a consequence, away from people who might suggest alternative ways of living and working, of which a student might not have otherwise heard.
As
a result, they grow up without
essential sets of skills that have to do with life outside the
suburbs. Without picking up hands-on skills, they grow up completely
unprepared for the real world and its problems, and with little
practical ability to be independent and self-sustaining. These are
real problems, and neither they, nor the problems that poor kids
experience, ought to discount the seriousness of the others'.
Poor
kids (and rural kids), at least, get to go on school field trips to
farms, plants, factories, and refineries. Those field trips can do
either of two things: 1) prepare them for farm work, factory labor,
working in a steel plant or oil refinery, etc.; or 2) scare
them away from those fields, so
that they'll be effectively encouraged to go to college instead (and
pursue a “higher” course of study).
Rich
kids never had those field trips. Or if they did, then it was mostly
about scaring students away from “dirty work”, and there was no
real risk anyone would end up in those fields (unless they wanted
to).
That
is, as long as the rich kids are willing to take advantage of all
of the privileges and
opportunities which their upbringing affords to them. And sometimes
that means taking advantage of white privilege, or succumbing to
social pressure to boast about your achievements and employability to
the point of it compromising your humility.
The
suburbs are no fun. Say what you will about poor urban areas, and
rural areas; they're where real life takes
place.
Students
should not leave high school, having practically no clue what a
factory is, nor what S.T.E.M. fields are (science, technology,
engineering, and math).
An
eighteen-year-old graduate from a public high school ought to
instantly know what you're talking about if you say the phrase “the
trades”. A young adult should be able to recognize a grain
elevator, or an energy plant, when he sees one.
Someone
who is just entering the work force should also know what their basic
rights are in the workplace; in regards to safety, health, breaks,
wages, conditions, and how to participate in effective negotiation
with management.
Neoliberals
and neoconservatives in the suburbs don't care about workplaces
having good, or even adequate, safety and health conditions, or good
pay, or good break policies. They just wonder why employed people
can't start their own businesses, create jobs, and contribute to
society to a degree equal to the help they've received.
Not
that they would ever listen, but there is a simple answer to this: If
you didn't shame them for becoming independent contractors,
or for trying to survive without striking a deal with some large
corrupt multinational, then they might do just that!
The
last thing a wealthy parent wants is for their child to grow up a
unionized tradesperson. Someone who can destroy the work they've just
done, if the person who hired them refused to pay what they promised.
A wealthy suburban parent would hate
to have to treat such a person like a human being with dignity;
whether it's their child or not.
The
only thing they care about is shitting on those people, criticizing
them at every opportunity, controlling them, and making it as
difficult as possible for them to become independent through honest
work.
The
last thing we need is for parents and teachers to educate children,
while completely neglecting to inform them as to what types
of professions the world will need most badly
when they enter the workforce.
If
I had been told at age 14 that the world desperately needed more
engineers, doctors, or whatever, then I would have considered
studying engineering or medicine, and I would have thought about how
I could fit in to those careers. Not only to make a lot of money; but
because I know that people need
those services. I'd know that I'd be contributing something which is
valued by others, and that would give my work (and the studies which
precede it) a sense of purpose. And the quality of work of someone
who believes in the
work they're doing, is impossible to put a price on.
It
saddens me to realize that many wealthy parents have neglected to
suggest back-up plans to their children, in case they don't turn out
to be the doctors, lawyers, astronauts, cowboys, and artists they
expect to be when they leave college.
While
they heap criticism and disdain upon the skilled trades (which they
regard as unskilled),
such parents are usually also content to allow their children to make
money carrying bags at gold courses. To such parents, the fact that
caddying involves sucking up to the wealthy for money, makes the
indignity of that job tolerable.
Moreover,
it provides the caddy with an opportunity to ape the most
Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic tendencies of the
business and political elite who belong to those golf courses. This,
of course, will be essential to furthering their future white-collar
career.
The
fact that, by allowing their children to caddy - and intern with
corrupt businesses, law firms, political offices, etc. - they are
conditioning their children to serve the elite
and the old money, not to
become independent of it. In effect – despite their privileged
upbringing - they are reduced to the same level of servitude to the
wealthy elite, to which the poor are reduced as well.
The
only consequences of obedience to affluent suburbanite parents is
eternal servitude. The best form of rebellion against such a flawed
parenting style is total independence.
In
2014, Chicago teacher Douglas Bartlett, was suspended for four days
without pay, after he showed common hand tools to his elementary
school students. The tools included screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, a
pocket knife, and a box cutter.
According
to Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor, Bartlett “thought
he was using physical objects to help his students learn the required
course material.” However, since the set of items he displayed in
his classroom included a pocket knife and a box cutter, his
instruction that day was deemed to be in violation of Washington
Irving Elementary School's policy against “possessing, carrying,
storing, or using a weapon on the job when not authorized to do so.”
I
guess they were worried that one of the kids might pick up the box
cutter, hijack the classroom, and fly it into the World Trade Center.
Bartlett
maintained that he displayed all of the items as tools, not as
weapons. The school, on the other hand, says that Bartlett failed to
ensure that the knife and box cutter were inaccessible to the
students, and that he failed to obtain permission from the school
before showing the items.
Auto
shop and wood shop classes are disappearing from high schools,
depriving students of hands-on skills, while standardized multiple
choice tests relieve students of the burden of having to actually
remember the correct
answers. Wealthy parents want their kids to get into good schools so
they can have dignified jobs (that is, jobs that the parents
consider dignified).
So
you have to wonder whether reprimanding the teacher for showing
common tools, was anything more than a way to distract students from
acquiring valuable trade skills that could risk injury to them (or,
more importantly, to their public school's finances).
Where
are those life skills
and agriculture classes in high schools?
A
world where everyone knows advanced math, and everyone knows one or
more skilled trades, and anyone can farm part-time on their own
property, is not something that the business or political elite want.
They want obedient workers who are equally dependent on big business
and the corrupt governments with which they collude.
Luckily,
however, many of these people are dying, and their death cannot come
soon enough. They, through their ignorance and passivity – and
their need to be persistent social-climbers and yes-men – are
causing the destruction of our ecosystem, and the poisoning of our
food with toxic industrial preservatives.
But
this is not enough for them; they must also profit off of our efforts
to save the planet, in order to render them ineffective and useless.
After all, what do they care? They're intent on dying before anyone
can catch them in the act. They'd hate to sit around waiting for
judgment and revenge to come. And it will come.
But
the fact that their judgment is coming, does not stop them from
encroaching on our ability to merely subsistence-scavenge
from within the shell of the old world which they have destroyed, but
kept alive like a zombie. Just like the “headless” “zombie
corporations” which they have kept alive through bailouts and
restructuring, heading companies with C.E.O.s who often have little
to no understanding of the industry in which they're working. Just
like the idiot politicians who know nothing about the things they're
regulating.
Don't
ever allow yourself to become so deluded as to think that you could
never become like one of these people. All you have to believe, in
order to slip down the road to their twisted line of thinking, is
“Hey, I got mine,
and I'm not complaining!”
I,
for one, will complain as long as I am pressured into renting things
which I would rather own, and as long as I have to beg and apply and
pay for permission to use something that I thought was my own
property.
We
must each own a means of production, if we are to be independent, and
self-sustaining. For only when we own
the means to produce, can we keep everything we produce with
it, without the owner of the
equipment demanding compensation for its use. We
should return to the days when many companies gave their employees
tools as part of their compensation package.
We should also seek to ignore
and invalidate all contracts which pressure employees into agreeing - as a condition of gaining employment - to refrain from competing with their employer company, when they leave that
company, for some duration of time. These are called “non-competition contracts”, and they interfere with the freedom of competition which is
afforded to us in the marketplace.
These contracts, as well as other anti-competitive agreements, only make it harder for a worker to resist the temptation to borrow other people's means of production in order to earn a living, instead of the owning a means of production outright by himself. The enforcement of non-competition contracts results in a truly sorry state of affairs, in which virtually every worker who 1) is not the best in his field, and 2) dares to quit working for an employer, is effectively unable to operate successfully and competitively in the field he has chosen. And maybe even the field to which he has decided to dedicate his life.
The
only alternative to redressing this unjust state of affairs, is to coerce 99% of people into dependence
and “skill-lessness”, while those who already have advanced
skills – and those who represent them – receive more pay, more
economic rents, and more legal insulation from competition and legal
responsibility, year after year.
Students
in high school today, as well as all young
people in general, should be encouraged to at least consider
the trades. Being a doctor or a lawyer is all well and good, and medicine is literally a life-saving field. But
skilled farm labor, and H.V.A.C., will become devastated
fields if several million
people do not learn the skills necessary to join them within the next several decades.
And
that is the kind of information that I wish I'd had when I started high school. I
hope that the younger of my readers will not discount the value of
that information.
Based on a Facebook Post Published on
January 22nd, 2018
Edited and Expanded on January 24th,
2019
Published on January 24th,
2019
