I feel like a response to this deserves a thread of its own:
One thing came up in conversation today that I hadn't even thought of before
Remember during the election we heard that Trump had all of his support coming from "non college educated white people".
How fvcking condescending can you get.....I know plenty of trades people over here.....electricians, diesel mechanics, HVAC guys .....who spend years at trade schools, learning trades and doing apprenticeships . They are just as smart and equally, if not more informed as many of the smarmy fvcks looking down their noses at them
I agree 100%
You know what I heard my teachers tell me in my day? "We want youse to go out and get good jobs. Not working outside in the rain as builders or labourers." Another one said "We want you to have a respectable job when you grow up. Not working out in the back yard lifting bricks." I always bristled when I heard that since my dad was a navvy in England when he met my mother, and later he was a breadman when I was growing up. My mother was a housewife until I was old enough to be left alone and she went back to work, first as a store detective and later going into factory work. When I heard teachers talking down to working class people like that I always felt that my own background was being insulted.
I have a handful of siblings, some of us went into professional work and others did not. All of us did well in life, IMHO. The ones that do manual work are as happy as any, and some of them are doing better financially than myself in a lot of ways, and fair play to them.
I have one friend who went to uni and ended up working in banking, but he says he feels out of place in it and he didn't really feel that university was for him. I have another friend who had no notion of going on to higher education, I think he did a HND and was happy to stop at that. Am I supposed to think any less of him?
University isn't for everybody. Software engineering, science, economics and the like are not for everybody, and the sooner we get that into our heads the better off we're going to be. Exposing all children to coding is all well and good, but we shouldn't expect everybody to want to go on to be a programmer. We still need people to build our houses, fix our cars, stack the shelves in the store, and serve us at the bar or cafe. I work in a tech company in Silicon Valley, and some of the people in there that I have the most respect for are the ones that work in the cafeteria. They get up early and work their asses off, and they do good work. You can tell they take pride in it.
I once had a boss who bragged about taking his son with him in the car one day. He parked across the street from a mechanic's garage and forced the young fella to watch these men at work all day. The lesson he was trying to teach his son was that that kind of work was beneath him, and he had to stick in at college if he was going to avoid lowering himself to that level. Bit harsh in my opinion. I once worked in a machine shop one summer and enjoyed the work. (The ones I had to work with, not so much, but the work itself had its own job satisfaction.) My old boss' son turned out to be a bit of an asshole, and I'd say that little mechanic lesson was probably a factor.
Now there's a whole generation of people brought up to believe that they're so special that manual work is beneath them. Hence you can't get an American to pick fruit out of the fields, only desperate immigrants will do it. How many films have you watched where the good guy prevails by escaping the drudgery of being an ordinary working man? An entire culture has developed where we don't value everybody's job, hence low-wage jobs are treated like a punishment for not being good enough at school. An American conservative once tried to argue with me that minimum-wage jobs "are not designed for people who want to have families." He thought that if you work 40+hours a week, you still don't deserve to earn enough money to get by on if the kind of work you're doing does not measure up in the prestige stakes.
What the hell's the matter with people now? What happened to a bit of respect for the ordinary working man and the dignity of the job?
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