Propaganda depends on education and we're getting more and more of that, but we might question the value of it.
And we need to question how early it should start. In 1932 novelist Aldous Huxley set out to portray the most dismally mechanistic and anti-human society that his fertile imagination could conceive. In Brave New World babies were "hatched" in government hatcheries, rather than born, and they were raised in state nurseries rather than by mothers.[1] We don't have government hatcheries yet but we do have day care, and there is pressure for government support and therefore government control of day care centers.
This is not a new idea. Mothers have always needed help with their children but in the extended family of the pre-industrial era they had it in their own homes. Women worked at home most of the time and when they had to go out the older children looked after younger children under the supervision of grandparents and great-grandparents. Siblings and grandparents both loved the children they cared for and young children never had to leave their homes.
Modern day care is more like the state nurseries that Huxley imagined, in which children were programmed to fill a preordained role in society. In Huxley's book some children were deprived of essential nutrition in order to reduce their intelligence and suit them for menial jobs and -- as we will see -- our system of day care and public education achieves the same end.
No institution can meet the needs of human babies, because human babies need individual care. Some animals bear their young in litters of up to a dozen at a time but human children are born one or two at a time. Human mothers are not equipped to nurse more than two babies at once and, whether we assume that this is a result of evolution or because we believe in planning by mother nature or by God, we know that human babies are not born to be raised in litters.
One professional who looked at day care and found it wanting is Dr. Burton White, a psychologist who has taught at Harvard, Brandeis and Tufts Universities. He was the founder of the Harvard Preschool Project and its director for the thirteen years it operated, the first director of the Brookline Early Education Project and Senior Consultant to Missouri's New Parents as Teachers project.
He would be an icon of the day care industry, except that he condemns day care. In a printed article he says: "I would not think of putting any child of my own into any substitute care program on a full-time basis especially a center-based program."[2]
On his internet site about the problems of day care Dr. White says:
"The people that I know who have studied the development of children over the years number in the hundreds because I've been around for a long time. I don't know two of them that applaud the notion of a transfer of the prime responsibility of child rearing over to any substitute. Most of the people I know do not like it. Very few of the people I know are willing to speak out in public the way I do. There's only two, there's Selma Fraiberg, and myself."[3]
If psychologists are reluctant to criticize day care that may be because many of them make their living from institutions that sponsor day care, and because they need the good will of the corporate culture.
In fact the effects of day care have been studied and the results of the studies have been published, but they are ignored by people who have a vested interest in day care.
Psychological experiments and studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s found that babies are not happy when they are abandoned by their mothers. To solve this problem one American 'expert' who supports day care says that children will have less negative reactions to day care if they begin when they are about three months old, before they learn to recognize their mothers. If they don't know their mothers they won't know they have been abandoned. If they have never been accepted, they can never be rejected.[4]
Psychologist Selma Fraiberg says that babies who do not get attached to their mothers develop the condition she describes as "the disease of non-attachment" which prevents them from forming normal human bonds. With no experience of human ties, she says, these people may have no conscience and are often unable to observe or criticize their own behavior.[5]
And they may grow up aggressive and potentially violent. A study of five to eight year olds who had spent most of their first years at a very good day care center at the University of North Carolina found that they were more likely to hit, kick, threaten and argue than children raised by their mothers. Other studies have found that day care children are considerably less responsive to, and more aggressive to, adults than are children raised at home.[6]
There is no question that modern children are more aggressive than the children of earlier generations. As I write this, today's news reports the murder conviction of a girl who was 15 years old when she was part of a gang that beat up a classmate. When the battered girl tried to go home the murderess and a teen-aged boy followed her, pushed her into a creek and held her under until she drowned.[7]
Also in the news is the impending release of Karla Homolka, the sweet young lady who helped her boy friend and later husband to rape and murder her own sister and to abduct, torture, rape and kill at least two other teen-aged girls.[8]
In this same month 13-year old Nina Courtepatte was beaten to death by a five 'friends,' including a 19-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, on the Edmonton Springs Golf Course.[9]
Another teen-aged girl helped torture, rape and murder 16-year-old Robbie McLennan in a park near Orangeville, Ontario, in April of 2002. The girl and two boys -- one 16 and one 19 -- burned him with cigarettes, raped him and shoved sticks of wood up his anus before they crushed his skull with a stone.[10]
The 16-year old girl kicked McLennan so hard she ruptured one of his testicles, and stamped on his face so hard she left a footprint.[11]
Some people may believe that young girls have always acted like that, but I don't remember any cases from my youth.
Boys are naturally more aggressive than girls but in my day we did not torture each other (very much) and we seldom committed murder. Most of us recognize the name "Columbine High School" because that was the first well-publicized case of teen-aged boys seriously trying to murder a lot of their schoolmates, but there have been several others since. Were all these teen killers the products of day care? Probably some were and some were not but, either way, they are products of a society based on day care. If they were not in day care themselves their schoolmates were, and if their schoolmates are aggressive they must learn to be aggressive themselves. Teens, even more than adults, accept the standards of their peers.
Several studies have suggested that this type of behavior might develop but these studies were conducted in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. Modern day care research tends toward experiments which prove that, for selected slum children, very expensive care and training by psychologists can offer some advantages over home care by inadequate parents.
The experimental centers at which such studies are conducted bear no relationship to the average day care, and the studies avoid any consideration of damage that may be done to average children by the average level of day care. That's not surprising, given that most of the research is conducted by people who either make their living from day care or who plan careers in the field.
Some psychologists favor day care and some oppose it but, as always, research money is available for studies that will favor something commercial interests want but not for anything that might discredit it. Psychologists who get funding for their research become better-known and their opinions are reported by corporate media. Psychologists who do not favor day care get little corporate support, and their work is seldom recognized.
The big push in Canada these days is for subsidized day care, which sounds good until you look at it. One problem is that it benefits mothers who don't want to take care of their own children, and (relatively speaking) penalizes those who do. Another is that if day care is subsidized, more women will be able to work for lower wages and, with their labor pool guaranteed, employers will have no reason to increase wages for anyone.
A study by the University of Lethbridge and the Vanier Institute of the Family found that 90% of Canadians think that in a two-parent family one parent should stay home and look after the kids but Statistics Canada tells us that 53% of young children in Canada are in some kind of day care.[12]
In 1976, married mothers were more than twice as likely to stay home as to work full time. By the year 2000, the figures were reversed. In 1976 only 21% of working women went back to work within six months of the birth of their first baby. Now, 70% are back to work within six months.[13]
Many mothers think they have to work to help pay the bills, but there may be some question about the wisdom of that decision. In May of 1999 the NBC TV show Dateline featured the ideas of writer Linda Kelly, who argued that the earnings of many working wives do not cover their taxes and the extra expenses they incur.
She analyzed the household income of a couple from Lawrence, Kansas. Between them Tony Ingram and his wife Julie made about $10,000 a year over the US median at the time.
Julie made about $15,000 a year but Kelly showed that it cost her $18,600 to earn it, and the couple wound up with $3,900 less cash a year than they would if Julie stayed home.
To begin with, Julie paid $3,900 a year in taxes, because she gets no deductions on the second income. The clothes she wore to work cost her $750, she paid her mother $1,000 a year to take care of her child, it cost her $1,250 to travel to and from work, her meals at work cost $4,155, because she worked the family's weekend meals cost $1,000 more than they might have, lack of time to shop carefully cost $3,900, other services cost $500, maintenance and repairs on her car cost $1,000 and special toys for the children, to compensate for their mother being away all day, cost an extra $500. In addition, Tony lost about $750 in overtime he could not take.[14]
Numbers for other families would be different, of course, but Kelly argues that most American families would be better off if the wives stayed home than if they worked.
Some women make more and some less than Julie Ingram but whether the individual woman wins or loses, there is no question that business gains. Today's working women are more likely to buy clothes than to make them and they don't have time to make or even repair clothes for their families. They are more likely to buy prepared food and restaurant meals and they buy more clothes, cars and services than women who stay home.
Kelly's was just one of several studies that found that the average working wife and mother does not earn enough to cover the tax on her pay plus the increased tax on her husband's pay and the extra expenses she incurs by going to work. While a typical two-income family today earns more than a typical one income family of the 1970s, the two-income family has less money available for discretionary spending.[15]
Prof Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School suggests that working women helped boost house prices in the United States because families with two incomes could pay more.[16]
Business makes more profit when women work for wages but some people wonder whether profits should be the primary consideration. They should not be, from a human point of view, but the business world is not concerned with the welfare of humanity.
The advertising industry, for one, favors day care because it makes it easier for women to work for wages; and because it takes children away from the influence of their parents and continues the assault on the family that began in the 1930s.
The most important effects of day care kick in after children grow older and leave the center. Children who are raised at home will adopt the values of their parents, and they may resist advertising and propaganda messages that conflict with those values. Children raised in an institution will accept the values that institutions give them.
Because they are not raised by their parents day care children do not learn to respect their parents or to look to them for leadership. If children resent being abandoned, they may resent or even hate their parents.
They can be forced to obey the adults and adolescents who work in the day care center but, because day care employees are paid help who don't have much time to inter-act with any one child, the children are not likely to look to them for approval.
In fact because most day care workers are low-paid and because many of them resent their jobs but have no power to change them, children may learn to hold them in contempt.
If the children don't respect them day care workers can't teach much because, among social animals, the young learn only from some of their elders. They will imitate the behavior of high-status adults but they will not imitate or learn from adults who have low status in their community.[17] Children don't know how much their caregivers are paid but they soon learn that the average day-care worker is low status and because they will not respect her, they are not likely to learn much from her.
With no adult models to admire day care children learn to identify with their peer group to a much greater extent than do children who are raised at home.
That creates a problem because whether they like them or not, children need adults. Even among animals, some migratory birds have to be taught to migrate and many carnivores have to be taught to hunt.
If they have no elders to teach them the birds can't migrate. At the appropriate time they will fly, but they don't know where to go and they may fly in circles or in the wrong direction.[18] Most carnivores have a natural instinct to hunt but unless they have elders to teach them, they may not learn to be efficient hunters.
Human children are even more dependent on adults because so much of our behavior is learned, rather than instinctive. Instinct can't teach us how make or use a bow and arrow, or to plant tubers or grain. Instinct does not teach us to make clay pots or stone axes, or to weave baskets or to catch fish with a net or a hook, or even to look both ways before we cross a street. We learn all these behaviors, and we learn most of them from our parents and other adults in our families.
The most important lessons we learn are the morals, ethics and relationships that make our communities work. These have always been the responsibility of families but the family's ability to teach depends on trust and respect for the wisdom of adults. If young people don't respect adults, they will not learn from them.
And they won't learn the skills of parenting. We might think that instinct would make good parents but the evidence of too many 'bad' parents shows that this is not the case. The skills of good parenting have been developed over tens of thousands of years, tested by natural selection and passed on from mother to daughter and father to son by example. If they are not learned and used by each generation, they will be lost. Apologists for institutional care may argue that day care personnel are trained and that modern psychology has developed better ways to raise children, but that is open to question.
I remind you that one American "expert" recommended that babies be put in day care before they learn to recognize their mothers. We might also cite the work of John B. Watson, professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University and one of the founders of behavioral psychology, who considered all but the "gratifications of the marketplace" to be perverse and socially damaging.[19]
In a book on child care Watson advised parents to "never hug and kiss" (children) "never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task."[20]
Watson developed his theories in the early part of the last century and we find them horrifying today, but they were part of the academic fashion of his time. Modern academics insist that their theories are valid, but the fact is that tradition has stood the test of time and theories have not.
But because tradition is not written it can be lost and, if one complete generation of children were to be raised in nurseries, it would be. In fact very few children are raised completely by paid workers, but the behavior of some modern teens suggests that some of us have already gone too far.
Day care also suffers from the problem that, like other low-paid workers, many day-care workers are looking for something better. If they find it they will leave, and the children will have to get used to another caregiver. We can hope that the new one will not take too long to learn the children's names.
It's dangerous to criticize day care because it's so very good for business, because so many women believe that it's better to work for cash than to raise children and because many politicians gain support by promising free state-supported care for children.
But day care is a problem. It's probably not the only reason for the change in personality of our children but it would be foolish to deny that it is probably a factor. When something is predicted by respected scientists and then it happens, we have to suspect that the people who made the prediction may have known what they were talking about.
We can't ban day care but we certainly do not want to subsidize it. Subsidized day care would be good for business because it would enable women to work for lower wages and it is a good freebie for politicians to promise but it would penalize full-time mothers and it would encourage more women to work for wages and let others raise their children.
On the other hand if we want mothers to raise their own children we have to make it possible, with tax breaks for men who support a full-time mother and with subsidies for full-time single moms.
And where day care is necessary, it should be good. That does not mean government-managed day care because government services are seldom good, but it does mean carefully supervised and regulated day care. Careful supervision would be expensive, but children are worth the price.
As the English anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith said, "child raising is the first industry of every species. If it fails, the species fails."[21]
ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
Public schooling began in England with the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which established a state-supported system of elementary schools. Author Alvin Toffler explained the reasons for this, in The Third Wave. . . .
"the early mine, mill and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was 'nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.' If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies, mass education.
"Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the 'overt curriculum.' But beneath it lay an invisible or 'covert curriculum' that was far more basic. It consisted -- and still does, in most industrial nations -- of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitive operations.
"Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956) and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased."[22]
Modern schools continue the program Toffler wrote of and they offer some extra benefits that Toffler did not mention.
One is that schools support the advertisers' program of diminishing the influence of families. If children learn from their parents they will consider their parents to be the authority but if they learn in school, from teachers who sometimes tell them their parents are wrong, they will learn that the teacher is the authority and, in later years, they will accept the authority of the media.
Schools teach children what to want and to enjoy. One of the important lessons is in 'school spirit' -- a form of mindless enthusiasm that can later be transferred to support for professional athletes whose own loyalty is for sale to the highest bidder.
Schools teach children to conform. Whatever the activity they must act as they have been told to act, and original ideas are liable to be punished. Schools destroy initiative by teaching children that the only acceptable activity is whatever the teacher wants them to do. In a natural family a child will pay attention to whatever interests him or her at the time and will decide for himself whether to play or to build something or to sit and watch. Children in school learn to do what the teachers tell them to do and they are taught that what they want and what they think are irrelevant.
Schools teach children to concentrate on things that are of no interest to them. To any healthy mind a bee buzzing around a flower or a puppy playing with a ball are far more interesting and important than, say, a list of the kings of England or of the presidents of the United States. Schools teach children that their own judgment is of no importance and that someone will tell them what to be interested in.
They also teach what educational theorist Ivan Illich calls "the need to be taught." In Deschooling Society he argues that if we were offered the opportunity, most of us could learn most things on our own.[23]
That may be true, but people who learn things on their own may not be optimal consumers. It's much better for advertisers if children grow up being told what to think, rather than thinking for themselves.
And above all, schools prepare children for life by teaching them to be helpless. Psychologists around the world have studied the phenomenon they call 'learned helplessness' in dogs, cats, rats, cockroaches, goldfish and people since the 1950s, but the system of education has been creating it since the early days of mandatory schooling.
Experiments show that when any animal learns that it has no control over its environment, it stops trying to control that environment. In a typical experiment dogs were placed in a 'shuttle box' which has a low partition down the middle. The floor of either side can be electrified to give the dog a shock and the dog can avoid the shock by jumping the partition.
To condition a dog to feel helpless experimenters electrified both sides of the box at the same time, so the animal could not escape the shock by jumping the partition. After conditioning the dog would cringe and whine and urinate when it was shocked, but it would not jump the partition.
For the second stage of a typical experiment the experimenters would put a second, unconditioned, dog in the box and electrify only one side at a time. The new dog would jump the partition to avoid the shock but the conditioned dog would not. Even though it could see that the other dog avoided the shock, it would not jump the partition.
People react the same way. I don't know of any experiments in which people were shocked but in the late 1970s tests at a Veterans Administration hospital at Northport, New York, found that after a few weeks in hospital, patients seem to be conditioned to be helpless.[24]
In the Northport experiment outpatients and patients were tested for their ability to learn to use mechanical controls to turn off an annoying noise. Outpatients learned the task quickly but patients who had spent a few days in hospital took longer to learn and some patients who had spent weeks or months in hospital never did learn.
In her report of the experiment psychologist Maritza Aminita Jonas noted that hospital patients have little or no control over their environment. "Choice of food and time of meals, television station, physician availability, standard procedures (such as temperature and blood pressure readings) not to mention the time and type of medical information concerning the individual, are all important factors over which the patient has little or no control."[25]
School children learn that they are helpless when they have to spend most of their day in a classroom, not talking to their friends and learning or pretending to learn things that do not interest them.
In people and animals, Jonas says, learned helplessness makes the individual passive, slows learning and reduces the individuals' sexual and social functions.[26]
HIGHER EDUCATION
We also need to take a look at higher education. In theory Canada has a very good educational system and if you believe the numbers we're way ahead of most countries.
A survey by The Economist magazine found that in 1995 about 40% of Canadians went on to post secondary education compared with about 35% in the States, 25% in France and 10% in Germany. From 1985 to 1994 the percentage of Canadians who got post secondary education rose from about 30% to nearly 40% but in Sweden it kept steady at about 18% and in Germany it dropped.[27]
But how does our "educational advantage" show up in wages? The Canadian Labour Congress defines "low pay" as less than two thirds of the median wage for a full time job. According to a survey by the CLC 23.7% of Canadians and 25% of Americans but only 13.3% of Germans and 5.2% of Swedes are "low paid." Somehow, the correlation between university education and high wages does not seem to work the way the way we're told it does.[28]
If university education leads to the good life we should be better off than people with less advanced education but it doesn't seem to work that way. Sweden is a small country with less than ten million people and relatively few resources but somehow the Swedes have developed world-class industries like Volvo, SAAB, SKF, Ericsson and others.
And they did it with less than half the percentage of university graduates that we have! How can Swedes make such wonderful cars, trucks and heavy machines with so little education? Do they hire foreigners to read Shakespeare, and translate Greek poetry for them while they work in their factories?
Germany, with even less 'advanced' education than Sweden, is a world-leader in high tech.
The fact is that you don't need 'education' to make things, you need 'training.' Most of us have been raised to respect education because in most European countries a few hundred years ago priests educated the sons of nobles while craftsmen took the sons of commoners on as apprentices.
Some of those craftsmen were in fact very well educated. The stonemasons who built the cathedrals of the middle ages were brilliant engineers with an intimate understanding of mathematics and other sciences, but they learned their trade by apprenticeship rather than in school.
Through most of history education by priests has outranked training by craftsmen but since the industrial/scientific revolution, practical knowledge has had more meaning. A lord could tell a peasant what crops to plant and a priest could tell him when to plant them, but both had to bow to a working mechanic's knowledge of machines.
In later years students at the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge were allowed to study science, but it was understood that they would never put it to practical use.
As a colony Canada was not meant to develop an independent economy and Canadian schools were set up to educate the sons of colonial administrators and of the local elite. As a nation we were expected to learn enough technology to prepare raw materials for shipment to England but not enough to manufacture finished goods.
In the last century we developed enough industry to help England through two world wars. We also built a few technical schools but, with a steady supply of trained immigrants from Europe, we didn't need much technical training and we didn't get much.
Then came the fall of 1957 and the first Russian Sputnik satellite. It proved that Russia was winning the space race, and frantic politicians decided that it was because they had better schools. The United States set out to catch up and, as a junior partner in the cold war, Canada followed suit.
But the education gap was in technical schools, and we opened liberal arts colleges. That's hard to justify, but not hard to understand.
Technical schools need expensive equipment and they are expensive to run, because anyone qualified to teach in a technical school can take his choice of well-paid jobs in the real world.
Arts colleges need only classrooms and a library, and teachers are cheap because they require no specific skills. Almost any arts graduate can teach arts courses, and teaching is about as good as any job that an arts degree qualifies you for.
And to a politician or an administrator, one school is as good as another. Because politicians and senior civil servants don't need any technical training themselves they don't recognize the difference between training and education, and all schools look the same when they are just promises in an election campaign or entries in a balance sheet. Because we could open arts colleges cheaper and faster than technical schools we did -- nine new universities in Ontario alone, within a few years.[29]
We had no need for most of the arts graduates they turned out but, as often happens in the modern world, the supply created the demand. As more and more Canadians received degrees, a degree became a basic requirement for more and more jobs.
The change came about partly because many big companies hired personnel officers who held degrees.
The new personnel officers were 'specialists' who had a theoretical background in hiring people but who didn't know much about the company they worked for or about the jobs they hired people for. They could not judge relevant skills but they could look at paper qualifications and, by considering only candidates who held degrees, they could make their own jobs easier.
It's illegal to discriminate by race or sex, even when these may make a difference on the job. It is not illegal to discriminate by education, or even to demand education that is not required for or appropriate to the job.
In ancient China would-be administrators were required to write a poem, and the applicants with the best poem and the best calligraphy were chosen. In modern Canada some company personnel officers choose employees on the qualifications they understand -- university degrees -- whether the degrees are relevant to the job or not.
By the late 1960s the continued need for technical schools was obvious and the federal and provincial governments tried to correct it by opening "community colleges" to teach technology. The colleges lost their chance for equality when educators agreed that a community college diploma was not equal to a university degree.
That made the colleges second-rate -- for losers only -- and ever since they have been trying to break away from the technological role they were intended to fill. They are now called "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology" and most of them now emphasize courses in arts or some form of administration.
Most arts courses are of little use but some teachers claim that they "teach you to think." Most students, on the other hand, know that the way to get good marks is to show how one can rationalize the teachers' conclusions from the teachers' premises. All students know that it is not wise to question either the premises or the conclusions, and many of the 'best' students actually believe both of them.
Even if students do not learn anything useful, our tradition promises graduates soft and well-paid jobs. Trudeau's and later governments filled the need by "creating" jobs with grants, and by expanding the federal and provincial governments.
That was a political decision and many of the jobs were an up-scale form of workfare, planned to fit the abilities of the people who needed jobs rather than the needs of the economy. In 40 years this job creation produced the runaway bureaucracy that now strangles the country.
We know that we can no longer afford make-work jobs but politicians still promise "job creation" and young Canadians still go to university for an education they hope will launch them into management, even though we have very little to manage.
High school graduates go to university because teachers tell them they need degrees. Vocational guidance teachers are supposed to advise students but many of the teachers assigned to vocational guidance have no technical or practical skills themselves, and are not qualified to advise anyone about the real world. Raised to respect university degrees they encourage students to plan for a university education, in the fond hope that civil service sinecures will again become available some time in the future.
A few years ago I met a young English truck driver whose family owned a fleet of about 40 big trucks and several warehouses. When he quit school at 16 to work as a truck driver his teacher tried to convince him to stay.
Because a teen-ager can not legally drive a big truck in England the company bought a specially-made medium truck that would handle like a big one -- and that cost about as much as three years' board and tuition in a good private university -- for the boy to start with.[30] When he went to work young Paul began a course of on-the-job training that was virtually guaranteed to land him in top management of a company worth quite a few million dollars, but all the schoolteacher could see was that he was going to drive a truck.
He could have finished his 'education' and then gone to work for the family company but, had he done that, he would not have learned anything about either trucking or warehousing. By starting as a truck driver he began to learn the business from the ground up, and to earn the respect of the men who work for his family and who will someday work for him.
And he has earned respect. A few years after Paul started work he won a national "tarping and roping" contest, in which drivers compete to tie a load safely to a truck and cover it with a secure tarpaulin. He's also an expert driver and, while I was visiting, an older driver came with us on one trip to see how Paul could weave a big truck through a very narrow winding lane. The older driver had more time on the job, but Paul was known to be one of the few who could take a truck through this particular lane. In this case that was an important skill because the lane in question was in a factory complex where the company had to make deliveries.
If Paul had a degree from Oxford no trucker would listen to anything he said about any aspect of trucking. Because he learned from the ground up, and because he is an acknowledged expert, even old hands trust his judgment.
In contrast one Canadian trucking executive told me that on major roads he drove his car in the center lane, at less than the speed limit. When one of his company's trucks passed him on the right, the driver was cited for a safety violation.
That man was the "safety manager" for a large trucking company but, until I told him, he didn't know that it's legal to pass on the right on a multi-lane road in Ontario and that on many main roads, including the one he patrolled, big trucks are not allowed in the extreme left lane. His own drivers soon learned to recognize his car and, because they dared not pass him, he created a rolling road block that was anything but safe.
With a pretense of facing reality Canadian university students are now switching from general arts to commerce and business administration courses -- but what will they administer? If there are no trained workers to work in factories, there will be no factories to run.
For the past 20 years or so the big deal in education has been computers, and we still hear about the lack of computer-trained craftsmen. That's a half truth.
We hear that there is a lack of machinists to run computer-controlled machines, for example, and the promoters of education tell us we need more computer training. They miss the point that the need is for machinists, not for computer programmers.
We have lots of unemployed programmers, but very few unemployed machinists. Many modern machine tools can be controlled by computers but they are still machine tools and the man who programs the computers must know what the tools can do, and how they do it. He must, in other words, be capable of running the machine himself.
If the programmer can't do the job himself he can't program a machine to do it, but a man who can run the machine can learn to program it. Some industrial robots are programmed by "walking" them through the job they are to do. In a "walk through" a man who knows the job guides the robot, and the robot memorizes the moves. The man must know the job very well, but he doesn't have to know anything about programming.
Some schools pretend to teach 'practical' subjects but I question the wisdom of trying to learn any practical subject in school.
If we want to study ancient Greek literature we go to school, because there is no practical use for a knowledge of ancient Greek literature and scholars who know nothing else have no way to make a living but to teach school.
But the study of -- for example -- marketing is quite different. Anyone who is good at marketing can make much more money in private industry than he can as a school-teacher. Because of that we have to assume that people who teach marketing in schools may do it because they are not good enough to succeed in real-life marketing.
The school won't know that, of course, because teachers are hired by administrators who check paper but may not themselves understand the subject to be taught and are not qualified to judge the teacher's qualifications. Some students may realize that their teacher does not know what he's talking about, but if they want to pass the course they will pretend to respect him.
Even if the teacher was once good enough to make it in a real world he is not in the mainstream of the business, and we have to assume he is not current.
It is also possible that a teacher knows marketing well but there are no jobs for marketing grads, so he has to teach school. When we have a surplus of 'experts' the ones who can't get jobs may become teachers and turn out more 'experts.'
That really does happen. About 20 years ago a friend of mine who already had a degree in computer science was 're-trained,' at government expense, as an 'instrument mechanic.' There was a need for instrument mechanics but none of the 20 students in my friend's class got jobs after graduation, because the type of instruments they were trained to service were obsolete before the course began. The teacher was a technician who had not been able to keep up with the industry, but found a way to recycle his outmoded skill.
In most cases we could learn more and better as apprentices or understudies than as students. If I want to learn marketing, for example, do I want to spend three years studying it under a teacher who may not be good enough at marketing to get a job in it himself?
I would do better to start as a trainee in a good marketing firm or in the marketing department of a big company. If the company is willing to hire me I know they think there will be work for me as a marketer. Because I will see my teachers' success as marketers in the real world I will know how well they understand marketing.
That's the ideal but when 20 people apply for one opening in a marketing firm and nineteen of them have degrees or diplomas in marketing, the one that has no degree is not likely to get the job. That's a shame because he might have the best natural talent and the 19 who have paper qualifications may have learned nothing useful. In fact the school may have given them misconceptions and wrong ideas which could make them less useful than someone with no training at all.
A former accountant told me about the students she used to hire. In most cases, she said, high school students showed more initiative and learned faster than students who were part way through courses in accounting.
As a journalist I have been appalled by the trend to school training for reporters. In days gone by most newspapers trained their own reporters, on the job. There wasn't much unemployment among journalists in those days because newspapers trained only the reporters they could use and the supply of trained reporters generally matched the jobs available.
Now reporters are trained in schools of journalism. With government and students paying the bills the schools can and will train everybody they can lure into a course, and they graduate far more 'trained' journalists than the industry can hire.
Most journalism grads will never get jobs in 'their' field and most of those who do will work for low wages. As a reporter on a small-city newspaper more than 30 years ago I was able to buy a house for slightly less than one year's salary. Now, a young reporter on a small-city paper might be hard-pressed to buy a new car on one year's salary.
In a perfect world schools would train only enough students to fill the need, but that's obviously impossible. As long as schools offer free choice of courses we have to expect students to sign up for the courses they think will lead to the top jobs.
And even if we could limit the openings in school no-one knows exactly how many jobs and what kind of jobs are open now, let alone what will be open three or four years in the future.
I used to think that Manpower Canada tracks jobs as part of its function as the national employment agency, but that's not so. When I asked Manpower Canada to confirm this a member of the public relations staff told me that Manpower Canada knows only about jobs that are hired through its own offices, and most private business does not deal with it. It never listed more than about 25% of all the jobs in Canada, and at times the level drops as low as 10%.
Governments and government contractors have to hire through Manpower and that may help to create the illusion that there are more jobs for people with academic training than for people with practical skills. Like the Chinese administrators who were hired on the basis of poetry and penmanship, most Canadian civil servants are not chosen for either practical knowledge or useful skills.
But even if the schools knew what jobs would be open when their students graduated, on-the-job training would still have the advantage that it would sort out mistakes faster. When I went to work on a newspaper I started as a reporter and I discovered very quickly what the job was like. As it turned out I enjoyed it, and I did well enough that the newspaper I started with -- and later other newspapers -- were willing to keep me.
Most journalism schools have their own make-believe newspapers but they are school papers, not the real thing. After three or four years of school, journalism students have three or four years' experience as students but none as journalists.
That's a shame because the graduates have invested three years of their lives in training and they still don't know if they will like journalism or if they are suited for it. All they know is that they like school, and that they can pass courses.
And they are not trained journalists, as the quality of many modern papers proves. One important difference is that students get through school by believing what they are told, but a good journalist knows that many sources will distort a story for their own ends.
Another difference is that students who run school papers learn to bow to the dictates of teachers and school officials. That may be one reason why so many modern newspapers bow so submissively to the demands of advertisers and even of government officials.
With cheap education almost any student can train for almost any job and most students like to think they will get the jobs they train for. That's a nice dream but the sad fact is that there are not enough soft and interesting jobs to go round, especially in an economy that is failing for lack of productive workers.
Personally, I would like to be president of General Motors. Dozens of schools offer training that might qualify me for the job but, unfortunately, General Motors already has a president.
Hundreds of Canadian companies need skilled workers but they're hard to find because most of our schools are training people to be company presidents. If General Electric and other manufacturers did their own training things would be different, because students would face reality much earlier.
In the present world you can spend three years and tens of thousands of dollars training to be president of GM before you find out it already has a president, and by the time you face reality it may be too late to retrain.
In a world of apprenticeship training you could wait until someone is ready to hire a trainee for the president's job, or you could start work tomorrow as an apprentice machinist.
The training you get as an apprentice may be better than you would get in school because schoolwork is always make-believe but the training of an apprentice is real. Students in school don't have to be serious about either their projects or their choices because most of what they learn in school has little bearing on real life and, in many courses, they may be able to fake their way through exams. For some, at least, the habit of faking things persist. Apprentices work and learn in the real world, and the decisions they make in training are real.
And there is the very serious danger that by concentrating on "advanced education" we will lose the skills we have.
Canada never trained many skilled craftsmen because, in the first half of the last century, we could get them as immigrants from Europe. Now we need to train our own because most skilled craftsmen can do better in Europe than they can here. We need a serious apprenticeship program of our own, and if we don't start it soon we may not have enough skilled tradesmen to manage it.
It takes a tradesman to train a tradesman, and too many of our tradesmen are now unemployed or retired. When the last master of a trade retires, it will be too late to think about an apprenticeship program.
In a healthy economy training as a machinist could lead to the president's office -- as it did for Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers and others. In Adventures of a Bystander management guru Peter Drucker reports that in the 1930s, 40s and 50s -- when General Motors was the world's leading car-maker -- most GM executives started as factory workers. The few who had university degrees did not talk about them.[31]
But in a world of formal schooling, practical training is a dead end. If university graduates control management they will make sure no non-graduate rises to their level.
And we maintain the myth that our unemployment problems are caused by lack of education. If everybody had a degree, school promoters say, we would not have unemployment.
But as The Economist survey shows, we already have more "advanced education" than countries that are more advanced than we are!
So where do we get the idea that more education leads to higher wages? We learn it in school!
I don't suggest that we can get along without schools but it should be obvious that we can't get along without apprentices. About thirty years ago an electrician in Yellow Springs, Ohio, told me that he had to have an apprentice because he could not get work without one. Yellow Springs is home to Antioch College, possibly the best liberal arts college in the United States, but the people of the town know that tradesmen need education too and they will not hire a tradesman who has no apprentice.
The demand for apprenticeships in Yellow Springs is a local initiative, but the need is global. I agree that most tradesmen also need school training but, besides establishing and funding more trade schools, a rational government should offer tax benefits and even subsidies to tradesmen and companies that train apprentices and to the apprentices themselves.
And even more important, we need to learn to appreciate tradesmen and apprenticeships. We must learn that while a man with a degree in business administration may be qualified to manage a branch plant or to establish an Enron-type business it takes tradesmen to make the things we need and use every day, and that most productive businesses are founded by tradesmen.
The Wright brothers never finished high school but they learned to make and repair bicycles and they built the engine that powered their first airplane.
Vic De Zen, founder of the billion-dollar Royal Plastics group that operates around the world, is a tool and die maker. So is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International with 24,000 employees and sales of more than $4.5 billion a year.
As I write this in the spring of 2005 some TV commercials appear to encourage young people to train for trades. This is good start, but the commercials I have seen are condescending and insulting. In one an architect explains to a young tradesmen that he, the architect, could not do the wonderful things he does if it were not for relatively insignificant work of the tradesman.
On one level that may be true, but it is also true that tradesmen have given us the modern world. Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, joined the RAF as an apprentice mechanic and qualified as a pilot and test pilot before the military sent him to university. The Wright brothers, Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers and others were tradesmen, not professionals, and poor old Thomas Edison had only three months of schooling.
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