I have been interested in the health of the 'Second World' for a long time - basically ever since 2003 when big corporations stopped being nice to my little business, and I started working for the first time in what's known as the 'mid-market'. Instead of big fat organizations like Cingular Wireless or Kaiser Permanente I started building systems for small companies like a real-estate developer in Utah and a solar power company in Southern California. At one of these companies, a restaurant chain, I discovered myself in an old aerospace town that was undergoing rebirth. I noticed a lot of trucks, a lot of tradesmen and a lot of non-flashy business. In my new job, I'm about to re-enter that world.
But what is making me think about the Second World in particular these days is a discussion I had with my cousin 'The R' who is the principal of a charter school in NYC. He said that in China, everybody knows that at some point in their free public education, they are going to have to take a test. It is a nationwide standard test which is basically pass/fail. You get to take it once and one time only. If you pass, then you can go to college. If you fail, then you cannot. We need something like that in America.
The people who fail the test are in no way shamed. They become the tradesmen of the nation. They will engage in business and they will be properly educated in the appropriate subjects. Here in the US, our popular culture is dominated by yuppie sensibilities, including bourgie decadence. We don't give enough props to skilled workers in America unless its in a Ford or Chevy truck commercial. We must do better, and I think that the single most important educational reform we could implement is something like this test.
I'm a firm believer in apprenticeship. There is a great deal of work that goes on in America that collegiate types don't know, can't know and never find out. Nothing illustrates this so much as the kinds of television shows I love on the Discovery Channel like Dirty Jobs, Hazard Pay and, quite frankly Cash Cab. We tend to think of intelligence in very narrow ways and something about the way we have grown businesses in the post-war era has warped our sensibilities about what's actually valuable labor. I am thinking at this moment that 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' would be a good read right about now. That model of corporate employment has practically disappeared, but how and why it came about, I think owes a great deal to what we thought about ourselves then. Quite frankly I think we were flush with cash from winning WW2 and had to fill all our new buildings with bodies. The smartening up came later, with the reforms that generated the need for MBAs started by Peter Drucker. Like most software guys in the enterprise space, I know how worthless a lot of MBAs can be. It was IT, JIT manufacturing and supply chain management that put the productivity into the 90s. My point is not to jab at MBAs, but to suggest that in many ways management was fit into the mold of the corporation rather than grown from an understanding of the core business. Corporate culture should be, corporate politics should not. There is a level of politics in the Second World that you simply cannot achieve. Nobody has the time for it, the margins are too slim.
Apprenticeship in the trades beginning that track after the National Test will open up not only a host of new and real opportunities for Americans in the skilled workforce, but change the culture away from the yuppie-centric. A national acknowledgment that certain skills are key to our nation's health might have any number of secondary benefits.
I think it would reduce the amount of money spent on college education that is of little practical benefit. It makes no sense to have English majors selling car insurance. Sure, I suppose you don't want your insurance guy to be inarticulate, but he shouldn't compare thy term life to a summer's day.
I must admit some of my bias against a proliferation of non-profits. I think we have a surfeit of Americans who independently muck up our understanding of a lot of issues that face the nation precisely because it doesn't hurt them to be eternally wrong. Whenever I listen to NPR I keep hearing about some foundation that is searching for the cause and the cure for homelessness. It's been about seven years now, you'd think they would have come to some solid answers. America doesn't need to flush these inefficiencies, but I don't think universities should be spewing out alternative lifestyles at the expense of everyone else. Taking the pressure off of students to achieve in that particular way, when they end up doing something else altogether would be an excellent thing for the culture of achievement and American meritocracy. It simply doesn't make sense for us to produce 5000 lawyers if only 3000 are good enough to work the real jobs and the other 2000 become hacks fighting the 3000 for prestige and influence. Let them fix bridges instead.
All of this interesects with class in an important way. An old British friend told me, that in America everybody looks at the rich guy and says 'I want to be like him'. But in the UK they say that they want to shoot him. We are unfortunately becoming more like the UK. We have too narrowly defined success and too many of us are faking it. We need to emphasize the importance of success in skilled labor, both white color and blue color. When we do this, people will be better able to respect their roles in society and we'll be better adjusted to recognizing different kinds of merit. America will not function properly if class warfare is the order of the day.
Imagine you could know, without question, what the best trade schools were. Whenever you wanted a plumber, or somebody to train your dogs, or somebody to take a family portrait, you'd recognize their school and credentials the same way you might recognize an attorney from Yale Law or CPA from Wharton.
I strongly believe that American labor markets should be robust and that we support a strong culture and emphasis on skilled labor education. It is vital to the future of America that we recognize and embrace Americans who provide such labor under the protections of American citizenship. If we do not, we will continue to outsource labor to nations who do not respect or protect liberty, we will integrate into a global economy of indentured servitude. This is a direct extension of the problem we currently have with illegal immigration from Mexico, with the difference being that most of those illegal immigrants are unskilled labor.
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