I'd like to know, how did your apprentice ship look like? With a story that goes "Expelled from HS, went to trade, best decision ever" you sound like an outlier

I'd like to know, how did your apprentice ship look like? With a story that goes "Expelled from HS, went to trade, best decision ever" you sound like an outlier to me. Because in my country, vocational schools are mostly terrible. First, most employers expect you at least have a state issued "maturity diploma" that signifies that you have completed some sort of secondary education. When you finish in many of our vocational schools, you get just a vocational certificate, that most people view as a lesser to maturity diploma. The worse thing is, that in our underfunded school system, with severe lack of good teachers, vocational schools are at the bottom of the pit. So it is highly probable, that you end up with teacher, ho doesn't know how to teach, doesn't know his trade all that well, and even if he knows, he is so under-paid he doesn't care. And you wouldn't have proper tools anyway. Then there were few incidents where attempts to introduce already working businesses to the schooling system, to move closer to real apprentice-ships resulted in a weird system where business would take you into training for last year to work for them, but after a year they lay you off, because they know they will have steady supply of junior work-force and don't really care to have more senior workers. That is not to say there are no good vocational schools. If you are into electrical engineering, you have lots of options where you would leave with maturity diploma as well as a certificate that lets you freelance repairing electrical equipment. And I know several chef schools that are decent, but getting enrolled can be even harder than getting to top tear high-school. Finally, our politicians seem to swinging between two extreme positions, either (almost) everybody should end up on a university, and it doesn't really matter what they learn there, or almost nobody should even get to high-school unless they pass a rigorous, state-crafted exam and most people should do just a vocational training. These were mostly anecdotes from Czech Republic, if anybody has counter-examples, feel free to post them :-)