Woeful education system full of misguided thinking

If there’s anybody out there who can say with confidence that our society at large is not comprehensively screwed up, please rise and state your case. Right, I see nobody standing. What a surprise.

The most obvious example has to be our healthcare system, wildly over-burdened and only barely functioning, beaten down by the pandemic that served to expose its many flaws – all of which we knew about but failed to address before Covid roared onto the scene. We were too cheap, too complacent, and collectively too stupid to see the inevitable future.

I could write hundreds of words on that one but I think there’s a bigger issue, a bigger failure, and it’s one that affects trucking in serious ways. It’s more subtle, older than the healthcare mess, and probably harder to fix.

I’m speaking of education and our apparent inability to understand its value and its absolutely crucial role in forming a future that will allow our kids to thrive. I’m not just talking about our system of schools and colleges and universities but also, and more importantly, the grossly flawed attitudes of some parents who just don’t promote learning or see the value in it. Anti-intellectualism is rampant in this country, and elsewhere too. You can blame that for the mess that our U.S. neighbours have created for themselves. The same with Great Britain.

Misguided thinking

Our woeful education system is chock full of misguided thinking and policy decisions that mean we don’t point our kids in the right directions and don’t prepare them well at all for the real world. Only now, for instance, are a few high schools teaching kids how to deal with the financial side of their lives. Man, could I have used some instruction on that front a bunch of decades ago. If I had understood compound interest as a teenager, my bank account would be fuller now.

Another problem, and this is where trucking comes in: our primary and high school curricula are based on the presumption, backed up by what so many parents want, that every child will at least aim for a university degree. Unfortunately, academic standards have fallen so badly in the last few decades that more kids get there who shouldn’t. And do so with unrealistic expectations. They may eventually graduate but often with useless degrees that make them unable to find anything but work as Starbucks baristas. High schools didn’t prepare them well in the first place – because nobody can fail these days – and universities operate on basically the same principle. They’re all so hungry for grant money that they can’t afford to lose students just because they couldn’t cut it academically.

It’s not any different in community colleges, but a diploma from such a school represents failure in a lot of parental eyes. And heaven forbid the young’un wants to join a trade. Dirty hands? No thanks.

Bigger paycheques

But hey, how about a bigger paycheque?

The average plumber or machinist earns more than your average teacher or journalist, maybe a lot more, and probably works fewer hours in the process.

And then there’s the diesel mechanic. Want a solid job after you finish your apprenticeship? A transportable job. Want to be wanted? There’s your ticket. But how many parents and their kids see that? How many educators see that? Way too few is the answer.

The problem was highlighted in the latest State of Science Index by 3M Canada. It found that 96% of Canadians agree that the country’s workforce needs more skilled trades workers; 91% trust vocational/trade schools to give them the education needed to have a successful career; and 81% believe they would earn as much money in a skilled trade as they would in a career that requires a degree from a traditional four-year university/college.

But get this — while we may think highly of skilled trades and the people who work in them, 76% of us would never pursue such a career, the study says. “OK for some, but not for my kid.”

Government investments

Thankfully, some governments are waking up, albeit a little late in the game. Ontario, for example, is investing an additional $90 million over three years to promote the skilled trades to young folks. It’s in response to the Apprenticeship Youth Advisors report, released on Nov. 24, which made a bunch of recommendations to help solve the shortage of skilled workers. Our economy will have a tough time growing if we don’t do this.

I just wrote that the province’s response is “a little late” but it’s actually radically late.

I’m reminded of a story I wrote during my brief stint on Plant Management and Engineering magazine in the late 1970s that showed the prejudice against the ‘dirty’ trades. The owner of a machine shop called me and complained about his difficulty in finding skilled machinists. He had brought a couple over from eastern Europe but wanted to develop his own, so he contacted his local high school and offered to supply both machines and machinists to launch a high school course that would lead to an apprenticeship. The school had only to supply the space. Members of the school board came to tour his shop and quickly turned him down – because the shop was, naturally, noisy and dirty and thus unfit for their delicate students. Talk about short-sighted.

Trucking is a victim of these attitudes, this wholesale lack of imagination. We offer all manner of jobs – in the office, the shop, and at the wheel – that are worth having, worth doing. Jobs that don’t necessarily demand a university degree or a college diploma. Young people and their parental units just have to drop the blinders and see the light.