Backbone

Last night, I was sitting around at a barbecue with some friends. It was thrown to celebrate a former karate student who moved back to Switzerland six years ago, because she is in town.

She was talking about her schooling, and how she is currently working in IT, and the complexities go beyond what I would have figured. She has to wire things up, design complex circuitry, and show that she can repair that kind of thing.

One thing she said really touched a nerve with me, because it’s so true. She said, “Vocational training is seen here as a not good thing, but over there, it’s not, because it’s very much needed.”

Vocational training has had a stigma to it for many years. Admittedly, I was probably a part of this problem for years. To me, everybody should have gone to college, because everyone needs to have a job where a college education is required, because that way everybody is “smart”. What I failed to see in my younger years was that we have a true need for every kind of smart in the world. We need people to fix cars, fix engines, to do plumbing, to work construction, to run farms, to cut hair (okay, most people need that…).

We live in a world that, luckily, places a great amount of value on education. I’m happy to say that I had the pleasure of teaching in a community for 18 years where that is especially true. But to see that as the be-all-end-all really does a disservice to everyone for whom a four year college is not the way to go. And this does not make them any less smart.

In fact, the United States is very much in need of workers like this. In addition to this, The Guardian reports that vocational workers are feeling more fulfilled than white collar workers.

I’m not sure how to take away the stigma, but it is very much there. It needs to change.