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Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going

Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades? I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students. The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.

WillAdams 1y ago
That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class". Cut my teeth on texts such as: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square and have bought (and given away) more copies of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-math https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge... than I'd care to count. Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
- deleted 1y ago
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mmooss 1y ago
> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace: They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for? How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits. They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must. And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.
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- 1y ago
mindslight 1y ago
> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.
- techpineapple 1y ago
  I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring. But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
  - mindslight 1y ago
    "math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself. And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to. (electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)
kmeisthax 1y ago
There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids. The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges. Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system. There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing. [0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
- techpineapple 1y ago
  The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
- repeekad 1y ago
  For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time. On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
  - whatshisface 1y ago
TMWNN 1y ago
> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
nradov 1y ago
It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
intermerda 1y ago
The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.

WillAdams 1y ago

That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class". Cut my teeth on texts such as: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square and have bought (and given away) more copies of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-math https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-... and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge... than I'd care to count. Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mmooss 1y ago

> There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades The conservative / GOP tactics are usually the same, and everyone else has, at conservative urging, disarmed themselves - they've abandoned postmodern understanding of communication, which the conservatives strategically embrace: They reframe issues: College is reframed - it was that knowledge was power, the key to life, citzenship, work, and sharpening your mind, your critical thinking, with the best thinkers and ideas in history was the most powerful tool. Now college is reframed as a training in employment skills for corporations. Life was about dreams and opportunity, fulfilling your potential and your dreams; now it's about making enough to survive. They refame America: It was the land of opportunity, where by working hard anyone had the opportunity to accomplish anything, not a class-based oppressive system like Europe and elsewhere; now you stay in your socioeconomic lane, take any job you can get, and (again) survive - what does a poor kid need college for? How you frame issues can determine the outcome of the discussion. 'Should we murder unborn babies?', 'Should we let undocumented criminals into the country?' - obviously, the answer is in how the question is framed (and often the framing is much more subtle than these easy examples). That doesn't mean there aren't merits to both sides but framing is a way to prevent discussion of the merits. They also demonize: Everything must include a criticism of 'liberals'. Almost as a display of bona fides, you'll see that commentary must always include an attack on liberals, even if it's a critique of something the GOP/conservatives is doing. Similarly they blame 'liberals' for every problem, no matter how absurd. They blame liberals for immigration, health care, lack of green energy, etc. etc. If you read the transcripts of the leaked Signal chats, you'll see their agreed-upon talking points included, without discussion, 'blame Biden'. Biden isn't even in office and will never run again, but that's a must. And why wouldn't they do these things? They work and nobody puts up any resistance; nobody even tries to understand their tactics or why they work and dominate the public debate. The Democrats play helpless - not a winning strategy and IMHO the reason they lose; who votes for helpless? And many liberals now embrace victimhood -- helplessness + persecution = a lack of personal responsibility for anything -- another winning strategy.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1y ago

mindslight 1y ago

> One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades I've got to wonder if a deeper dynamic is that you now have to be relatively "smart" to go into the trades because perhaps the teaching/curricula is lacking, making it so that more base general intelligence / self starting on abstract concepts is required to actually learn in the first place. Trade classes should be an opportunity for people who missed the verbal-communication-of-abstract-topics meta-intelligence to develop their intelligence focused around a narrower topic that they taking a liking to. But if the teacher is really uninspired, and the curriculum shies away from actually creating larger cool things or playing with different techniques, (or becomes about following the manual for procedures for poorly-documented poorly-written throwaway proprietary software) I can see it coming off as yet another "when are we going to need this" high school class.

techpineapple 1y ago
I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring. But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
- mindslight 1y ago
  "math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class" seems like a reaction from within the model of the prevailing philosophy - more abstraction-first book learning. Whereas addressing a different learning style would be more like: here are the physical skills you need to be an electrician, here are more classes working your way up to build larger and larger things, and oh by the way now that you've developed the skills of building things while taking direction from someone telling you how to build it, let's try to teach you how to figure out how to build it yourself. And I'm just wondering if the safety-and-HR-uber-alles dynamic has stamped out a lot a of that physical-skills-first in favor of like, dry lessons trying to tell people all about wiring before they actually get to play with wires. Thus making it so the same people who succeed here are the traditionally "smart" ones that can take abstract knowledge and store it for later, before having something tangible to apply it to. (electrician might not be the best example for this because the differences between good/unsafe/unpowered wiring are still pretty abstract, but hopefully you can see the point regardless)

kmeisthax 1y ago

There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids. The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges. Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system. There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing. [0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever

techpineapple 1y ago
The thing that gets to me, and everyone is overly idealistic about a lot of things(learn to code!) but I really wish that that things were as simple as conservative culture warriors laid them out to be. It would be great if there was this “one neat trick!” To getting a 70k a year job right out of high school, optimized for people less academically inclined.
repeekad 1y ago
For what it’s worth, my intro to psychology gen ed professor told us to spell “humyn” with a y to “remove woman being dependent on man” and let us skip the final if we recorded ourselves protesting the controversial state house bill at the time. On net I agree with what you’re saying, but know that the culture war isn’t total bs one sided, and my unremarkable school had plenty of bad examples like this. Evergreen university in 2017 barring white people from attending class for a day was particularly embarrassing.
- whatshisface 1y ago

TMWNN 1y ago

> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools. This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."

nradov 1y ago

It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.

intermerda 1y ago

The same politicians who push trades on America and bash colleges won't send their kids to trade schools but send them to Ivy League Universities instead. I wonder why that is.