For the past two years, I have been unpacking the racist, classist, misogynist bullshit that is feminism, and exploring the ways that sexism harms men and boys – and always in the back of my mind is the whisper what do we do about this?
Watching President’s Obama’s SOTU address was an incredibly frustrating experience as he ignored all the key issues and proposed massive spending campaigns that effectively pour more fuel on the fire when we are trying to put the damn fire out! The one that struck me in particular was his suggestion that community college tuition be reduced to zero, and I was left shaking my head that the goddamn President of the most successful capitalist, free market economy in history does not appear to understand how markets function.
Here’s his idea: the markets have set community college tuition at $3800/yr. That is what students are able to pay. Go over that amount, and you eliminate most of your applicants. Some colleges can afford to do that, most cannot. They must price their product at the market rate. This is how markets work. President Obama wants to grant all qualified applicants $3800/yr, effectively reducing tuition to zero.
With all due respect, Mr. President, are you fucking retarded?
Students still have the $3800 they intended to spend on tuition. Do you seriously think colleges are just going to let that $3800 waltz into the nearest Apple Store? No, they are not. Colleges will respond rationally and double their tuition fees. Now they get $3800 from the students (who have already indicated via the market they are willing to pay that) and the $3800 from the government.
Brilliant use of money. Idiots.
All of this led to me to thinking that we already spend a shitload of money on education, but it’s the wrong education that prepares even those students who manage to drag their bored asses through it nothing of value they can trade in the free market. A high school diploma is about as useful as toilet paper, unless you use it to go on to higher education. But why is higher education even necessary? Instead of boring the fuck out of the majority of students for 4 years studying utterly useless crap like Urban Geography and Poetry and Sociology, why are we not offering emerging adults some real choices and real skills that will graduate them into paid employment?
Why do we not have trade schools beginning in Grade 10?
The US has a looming skilled trades shortage. Plenty of other countries around the world treat 15 year olds as emerging adults perfectly capable of making rational, practical decisions about their futures. We know beyond all shadow of a doubt that schools are designed to meet the needs of abstract, esoterically inclined “book-learners”, and do almost nothing to address the needs of restless, hands-on, objective, kinetic learners who want to do something and not sit on their asses discussing the theory behind the action.
Who are these students?
Predominantly young men.
And then it clicked. Quite some time ago, I read a book called Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, which is essentially a bunch of whiny white women describing the moment they understood the power inherent in perpetual victimhood. Thinking through the issue of trade schools, I am kind of left in awe of how simple and how devastatingly effective the feminist program to destroy masculinity and manhood has been.
Click.
Destroy the trades.
The university bound, Ivy League men won’t be affected, but the vast majority of working class and lower income men will be reduced to social flotsam. Brilliant, except for that whole we need electricians and plumbers and surveyors problem but feminists are not really known for logic or consequences, are they?
Prior to 1984, it was possible for a student to graduate from high school fully prepared to enter into an apprentice trade, which meant graduating into paid employment. The Aviation Highschool in New York, for example, supplies 12% of the entire world’s aircraft workers! One high school! That high school is still up and running and educates over 2000 students per year, but if you are not in Queens, you are shit out of luck.
Enter the “social progressives” in the 1960’s, especially John Dewey, and the dismantling of an educational system that served primarily low income and working class men was underway, for their own good, dontcha know? Step by step, the progressives began taking apart the very mechanism that promoted a meritocratic, democratic and economically stable society. The feminists got wind of this and leapt on board with excitement and visions of female domination. If schools, especially high schools, could be transformed into institutions that benefited women primarily, women would take over the labor market and force the non-socially valuable (ie: not wealthy) men into a subservient role in society. If young men could be deprived of the means of matching their interests and talents to real skills, they would increasingly drop out, turn to underground economic activities to survive and be subsequently incarcerated en masse.
One group of men in particular.
The scary ones.
The black ones.
By destroying young men’s opportunity to join the legitimate labor market, feminists and social progressives simultaneously destroyed the nuclear family (the majority of men could no longer provide for their families), created the welfare state and gave themselves paper shuffling, bullshit jobs to administer the whole deal.
You have to admit, it was rather clever. Did feminists and social progressives fully realize the consequences of these actions? I’m guessing at the very highest levels of decision-making, you’re damn right they did. They pedalled this malevolence to the masses by framing it as “social justice” – It’s not fair that lower income men should graduate as electricians and plumbers while upper income men go on to be doctors and lawyers! Everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer! The less intellectually adept feminists and social justice warriors bought it hook line and sinker and the vocational educational system was pretty much destroyed by the end of the 1980s.
Mission accomplished. Guess what? All those low and working class young men didn’t put their nose to the arty-farty grindstone and become doctors and lawyers, except for the ones who would have done so anyways. They sat through a few years of “education” that made zero efforts to capture their talents, skills or interests and in fact blamed them for the failures of the system. Those brown and black lower income students in particular were characterized as unmotivated, dull, lazy, immature and possibly even inherently prone to violence and brute stupidity.
Vocational high schools are seeing a resurgence in some states that have cast off the bullshit “social justice” narrative. “In Massachusetts, in 2013, the graduation rate at regional vocational high schools was 95 percent. At traditional high schools, the graduation rate was 86 percent,” writes Emily Hanford of American Radio Works.
Imagine vocational high schools rolled out nationwide. Take all those community college courses Obama wants to make “free” and run them in high schools which are already free (in the sense that all taxpayers finance them, not individual consumers). The idea that emerging adults are too stupid to make rational life choices is garbage. The opposition to vocational high schools comes from feminists who decry the fact that mostly young men choose to take advantage of them.
No one and nothing is keeping young women out. They are simply not interested.
Who is going to teach these trades courses? Social progressives and feminists maneuvered the school system so that essentially only middle class (mostly women) could get teaching jobs. The requirements to be a teacher slowly advanced from a post high school training course to a 5 year university degree, which has the dual effect of making sure that low and working class students are never taught by someone who has lived their lives and shared their experiences, and created a sweet job with summers off (gotta bring in that wheat crop and harvest those potatoes, amirite?) for middle class men and women. 2% of teachers in America are black men.
2%
Switch to vocational schools and suddenly most of those jobs will go to working class men with experience in their fields. Can women teach vocational school courses? Of course they can. Are you an HVAC? Great. You’re hired.
Imagine the impact of restoring skills-based learning in lower and working class communities, especially black communities. You’re 15 years old, high school is boring as shit, and even if you finish you’ll be lucky to work at McDonald’s with no hope of advancement. You can make $300/week spotting for drug gangs. Hobson’s Choice.
Bring in the vocational skills school. Now you’re 15 years old and you don’t sit in chair on your ass all day reading books. You are in a workshop, a welding lab, an air-conditioning unit and you are learning skills that will pay you an above average wage when you graduate. You will be able to support a family, should you choose to do so. You can take advanced training at any stage of your career and add corollary skills as you see fit. You get a well-paid summer job. You are working. Doing something meaningful. Your skills are highly sought after. You are admired, valued and companies will compete for your talents. What does that drug gang have to offer you? The complete destruction of all of that.
No thanks.
Nothing stops a bullet like a job, as the saying goes.
Obama almost has it almost right. Close but no cigar. A return to vocational high schools will be strongly, desperately resisted by feminists, mark my words. Because at the very heart of that restoration is a very simple idea: men have worth. Vocational high schools treat all men (and the few women who are interested) as intelligent, ambitious, talented, driven, capable and valuable human beings not to be squandered to mistaken ideas about social justice. This isn’t about economic worth. That is merely a side effect. It begins with the idea that men have worth as human beings. Instilling that sense of worth by providing men with a real opportunity to discover their own worth and translate that into economic market value as they see fit is the result of treating men, especially low income and working class men as inherently valuable human beings.
The reverberations in the black community will be profound indeed. Find me a progressive or a feminist who claims that low income black men are intelligent, ambitious, talented, driven, capable and valuable human beings.
Want to find out just how true that is?
Bring back vocational high schools.
Now.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
JB – I’ve been singing this song for years. While high schools have generally backed off of vocational education, there are still plenty of apprenticeship programs in the skilled trades. A lot of those are union-affiliated, but many aren’t. We constantly preach that, in order to do well in life you need a college education, but it’s just not so. Consider: you go to college for four years and graduate with a degree that may or may not get you a job. But what you also graduate with is, say, $100,000 in debt.
But what if you graduate from high school and enter an apprenticeship program to become an electrician, plumber, HVAC worker, etc.? The first year, you’ll make a living wage and, four years down the line, when your high school classmates are exiting college with all that debt and no prospects, you’ll be making upwards of six figures as a journeyman.
Add to all that the fact that you can make a good living by yourself and never ask another person for a job, and you’re in pretty good shape providing a much-needed service. Finally, if you’re so inclined, you can start your own business, employ others and potentially make some big bucks.
Not bad for a kid with a high school education, right?
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Common sense insight is not dead, you just read it right here.
This post reverberates to the sound of nails bing hit squarely on the head.
Making it happen though, not so easy.
It’ll take time, and the femarxists have a 50 year head start.
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Well said, Young men need mentors and vocational training desperately. It wouldn’t just help the economy, it would help young men learn that they have worth and value, it would probably help reduce crime, improve relationships between men and women, decrease dependance on the state….. and therein lies the problem, we have a government heavily invested in creating dependance on the state and therefore justifying their own existence.
Even Einstein said if he had it all to do over, he would have become a plumber. Those blue collar skills are priceless, especially in the middle of the night when your house is flooding.
Feminism has a very elitist edge to it. That’s one of the things I dislike about it the most. Most fems are all heavily pampered, overly educated narcissists who wouldn’t know the real world if it bit them on the behind.
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I was thinking about this back in middle school, I though to myself, “Why are they still teaching me stuff I’ll never use when I have skills they could be honing into something useful? High school should be like college.” My artistic talents could have easily been morphed into something useful, but instead I spent four more boring years learning nothing I cared about, then spent four more years not learning how to market the stuff I can create. So I have a useless diploma, a useless degree, and work a job that doesn’t really require either.
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Plumbers and Electricians, Air Conditioning Techs……Essentially the straightforward service industry. Here’s the real problem as I see it on the ground. Quite a few people simply can’t afford the rates that these service guys charge. Mexican handymen are really growing. Across the pond it’s Polish handymen. All under the table. That’s the future.
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That’s just a tight supply of labor. Educate more plumbers etc. and the price will stabilize.
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Janet, I’m not sure that the collapse of vocational training was the conscious, intentional and manichean act you describe, I’m not saying it was o.k. to let it happen, just that it wasn’t done maliciously by cartoonish villains. Which leads me to also have a different take, on the President’s community college proposal; something I come at from the perspective of being an education reform advocate from the academic side of things. We agree, you and I that high school diplomas are worthless and largely also agree on the reasons why. As a result students going to college aren’t ready for the coursework at the university, thus five or six year bachelor degrees at least in the useful fields, for instance calculus and calculus based physics has begun to serve as a serious bottleneck for engineering and natural science studies, ideally those two subjects need to happen in high school (for potential scientists and engineers). The upshot here is that none of the solutions anyone is coming up with are politically palatable, those being: add more grades to mandatory education, eliminate chaff from the curriculum, or funel students into job promoting programs and curricula (basically what you suggested). Parents and students dislike the first option (but could potentially be convinced), teachers unions dominated by largely useless high school English teachers oppose the other two options because it hurts the humanites (English department, and to a lesser extant history/social studies), but also probably because elementary school teachers would require more extensive math education, and math would become a larger part of the elementary curriculum. I suspect that the free community college tuition idea is an attempt to sneak in the extra grades through a back door. Also, community colleges in America don’t operate under free market principles because they are part of the State run University systems, so your suggestion that they’d double their prices doesn’t work, because they can’t without government approval; additionally students don’t have $3800 saved up for school, they have a $1500-$2500 Pell grant from the feds, an approximately $1000 subsidy grant from the state in most states, and then loans for the rest.
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Does the proposal include removing Pell and state grants? If not, colleges are still likely to try and capture those dollars.
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Reblogged this on Ice-cream in Pakistan and commented:
“A return to vocational high schools will be strongly, desperately resisted by feminists, mark my words. Because at the very heart of that restoration is a very simple idea: men have worth. Vocational high schools treat all men (and the few women who are interested) as intelligent, ambitious, talented, driven, capable and valuable human beings not to be squandered to mistaken ideas about social justice. This isn’t about economic worth. That is merely a side effect. It begins with the idea that men have worth as human beings. Instilling that sense of worth by providing men with a real opportunity to discover their own worth and translate that into economic market value as they see fit is the result of treating men, especially low income and working class men as inherently valuable human beings.
The reverberations in the black community will be profound indeed. Find me a progressive or a feminist who claims that low income black men are intelligent, ambitious, talented, driven, capable and valuable human beings.
Want to find out just how true that is?
Bring back vocational high schools.”
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I don’t know the specifics of the proposal, I’m basing my comment on what you wrote and what I know about education reform and its politics. However the Community Colleges aren’t private or for profit institutions they can’t go after additional tuition dollars the way you’re concerned about, regardless of whether the proposal replaces Pell grants at the CC level, supplements them to a level that covers the rest of tuition or does something malicious and senseless, the money would only be available for educational purposes.
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JB ..
Nice write-up.
Back in my day (circa mid 1980’s) we had just started offering an Advance Diploma from 9th grade on. So by 1988 we graduated the first class of Adv Dip’s (said this way for humor).
We had trade schools. I had trade training from Dad and Uncles and Grand-Dads. So I opted for the Advanced Diploma.
All my buddies went to trade school. Drafting, electircal, carpentery, autobody, hvac, etc.
All had jobs after HS. I went to college for a STEM related degree. I joined the US Navy and later went on to fly at the Airlines. After 9-11 I was furloughed. I went back to work in the Nuclear Industry. The Navy had given me a huge leg up for such work. I am thankful for that training.
So, as you have mentioned, who trained me? Other qualified men. Who paid for this training? Tax-payers. What did we get in return? Highly functional men who pay taxes to support future generations of men (aka the doers/makers/builders/etc).
I keep touch with them and over the long haul they have done just as well and in some cases better than I have done with their career’s.
I like Mike Rowe’s (sp?) idea too. Let business pick up the tab. In some cases they already have .. bottom line let the market figure it out.
Nice post.
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Nope. Thing is, folks are going to hire who they can afford. For example, a Mexican who will unstop your sink for 60.00. A plumbing company will charge 145.00. Trades are nice, and are valuable. However, most plumbing and electrical repairs are handily done by handymen. Yeah, I know, it ain’t legal. But that’s what’s happening. Btw, they set a water heater for 125.00. Facts are facts. Try telling the homeowner different. You see, this is the future. Some will go the legal route. God bless them. Others, well, no. AC techs might be different. But what ever supplies you see sold at Home Depot will roll you which trades are going to have trouble. There’s a difference between what folks profess and what they actually do.
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I forgot to mention we still offered “home ec(onomy)” for the ladies. I wonder if the trade school disappeared at tye same time we did away with home ec?
I know that the trade school was shut-down due to .. errr so called due to .. the travel time / cost.
I don’t believe North Western Alabama has ever re-established a trade school since the early 90’s.
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For reference sake full time tuition (12-18 credit hours per semester) at my local CC’s are $3000-$4500 per year after state level subsidy grants are applied, fees run $500-$800 per year unless you have a lab which are each $300 per course and books run $1500-$1800 per year. So total price per year is $5000-$8300 (with two labs per semester). So at least where I live $3800 plus the Pell is actually necessary, and isn’t enough for anyone planning on doing science classes.
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That’s pretty significant. So many of those skills could be delivered through high schools.
Oh but that would require math and technical skills.
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Again, we agree.
Just to be clear do you understand that I’m not endorsing the plan just offering another explanation as to why they’re proposing it.
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I’m starting to think I live in an AWESOME city as far as educational options go (I’m in a big Midwestern U.S. city). As well as having a high school that provides training for some manual and technical careers — though it looks like the areas are just automotive, construction, certified nurse’s aid, and culinary arts training — our local community college also has an extensive list of trade programs offering certificates — the list is huge, but a few that stood out to me were coding specialist, HVAC Advanced, and major appliance technology.
The free community college option is wonderful for children from middle class families whose parents earn too much for the children to qualify for financial aid. As for low-income families like my own, our children already qualify for full financial aid — but I guess making the colleges free for everyone would make things easier for many low-income parents who might be overwhelmed with all the paperwork of applying for financial aid.
I will say that I’m tremendously glad that we listened to our older daughter’s desire to start school and enrolled her a year ago (when she was 13), because from what my husband has learned, it looks like the parents of homeschooled students can’t qualify for financial aid in my state. So even though our younger daughter is still homeschooling for now, we’re planning to send her to public high school, too, in a few years, because of all the educational opportunities it can open up for her.
At any rate, there are such huge differences in the U.S., depending on where you live, but it does look like low-income kids in my city (such as my own kids) have a wide range of vocational-technical options to choose from. About the free community college option (especially for ones like our local one that offers so many technical certificates) — this will also be wonderful for adults wanting to retrain. Because I believe the student financial aid (the kind that doesn’t have to be paid back) is only for kids fresh out of high school, so low-income adults who aren’t fresh out of high school are often stuck with having to take out loans that they can’t afford.
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While I can’t speak to most of what was said here and the notion you can go to a vocational trade school and then work a 6-figure job seems, to put it mildly, too good to be true, the idea that this sort of thing can improve a man’s self esteem really does ring true.
I never went to a trade school but, years ago, I decided to start doing whatever small repairs I could in my house. It turned out not to be that hard, at least to get started, and it really made a huge difference for me. I went from being a kid who was good at math but couldn’t actually do anything, to being able to do stuff.
I am not good enough at this to be paid for it, other than with the occasional invitation to lunch, but I do get people appreciating me and what I can do, in a way no-one had done before. Few things I’ve ever done compare to the satisfaction of designing and building something on your own, and then seeing it work.
So, even if most young men who go there don’t actually land high paying jobs, they will get the satisfaction of making things that work and help people, and avoid the drudgery of doing a job where they don’t matter, and can be replaced at any moment.
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Susan, With regards to your last point about retraining for adults, I don’t think that’s something I had considered. Here’s hoping that it is an intentional part of the program and not an oversight. So much of financial aide problems stem from the fact that it’s designed for kids right out of high school, and tends to penalize older people or those who marry or who work.
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Spaniard, I am curious would you happen to know at what grades/ages in school students in Spain are introduced to arithmetic (adding and subtracting) as well as algebra? In fact I would be curious to know about any other countries, I have several sources that tell me most countries take between two and four years to teach arithmetic and introduce the course Americans calls Algebra I or Elementary Algebra in the equivalent of 7th grade, but they can do so because they separate college bound and vocation bound students around that age. I want to know if this is true, please.
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Ok here we go:
1) Complains that reducing tuition prices will double tuition prices.
This one is very retarded. Any agreement from the gov to pay for tuition fees will come with an agreement not to raise tuition fees further. That you even suggest this means you are grasping for straws.
2) Complains that the President doesn’t understand the markets; Blames the government for the lack of trade schools.
If trade schools were what the market wanted we would have trade schools already. If trade schools were what the industry needed we would have trade schools already. I do not claim to know exactly what direction our education system needs to go. But it’s obvious that The Holy Market won’t take us there by itself.
And if you believe it will, then stop complaining about how the gov runs its education programs.
3) I’m sorry for being an esoterically inclined book-learner. Oh wait a minute. I’M NOT.
I won’t apologize for being a nerd, I’m not going to let some woman berate for having interests other than earning money for you milady.
The best I can offer to you is that modern history is full of technological breakthroughs made by people researching things seemingly without practical applications. For me tho the pursuit of knowledge is its own reward.
4) Blaming feminists for a lack of plumbers is just fucking silly.
Feminists are fucking awful. I get it. But you give them too much credit. For once there really isn’t a lack of plumbers. There is a lack of cash to pay plumbers with. And there’s an abundance of cheap labor that will do a lot of that work for you. And then there’s automation and out-sourcing.
An inevitable result of technological advances in transportation is that now you are competing with people who will do your work for cheap. Which brings everybody because now getting your plumbing fixed is cheaper but your plumber husband is out of work.
You are starting to share your standards of living with people from poorer countries. Welcome to globalization, this is the future. Don’t like it? Become a banker, an investor or VC. The system is called capitalism for a reason.
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Exactly! And in community colleges like the ones in my community, which do offer a TON of highly practical vocational technical programs, having it be free could make an enormous difference for people with a family who are working in an industry that suddenly slows down — like the couple that Obama shared about in his example. When her husband lost his construction job during the housing crisis, the wife ended up taking out a student loan to update her skills, which got her a better job — but by better, we’re probably not talking about huge increase in income; an upgrade from a waitressing job can seem great going in, but if you’re then spending the next several years paying off student loans, it can be very rough.
With kids, if one spouse can go back to school for free, they might be able to arrange the class schedule so that it’s opposite to the other parent’s working hours, so that one of them can always take care of the kids. Then there’s no childcare cost. If they can somehow scrape by on just one income for a couple of years, they might be able to avoid taking out any loans at all — and a couple of years is time enough for one spouse to get certified in a trade that might even enable him or her to support the family on one income.
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Well, I don’t know about six figures, but where I live in the Midwest, a family can live comfortably on considerably less than that. Plumbers and HVAC-certified people, as well as many other kinds of technically-skilled people, are always in demand, too.
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“I’m sorry for being an esoterically inclined book-learner. Oh wait a minute. I’M NOT.
I won’t apologize for being a nerd, I’m not going to let some woman berate for having interests other than earning money for you milady.”
I’m not ashamed of my bookish interests, either. I think the criticism of those of us who love reading and writing, and could happily do it all day, is somewhat of an over-correction due to the way that many academic types have always tended to look disdainfully down upon the more hands-on types (it’s not unlike those who strive to correct feminist man-bashing by engaging in woman-bashing).
Mechanical intelligence is no less amazing than literary intelligence, and vice-versa. I realize some will say that while every writer values a working toilet, not every plumber cares about literature or the arts — but I think the people who say that have a very narrow definition of literature and other mediums for creative expression. I believe everyone has an appreciation for the arts, but that appreciation may be expressed by them enjoying Jerry Seinfeld’s use of the English language, or something along those lines.
This kind of goes hand-in-hand with egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is like the next step beyond over-correctionism. Once we no longer feel a need to counterbalance the message about how awful men can be by emphasizing that women can be just as shitty, we can start accepting all men and women as just people with a capacity for both good and evil. And once we no longer feel a need to counterbalance the reverence for intellectualism with a message about how the practical people are the only ones who really have any value, we can start accepting all the different kinds of intelligence as equally important, too.
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This destruction was similar in Britain. Vocational education actually dismantled by both the left ” everybody should have a degree no matter how pointless” and right ” state education is shit “public” (actually private) schools are great” . Net result ; collapse of skilled trades followed by a. Poverty and family breakdown in working class boroughs and b. massive importation of eastern Europeans , men , from countries who still produce skilled men.
Without this influx of skilled Poles etc. the British economy would be scuppered. Only recently had concern about poor White and Black men started to filter through the Political Correctness.
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Damn Janet. Once again a brilliant post.
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Uh, fella, that’s kind of her whole point. People making individually beneficial decisions is what (in aggregate) sets market price. If a random Mexican guy can unstop your sink for $60, and do it right, then that’s pretty close to what the real price will be once the floodgates of supply open up. Plus, people will usually be willing to pay a premium for reputability. Not counting the fancy artisan brews, would you buy knockoff coors light from a guy selling it out of his van, who made it himself on the cheap, even if it ultimately tasted the same? No, cause of the risk involved.
One inevitable consequence of a trade school resurgence would be that the cost of such labor goes down, thus the currently seen wages as well, once the supply expands drastically. So that’s something to watch out for.
I love the idea of actually teaching useful skills in school, as opposed to the almost fetishistic waste of time school currently is. It’d be cool to see trade curricula developing for more modern skills, in addition to the bread and butter of electrician, plumber, etc. Most anything I could think of like that already exists, but to see it grow and mature would be nice. As always, let the market decide.
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I’m almost certain president knew very well most of what he was proposing was complete nonsense. If he actually wanted to do those things, he would have done them when he had the chance. It was entirely a set up so that when congress shoots down the proposals he can rewrite the narrative. If he had a friendly congress, there is no way he would have proposed something like mandatory sick leave. That’s a disaster, it’s just an indirect wage cut for everyone. He’s not that incompetent, he’s just that disingenuous.
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1) Federal subsidies for education generally do not stipulate that tuition stay the same, so you’re wrong on that front. Also, if the state did impose such price controls, it would be even worse, because universities wouldn’t be able or willing to expand to accomodate the massive influx in students. Effectively, you’d end up rationing education: it’d be cheap or free for some, and unavailable at any price for everyone else. Price controls don’t work. This is a basic economic fact Americans of the left would do well to learn.
2) You’re not making sense. The government mismanaging the education system (most expensive in the first world, an almost the worst results in the first world; you can’t argue that our education system is not mismanaged, nor can you argue it’s underfunded, considering the comparison with Europe). And the state trying to incentivize people into ‘higher education’ perhaps the majority of which is economically useless social science and humanities education, has dried up the supply of prospective students for trade schools. In some countries, like Germany, trade school-type education is still common, and works quite well. The US government’s peculiar attitude toward education has indeed interfered with the education market extensively, inhibiting its functionality.
3) So, money isn’t that important, that’s why the government so needs to give certain people more money? And why it’s bad not to? I don’t know what you being a nerd has to do with anything.
4) Globalization may be a factor, even the driving one, but not all goods (and especially services) are equally outsource. And the (state-caused) distortion of both education and labor markets have clearly done their share of damage. Economists have been warning for decades that not everyone should go to college; many drop out; many get poor grades that don’t help their employability; still many major in economically redundant fields, but refuse to work minimum wage jobs despite being trained for nothing better. By subsidizing their education or attempted education, we have diverted labor or potential labor out of the market for unwarranted reasons.
I argue that all degrees should be subsidized in direct proportion to how much those who earn them produce in the future; engineers and doctors should be much more subsidized than experts in English literature, as there is virtually no demand for the latter. If you want to study English lit, go ahead, but do so on your own dime, because it is a luxury, not a necessity, and the state should not fund luxury services. The state does not exist to pay people to edify themselves or pursue their personal interests, they are supposed to do those things with the money they earn doing providing a useful service in the market.
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As I understand it though, the dropout rates for community college students (and also college students not coming directly from high school) is quite high. Sometimes even over 50%. So it may seem pointless to invest in something that you know is more likely than not to come to naught. I think subsidies should come mainly in the form of loans that the government agrees to pay off if you graduate (and how much they pay off should depend on your GPA); and also how much you earn within 5 years of graduating; this would incentivize students to do well, to finish, and to pick fields for which there is high demand; incentives that currently barely exist.
A second issue I have with subsidized education is perhaps cold-hearted but true I think nonetheless: many of the people who aren’t going to college or community college shouldn’t be going to college in any case; they’re simply not smart enough or not disciplined enough for it, and subsidizing their education is waste of their time and taxpayer money. It may be unfortunate, but a good portion of kids are just not prepared for higher education, and the fault goes I think to both their parents and the education system. Subsidies won’t fix that problem, worse, they enable us to ignore it.
Before we should consider such mass-subsidizing of education, we should repair the broken systems that render such subsidies largely futile first, in my opinion. Otherwise much of it is just pouring water into a broken pipe.
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Here’s some truth..
http://www.fredoneverything.net/NewWomen.shtml
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“…the goddamn President of the most successful capitalist, free market economy in history…”
Obama is now the Chancellor of Germany? Who knew.
It’s not 1950, JB. It’s not even the Clinton Presidency. We’re not Number One.
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I wrote the same thing on my own blog. But I notice no one mentions the hidden cost of college. The debt is nothing compared to the loss of an early ten years of compound interest.
https://anunusualman.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/leveraging-the-fifth-decade-how-to-get-rich-and-fat-simply-by-working-at-starbucks/
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I definitely agree with the subsidy being based on whether they graduate and keep up decent grades.
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So… we need men to do the grunt work while women go on to advanced degrees in universities? That’s an excellent plan for a two-tiered society where men get screwed over and treated as second-cla… oh, wait. You’re already familiar with that. So why do you want to make it worse by sneering at higher education instead of improving it?
You’re off base with this one, JB. Men’s issues have nothing to do with the ‘virtues’ of a free market or the ‘evil conspiracy’ of higher education. Hating government is not the same as advocating for men.
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Norway still has vocational schools, but we have some issues though.
Firstly these schools relied on apprenticeships, which are becoming rather scarce.
Secondly some 20 years ago they decided to make the vocational schools more like “normal” schools, and introduced a lot of the standard curriculum like math and Norwegian classes… the math is a of a rather higher level than they need to be.
Many people who are already sick of school don’t want to do more of the same.
But all in all, yeah I don’t see why someone who don’t want to go into higher learning should have to do 3-4 years of meaningless school until they can learn what they want to learn.
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I don’t think feminists oppose the idea that Men have worth on an intellectual level. I think some of them hear someone say “Men have worth.” And read into it: “Men have MORE worth than women.” and get all flustered about that. I also doubt the vocational attack was purposely made to crush men, I think progressives and feminists honestly believe that all people have the same potential and it’s evil racism or sexism that prevents the realization of that potential. If a girl doesn’t do as well in math it’s not because she doesn’t like it, or because girls on avg have different (more verbal) strengths than boys, it’s because some evil patriarchal men made her feel bad about math. Much of marxist/feminist/progessive time is spent searching for the motives and means of that oppression that is assumed to be there all because they start with the belief that we are all exactly the same. I maintain that this belief is not rational either, it is entirely felt, like a reigious experience. They _know_ it to be true. You cannot argue it with logic or facts, all you’ll get is scorn and shaming.
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I think the issue here is that there is a subset of men (and women) who don’t go into higher education.
But it’s more detrimental for men. Women have the option of “marrying up”, and if that fails get knocked up and child support.
What option does men have?
Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor. We need to not only educate skilled tradesmen, but also give them an ounce of status.
The opposite is that many of these men fall out of society entirely.
And I personally don’t think trade work should be viewed as “grunt work”, electricians, carpenters, plumbers all have a facet of “physical labor”, but it’s also highly technical work. I respect most people in these fields, as it’s all honorable jobs.
It’s honestly the feminist thinking hat has indoctrinated us to view trad jobs as “second class”. Sure they don’t make as much as the doctor, but again neither does the nurse. Not everyone can have the high paying jobs, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need the other jobs.
BUT! That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for better equality in early school years, where a lot of boys probably have their learning experience ruined by a flawed system. Help them early, and we might see more boys at Universities too… but the universities must be inviting and not hostile towards them.
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You clearly have no idea what a fully qualified HVAC makes. Over $100K easily.
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I think J.B. was specially focusing on young men growing up in poverty, especially young black men. I just found a really good article at Slate magazine (link below) that talks about some of the obstacles encountered by young people in poor communities (my own family income is below the poverty line so I’m not talking about “them”). While it’s important to revamp educational systems so that the lack of college readiness isn’t created by the schools, it’s also important to help any young people who are so lacking in academic skills that there’s no realistic way to make them “college material” in a mere couple of years. Providing realistic options like trade schools can help them take a real step forward in their lives, so that their own children may have a better chance at even wider options (or they themselves, after their confidence has been built up by a successful career, may later actually be able to pursue advanced degrees if they so choose.
And I don’t honestly believe that all schools in poor communities are bad. We live in the inner city. We bought a house here several years ago because we were homeschoolers who had no intention of ever enrolling our kids in public school. When our older daughter made it clear that she needed the public school experience, and we enrolled her in 8th grade a year ago, in a school that was at that time unaccredited, as was the whole district (this school has since become accredited and the district as a whole is now provisionally-accredited and working towards full accreditation), I’ll admit that we were rather anxious.
But for her, it’s been an amazing experience in more ways than one. She has thrived in this environment where she has daily interactions with a wide range of different kinds of people, and she also loves getting graded and seeing how she measures up compared to other kids her age (this whole competitive thing was something I’d previously seen as very bad, but I’m starting to understand that it’s a real need for her), and participating in all the extracurricular theatre opportunities that she now has access to. She has some excellent teachers who know and are enthused about their subjects, and she often comes home talking about stuff she’s learning about history, physics, English, theatre, and so on.
The main thing she finds discouraging is that a good number of the kids are very disruptive — and I don’t mean as in zoning out or quietly passing notes to their friends (which my daughter has admitted that she does sometimes) — I mean as in loudly shouting to one another across the room while a teacher is talking. There seems to be an attitude, on the part of some parents, that the schools just need to hire teachers who know how to handle their inner-city kids, which I don’t get, because I want my kids to be able to relate respectfully with all kinds of people, and it seems rather disrespectful of your own kids to assume that they can only function In an environment where those in charge know how to handle inner-city kids.
But for the kids who’ve gotten so wrapped up In the shouting across the room-thing that they’ve missed out on all the really great teaching that my daughter and some of the others are availing themselves of, and who are now about to graduate in a few years — it’s not completely their fault and they still deserve a chance to get some more realistic training that can help them make a better life for themselves and their kids.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/03/college_isn_t_for_everyone_let_s_stop_pretending_it_is.html
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“Antifeminism” is a code word for “getting men back to the plantation”. The good old days.
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Certainly not, but our unemployment rate is below 6%, compared to the EU’s 10%. I’d keep that in mind before using Europe as a role model. Paul Krugman’s predictions, once again, were wrong, Europe’s social insurance system didn’t weaken the impact of the recession in the least.
If the US went the Europe route, we’d likely end up more like Spain or Greece than Germany (the Germans, remember, have a higher savings rate and are a creditor country, explaining much of their success; contrast this with current US administration’s agenda to disincentive saving and expand spending as much as congress will let it get away with.
And, much as I disdain nationalism (I do not consider myself a patriot and am not ‘proud to be an American’), one has to give the US more credit; comparing us with Europe isn’t exactly fair: we’ve been assimilating tens of millions of people from the third world every decade for over a century. Which is great, keeps prices low, but it also exacerbates the numerical appearance of income inequality.
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I think you have it backwards: we need to stop taking money away from working men to pay for women to get useless degrees, or give them gratuitous government jobs they think their entitled to because they have degrees.. Let middle class women get all the gender studies degrees they want and work as Wal-mart greeters while getting out-earned by working class men who didn’t go to college.
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How much of the difference in unemployment rate is a result of how things are being counted? Is it possible, that they have higher unemployment because they’re counting all of their unemployed and we are not? I seem to recall that the U.S. rate was high for a long time because we kept extending benefits, and it reduced very quickly after we stopped. How many of the people are no longer receiving benefits but are still unemployed? I seem to recall Labor Participation Rate is only just recently back to the same level as pre-recession and has been on a decades long decline, job growth has been pretty anemic.
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I think I’m coming to hate averages as measures. No one is completely average at everything and most of us aren’t average at anything. I think the problem feminists have vis-a-vis statistics about differences between people, isn’t that they fall on different gaussian curves or perhaps different distributions altogether such as gaussian vs. uniform, it’s that we don’t all fall on an invariant curve, that we aren’t all the same. Even if women and men (or even two groups one wishes to compare) are the same on average at something it doesn’t mean a given individual on either side of the comparison is good, competent or even “average” at what ever is being compared.
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How one counts employment does of course matter, and I personally hate ‘unemployment’, but everyone uses it. I prefer ‘Employed to Population ratio.’
I would like to assume that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was sensible enough to use the same metric for both Europe and the US.
You are certainly right if what you are saying is that many of Europe’s unemployed are still being paid. But I wouldn’t consider that evidence of European economic success. State spending, Keynesians say, is supposed to activate idle resources and labor, not render active resources and labor idle.
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For an alleged “book-learner” you haven’t learned very much.
1: You’re assuming facts not in evidence. Nowhere is it written that an agreement from the .gov to pay for tuition will come automatically with an insistence that colleges not raise their costs. It’s you who is grasping for straws!
2: The President can be wholly ignorant of the markets without that fact having any impact on what the government does regarding trade schools. You’re ignoring facts that don’t suit your narrative.
Were the market truly free, trade schools would be where the market/people wanted them. However, the market is constantly hampered by thousands of government regulations and little emperors dead set against anything that might upset their apple carts. This is true for any type of market, not just the education market.
3: The fact that you’re a self-professed nerd is irrelevant. While you might really enjoy books and be able to translate that book-learning into a career that pays you well, there are millions of people that are the exact opposite. Some people enjoy getting their hands dirty and building things. Some people learn best by doing, and are just naturally inclined to be more hands-on than you are. This isn’t an attack on you, merely an illustration that you’re not the standard by which all others are modeled.
That technological breakthroughs have been made is, again, entirely irrelevant. Those breakthroughs wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the construction and maintenance people that keep the laboratories running.
4: Again with the logical fallacies. Feminism is very much responsible for “guiding” the direction that our education system has gone in. This is evident in the writings of the grand matriarchs of the Feminist movement. It is also evident in the results we’re seeing today. It’s common knowledge that the majority of teachers. K-12, are women, and they self-identify as feminists. How do you think they are going to vote?
You’re fixated on “plumbers” as though that is the only vocation outside of the college educated. Tradesmen includes a wide assortment of skills that can’t be outsourced or cheapened by illegal immigrants willing to work for pennies. And technological advancement can’t fix a burst water line. Welders, plumbers, roofers, carpenters, woodworkers, machinists, tool and die makers, automation technicians, blacksmiths, whitesmiths, masons, boilermakers, landscapers, grounds maintenance, drivers, the list is almost endless. Each one of those jobs is a learned skill that takes years to master, and that this nation is sorely dependent upon.
And your day-to-day life is tied hand-in-glove with the work that they do.
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It’s no mystery why the cost of a basic education doubled at the same time the number of employees in the school system doubled. From 1970 to now, women have made huge inroads into the education system, but student enrollment and test scores have remained relatively flat. How is it that possible? It takes twice the money and twice the employees to get the same results? Sounds like feminism to me.
And compare that to the incarceration rate that has also more than doubled in the same time. Well, compare that to the MALE incarceration rate. Female incarceration has remained flatlined just like the test scores.
And, yes, I have the graphs to prove it.
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There’s a certain irony to the demise of trade schools. When I was young man, many of my peers and myself did a trade, earned a pittance as an apprentice, but soldiered on until completing the trade and then finally earning a decent wage. However, although wages were better than for those who were unskilled, there used to be a huge gap between the earnings of a trades person and the earnings of a university trained professional.
Four decades later, and the almost total destruction of the apprenticeship schemes and trade schools has reduced the number of trades people to the same level as that of 40 years ago, while population and demand for their services has nearly tripled.
In the meantime, the thrust to put more and more people into university has led to a massive surplus of ‘professionals’ for whom the majority of the population have no need of their services.
The result being, that a good electrician or plumber now earns more than your average ‘professional’ because of the simple market forces of supply versus demand.
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Surveyors aren’t trade jobs anymore since the advent of the Professional Land Surveyor’s license. Surveyors are trained in civil engineering or engineering technology departments in colleges and universities.
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Good stuff. We should be taking a hard look at the German model in this regard. As for instructors, don’t forget all our former military men in addition to career tradesmen. Military guys often have similar skill sets and NCOs have experience as instructors.
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It’s worth noting that feminist opposition to trade schools reflects feminism’s resistance to educational pathways outside the university gulag. Universities are the epicenter of feminism, and the funnel through with its subsidies flow. The gulag provides them with tenured professorships, administrative careers, fat paychecks, gold-plated pensions, platforms, access to decision-makers, book deals, speaking engagements, entry into the crony-capitalist corporate world, and a role in the extended Marxist/statist matrix. The gulag functions as an indoctrination machine for young women, and a meatgrinder for young men.
All that is put at risk, in multiple ways, if men begin bypassing universities. The absence of men also alerts young women to how the educational system has made itself hostile and dangerous for men, and invites them to wonder where all the men went. That is very bad for feminism’s long-term outlook. The first step is to neutralize alternative educational pathways for men, in an effort to keep them on the university plantation.
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Vocational high schools were smothered to drive those teen men into another profession: soldiering. Technical schools went out of vogue the day after the U.S. military draft ended.
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Yikes! I never made that connection before. We keep hearing about how a high school education used to be sufficient preparation for a decent career, and it’s not anymore — but most of us never connect the dots and realize that when high schools offered technical and vocational training, that meant that young men without the financial backing and/or interests or aptitude for college, had another secure route to success besides the military.
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“They pedalled this malevolence to the masses by framing it as “social justice” – It’s not fair that lower income men should graduate as electricians and plumbers while upper income men go on to be doctors and lawyers! Everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer!”
Long ago, General Motors had a program, which included a design contest, intended to interest young men into going into the auto industry. Writer Ruth Oldenziel described this program’s fate:
“By the sixties male teenagers no longer projected their future years into corporations, as canvassing corporate representatives were shocked to find out. Someone close to the organization remembers that “in the late sixties, [GM’s] presentations at inner-city high schools were not that well received.” He thought that “often the disillusioned, turned-off young of that era felt little motivation to exercise the kind of self-discipline required for the creativity and craftsmanship it took to win even a college scholarship” and concluded, “I hate to say it, but I think a few of our Field Representatives felt fortunate to escape from some of those school assemblies in one piece–it got that bad.””
See my post Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11680.html
David Foster
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The unemployment rate in the US is not below 6%. Comparing the US to other nations doesn’t work because there is no other nation even close to us in numbers, history, GDP, etc.
“Assimilating tens of millions” does not keep prices low. It actually drives up prices because those millions require/use a lot of social programs and rarely become major contributors to their communities. The supposition that they provide cheap labor is assuming facts not in evidence. A union-worker in NYC earns what he earns regardless of where he came from. Illegals from south of the border will demand every last penny they can get even in non-union jobs. If the competition for the jobs is high, the wages will be relatively low. But if the competition isn’t high, the reverse is true. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the work.
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Illegal immigrants make tremendous contributions to our society! They have no access to government assistance programs like food stamps, or unemployment insurance if they lose their jobs. AND they pay taxes, and pour a ton of money into social security benefits for Americans — benefits that they themselves will never be able to draw when they are old.
And one thing I’d like to say to any of my fellow descendants of European immigrants — for those of you who’d like to reduce the influx of economic immigration now, the best way to achieve your objective is to fight like crazy to abolish NAFTA and also fight for the legalization of recreational drugs like marijuana and cocaine.
If our country would quit dumping cheaply-priced mass produced grain and other products into Latin American countries, subsistence farmers would be able to return to their land and have a chance of eking a livelihood from it again, and craftspeople would have a chance, too. If recreational drug production were legal and overseen by the government, organized crime rings would become infinitely less powerful and maybe they’d eventually stop terrorizing Latin American people and making them feel so unsafe in their home communities.
The best way to reduce immigration is to stop participating in activities that make undeveloped countries so unlivable for the majority of the people there. Most of them would never choose to live separately from their loved ones if they had a real choice.
http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/high-school/top-10-myths-about-immigration
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There are plenty of sectors of the economy that the unions haven’t monopolized, in fact most of the service sector. And competition for job is high by definition when there’s surplus labor. To say there is no competition for the low wage jobs many immigrants do is ludicrous. The reason why few Americans are competing for those jobs is because few Americans are willing to work for that little; if it weren’t for the immigrants, Americans would be doing those jobs but for two or three times the wage, leading to much higher prices for everyone.
You’re right though that there are factors which inhibit competition in the labor market. For example, when labor unions use the state to require or incentivize use of union labor, drive up union wages far above the market wage, or bully and marginalize non-union workers, they throw a wrench into the labor market drive up prices and drive honest workers out of their industries into unemployment for the benefit of the already usually over-paid union workers.
And ‘social’ spending on immigrants doesn’t drive up prices, it drives up taxes. This is why immigrants should be naturalized, employed, taxed, requisitioned for jury duty etc. as efficiently as possible. I would argue any immigrant who doesn’t have a criminal record, possesses useful education or training or can find someone in the US who is willing to employ them may as well get automatic citizenship, perhaps provided they agree to attend some English classes. Hell, if an immigrant has a medical, nursing or engineering degree, or the competence and will to obtain one, we should pay them to come here. What better way to cut healthcare costs: if you can get training and a job in nursing, medicine, or a health-related field, you get citizenship.
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“Enter the “social progressives” in the 1960’s, especially John Dewey,…”
Dewey died in 1952.
I like you, judgy, but you’re easily at your worst when you try to cobble together histories of things you’re not familiar with. In addition, treating community college tuition as though it was the plain price of a market commodity makes no sense and makes for weak analysis.
–I’ve noticed that several of my recent comments have “your comment is awaiting moderation” appended to them. Am I under a cloud?
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No. WordPress will hold some comments and not others. No idea why. You’re an approved commenter.
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And Dewey’s legacy lived long past him 😛
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In my mind the problem being that to use averages as measures you have to be able to understand exactly what you said: that no one is exactly average, that the purpose of knowing the mean or the median is to get a feel for the nature of the population as a whole, rather than the performance of any given individual. I don’t think the ability to grasp that group A might have a higher average score on a math test, but group B with a lower average can still have someone with a higher score than any individual in group A (and every other possible permutation) is very common. Human intuition (i.e. common sense) can be very useful in some ways, in others not so much.
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The left and feminism are the same thing. When you realize that you’ll see why the president says the things he says.
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“Prior to 1984, it was possible for a student to graduate from high school fully prepared to enter into an apprentice trade”
Apprenticeship. Older men interacting with younger men. Sharing life experiences, acting as role models.
This cannot be allowed.
The heart of the feminist program is not attacking the trades – that’s incidental. The heart of it is breaking the generational bonds between men. Because men are the wardens and propagators of culture, specifically the culture that extends beyond face-to-face social bonds. Civilisation.
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Did you see what a previous poster here said about the reduction in high school vocational programs coinciding with the elimination of the draft? In addition to the people who staff colleges and universities (who I agree are largely feminist), I think those who profiteer from wars also have a strong motivation for seeing to it that large numbers of disadvantaged youth will view military service as the only viable step-up out of poverty.
But I’m very excited about what’s now happening in some regions of the U.S. Students in some vocational/technical programs are getting much more versatile educations than traditional students, because they are graduating ready to start a career AND AT THE SAME TIME they are graduating with a solid foundation in the core academic subjects, so that, should they ever want or need to attend college, they’ll be every bit as well-prepared as a traditional student.
For example, one girl is studying cosmetology in high school so that she’ll be able to work flexible hours while pursuing a pharmaceutical sciences degree in college (2nd link below). I would imagine that some people in financial lending institutions might dislike the idea of more high school graduates being in a position to finance their own university educations (should they ever decide to go that route), and not needing to take out student loans.
Some people who’ve never even finished college are currently having to spend years just paying on the interest that’s accumulated since their first semester or first year of college — after dropping out of college, many kids who are unaccustomed to financial responsibility tend to forget about the loans they took out or to be eager to defer them for a few years, and are hit very hard some years later when the collection agents track them down and they owe many times the original amount. Some people are making a shitload of money off of these naïve young people.
http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/the-troubled-history-of-vocational-education/
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/05/02/the-return-of-vocational-high-schools-more-options-or-the-kiss-of-death
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Personally, I think that web application development and similar strands of computing work should be treated as a trade. You go on-site, you build (or bodge up a fix) to something, you install it. That’s a trade. Frameworks are in a state that you simply don’t need the knowledge of theoretical CS that you get in uni. Developing new crypto algorithms: yes; adding a button to a web-page: no.
Move HTML/CSS/Javascript into trade school.
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