Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I had four grandparents.
Two were southerners. Two were New Englanders. Very different people who grew up in a time when those groups were as isolated from each other as they could be. None of them finished high school. They were, by today’s standards, uneducated hicks.
Interestingly enough, they were also quite successful.
My southern grandparents worked in the newspaper industry. Starting at the bottom, both my granddad and granny were skilled workers who operated Linotype machines. Granddad ultimately worked his way up to being the production manager of the Hartford Courant, a proud old rag that is still in business today.
It is thanks to that job opportunity that my parents met and I came to be.
My New England grandfather came from a line who arrived on these shores shortly after the Mayflower. My grandmother was a first generation American, the daughter of two German refugees who came independently on ships powered by sails while each of them was still a teenager.
Even today I have pictures of Frederick and Emilie on a bookshelf near my desk. I remember Frederick from my toddler years. He was a very old, very German man who refused to let his children speak anything but English. They were born American and he made it his business to be sure they assimilated fully into his new land.
These were tough, gutsy folks. The German immigrants became bakers who owned their own shop. Their daughter and her husband, my grandparents, became hairdressers who opened a hairdressing academy that supported two generations of the family through the depression, World War II, and provided them with a leisurely retirement.
They were all hard-working, lower class individuals who found a way to work together to build what would become a comfortable middle-class life. Blue collar folks who came from a time before the modern conveniences we take for granted. They were the last generation who saw cooking with fire, traveling by horse-drawn wagon, and lighting lanterns at night as normal activities.
Jump forward a bit and both families spawned children who grew up to be white collar, upper-middle class residents with advanced degrees from institutions of higher learning. Those were my parents.
I have three siblings. Of the four of us, two have earned doctorates. I am a high school graduate. Four years after high school I gave college a shot, but my band was doing well enough that I quit before distinguishing myself in any way. Having the opportunity to play music professionally trumped the idea of sitting in a series of classrooms for however long it took to get a degree I didn’t have all that much interest in.
What I did have an interest in was music, electronics, writing, and aviation. I’m pleased to report I’ve earned a living at each of those endeavors.
Somewhere along the line, between the time when my uneducated grandparents become successful and the time their children launched themselves into the Mad Men era of prosperity in the 1950s, the idea of being a blue-collar worker became a shameful thing.
That was a mistake.
As a culture we pushed teenagers into colleges to study material they had a curiosity about, but not necessarily a means of monetizing that interest. That was deemed the best way to assure their success in life.
Earning a degree was respectable. Eventually it became almost an imperative.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard modestly successful adults tell curious, bright teenagers that without a degree, ideally an Ivy League degree, they would be poor underclass failures for the rest of their lives. Truly. That message has been prevalent and entirely inaccurate for years now.
Just because an idea becomes universally accepted does not mean it actually has merit.
I am thoroughly blue collar and proud of that status.
As a mechanic, I scrape my knuckles, cut myself, get grease under my fingernails, and occasionally succeed in making a machine work better than it did before I took a whack at it. That’s blue collar.
As a pilot, I check the oil, peek into the fuel tanks, then climb under the wing to inspect tires and brakes. Whether a pilot is wearing a crisp white shirt with epaulets or a T-shirt with oil stains, I consider that position to be very blue collar. Gratifyingly so.
Writers have always been looked down upon, or up to, depending more on their popularity and income rather than the quality or quantity of their output. We’re very much blue collar folks, even though many of us pretend to be otherwise.
I mention all this because I believe the emphatically enthusiastic Mike Rowe to be correct. He projects a saintly voice of reason in crazy times.
As Mike tells us so often, and as I have lived to experience, there is grace to be found in doing a job and doing it well. That is true whether your workspace is in the executive suite or on the sub-basement garage level. The farmers, plumbers, electricians, welders, bakers, brewers, cooks, tailors, mechanics, and pilots of this world make things happen.
Thank goodness they walk among us. We would be in a world of hurt without them.
Is college a bad idea? No, not at all. Is college necessary for those who wish to find a financially successful and emotionally satisfying life? Nope. Not even a little bit.
Let me suggest we stop telling teenagers what they need to do in order to meet our expectations and shift to a perspective that allows us to share with them the various paths they might follow to make their own way in the world.
Times change. People adapt. But we still eat bread and we still get our hair cut or styled. Neither of which require a college education or a student debt load. Both of which add value to our community and our lives.
We need to rethink what we value. Is it the degree or is it a combination of education and skill built on experience?
Jamie Beckett and Mike Rowe, two solid voices of reason!
I have two degrees in engineering and spent much of my career in aerospace. Worked my way through college back when a year cost only $660, tuition & fees (Auburn). If I had to do it all over, I would follow my younger son – apprenticed as an aircraft mechanic at a small rural airport, Siler City, NC. His mentor, the shop owner, was a former Airbus mechanic who started his career on crop dusters. They worked on all kinds of planes, from Wichita spam cans to warbirds, fabric, homebuilts, restorations. He earned a working man’s Ph.D. in his apprenticeship in an unheated, uncooled hangar in central North Carolina. Had his own apartment, was really poor but never complained, knowing that was the price to be paid. Worked a few years in GA and then was hired by GE in Durham, where he built jet engines of all kinds. GE sent him to Embry-Riddle (online), where he earned a B.Sc. in Aeronautics, all paid by GE. He admitted that he learned at ERAU nearly nothing that he didn’t already know. Graduated magna cum laude. Now he is lead on FAA certification for GE Aviation, living the good life. No classroom college, no college debt, no fluff wokee courses required. All work in a clean, air-conditioned facility. Start humble, work hard, stay out of debt and away from college campuses to do well these days. College ain’t what it was 40 years ago.
I can learn something from just about anyone. One of my best friends was a sewage treatment plant operator. I learned so many life skills from him that it wasn’t even funny. Even more important was the fact that I felt I could call him anytime day or night and he would be there. Unfortunately, he passed away about 5 years ago and I still miss him.
I’ve found the problem isn’t “education” but “educators”. It isn’t possible to learn to be a pilot, a lawyer, a doctor, and engineer and so on by doing it on your own – you have to have instruction, and the exam (allegedly) shows you’ve learned the material.
I’ve been on both sides of the desk in education. When I was a munchkin (back when we rode dinosaurs to school) I would sometimes sit there and ask myself why this teacher hasn’t said anything significant in three hours, it must be me, I’m just a lowly student and don’t know any better and that’s the TEACHER.
Later on in my life, I taught at a vocational school (mechanics training). I got to do the electrical sequence because I was the only one there who knew anything about it. At one point, I was handed a syllabus and told the time slot for this lesson was three hours long – but the material could be covered quite completely in 15 minutes. Guess what – it was MY turn to not say anything significant for three hours.
The education business is very different from education, which is supposed to be about imparting knowledge. When I went to college (a long time ago in a universe far far away) the “welcome” lecture started out “Look to your right. Look to your left. One, maybe both of those people won’t be there when you graduate.” And they were proud of it, too.
How would you feel if the captain of the 787 got on the horn and said “There’s a 33 to 66 percent chance that we will not complete this flight successfully” (i.e. crash)? How about a doctor who said you have about a 33% chance of surviving this procedure. (hangnail removal)?
Their attitude is that if you don’t learn, it isn’t OUR fault, you’re just an idiot (and not worthy), and by the way, we’re keeping ALL the money.
We do need people with higher education, but not for everything, and one size does not fit all. Often the “requirement” of a degree of some sort has been used by HR departments to arbitrarily disqualify people so HR doesn’t have to work so hard. The best example of this was the Macy’s ad during the 1930s depression – “Floor sweeper wanted, PhDs only need apply.”
I graduated with a BS in electrical engineering, and worked for a large computer company in the 1970’s, designing DC power control for computer room line printers…now all long gone. I also did some reliability engineering and manufacturing test equipment development .
Now retired and a pilot/ aircraft owner, I’ve found a ‘new career’ helping other pilots and A&Ps diagnose electrical problems in aircraft. I was shocked at how uninformed A&Ps are on diagnosing and making simple, low cost repairs to the electrical parts in our GA aircraft.
Mike Rowe has a degree in communication studies from Towson University; I wonder where he would be without it.
Bottom line Jamie is– either a person was born with with the mental ability for college/university learning for clean executive, mangement, engineering level work-or-will earn a very good living with dirty hands/manual labor-or-be an independent artist-or- he ,she or IT could be an empty suit/dress, useless, BS artist, ice cream eating politician like–.
Spot on, Jamie!
Spot on, as usual, Jamie!
This is a great story and very well written!
Even though I have 3 college degrees and even taught at the university level (as well as being a flight instructor) I am probably more appreciated and respected for my ability to “fix” things, which is a mentality and skill set I learned from my dad who grew up in a farm. Priceless!