House of Eratosthenes

Hat tip to Rick. The passage I quoted in the title, in my opinion, was a somewhat-adequate defense; they’re alternative-fuel proponents, and as of now you can’t get to Copenhagen from stateside using linseed oil. They’re just a couple more young people trying to do their part by bringing about the next revolution. All of western society is going to smack itself in the forehead and say “Omigaw, I’ve had my head stuck up my ass all this time and it took the courage of (insert your name here) to point it out to me!”

My concern is not the hypocrisy. Although I do like that voucher, and I think it’s a scream. Read the wording, it just gets funnier and funnier as you keep on reading toward the bottom.

My concern is that sentiment, that objective, regarding society smacking itself in the forehead and “realizing” something. How that approaching Omigosh-moment is so casually defined by our younger people, and has been for generations now, as the meaning behind the word “work.”

Everyone who’s ever stepped onto a campus wants to be our next Joan of Arc.

Like I said in my comment,

These youngsters want to “make us realize” this-or-that…it doesn’t matter what the epiphany is, so long as we “all” have one, and they’re the ones who gave it to us…because they are BORED. They don’t want to fill in the blank after someone else has designed the checkboxes, they want to design the checkboxes, because filling in the blank is for losers. That’s what they have been taught, and I think our society will eventually survive it, but not easily. And we shouldn’t be struggling with this theft of our society’s youth. We shouldn’t be tolerating it.

As I said further on, I know this personality type very well. The tragedy is that these people, while their judgment is unsound, their intellect is not lacking. Overall, they’re reasonably intelligent. In fact that’s usually how the problem got started: When they were about five-to-eight years old, someone told them so.

The folks from days-gone-by did things better than us, though. I’m not referring to their smaller carbon footprint; I’m referring to apprenticeships. You couldn’t become a blacksmith until you did your time as a blacksmith’s apprentice. Ditto for the bricklayer, the barber, the tanner, the shopkeeper, the cooper, the roofer, the miller. You had to form your ideas about how things should work — by spending your certain required number of years just toiling away at them the way they did work, and keeping your high-minded ideas to yourself. It was thought, back then, that if your revolutionary ideas really had merit, you’d still be hanging onto them after the end of this apprenticeship. That idea took hold well before the Renaissance and it was in full bloom afterward, so it can’t be all bad. Why did we scratch it? Whose dumb idea was that?

We’ve gotten rid of this; not through a conscious decision, and so nobody has had to qualify exactly how this decision made sense, or if it ever did. But I think it’s reasonable to say that experiment has failed, and before we talk about “agreements” from Copenhagen, we should first make it a mission to bring back apprenticeships. That is the big crisis that confronts the globe now.

People who haven’t done any real work…by which I mean, not simply spending calories…but putting in effort to produce an outcome defined at the outset by someone more senior; figuring out independently that this-thing or that-thing cannot keep drifting in its current direction if the outcome is to be achieved; and so this must be changed, that must be changed, and it’s all up to you to realize these things and act on them…people who have never been through a stewardship process like that, have these ambitions about “correcting” the rest of us. It is arrogant, counterproductive, wrong, and I cannot find the words to express the magnitude toward which this wastes our human potential.

I think PrezBO put it perfectly — just direct those words toward a different crowd, I say. Quit telling me I’m holding the mop wrong. Grab a mop.

He could have offered these two lovely young ladies Stupidity Offsets, but they wouldn’t have had the intelligence to accept them.
- sonofsheldon | 12/20/2009 @ 18:40
Agreed, bring back apprenticeships.

Part of the problem is that high school counselors by and large do not remotely inform students of the possibility of going into a trade, like carpentry, plumbing, hvac, electrician,etc, where apprenticeships are still to be had. No, the only option they discuss is college, college, and did I mention college?

My counselor, of course, never told me of an alternative to college, and while I may be college material, I wasted a lot of time early on, dithering in community college before I finally decided on engineering. If I had done, say electrician apprenticeship, I could have a cool hundred grand in the bank by now, and if the economy proved to be bad for business, I could use the money to then go for a degree. Instead I’m in my fifth year of college and have 200 bucks to my name, and hoping my degree will pay off once I’m out.

This is a very big problem, because for one, this inflates the demand for college artificially. Given that a significant percentage of students never finish, this implies that a hell of a lot of students going to college are simply not college material, and therefore it is wasting their time and potential that could be better spent learning a trade. Plus, a few years in the real world can give one an appreciation for education that a fresh high school graduate is unlikely to have, I certainly didn’t.

Let’s be honest, not many young people know exactly what they want to do out of high school, few have concrete long term plans, and most will, like me, dither in school for a while wasting their time and their parent’s money.
- KG | 12/20/2009 @ 22:53
I just finished reading Shop Class As Soulcraft, written by Matthew B. Crawford. He talks about how California schools shut down 75% of the school shop classes in the ’80s because computers and artificial intel was the wave of the future. Plus, you could get more kids in an AI class and there was less chance of injury. Before the economy went south, they were always crying for framers, plumbers, electricians etc. Good book, worth a read.
- glxi390 | 12/21/2009 @ 07:02
You are so right about apprenticeships. For decades (I’m over 50 years old) I’ve believed that it’s a mistake to put teenagers in high school all day. They suffer from confusion caused by hormones and when they are in the majority they feed each other’s fantasies. In an apprenticeship the youngsters are in the minority and when they say or do something immature, the older workers are likely to say something like “that’s nice now sweep the floor”. I know this from experience. But there are examples today of what apprenticeships can do – look at the military. Senior leaders make it a primary responsibility to develop the soldiers that will replace them. It’s a huge part of our Army’s structure and culture.
- kdaunt | 12/23/2009 @ 14:07

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