Now that there is a shortage of young people coming into the trades they’re begging us not to retire
My HS was a Tech/Vocational one, gave you the options to choose your path. And some free hrs to pick up extra courses over 4 yrs. We need HS’S that offer both. Open them up to both sexes. Gym remains the same separated.
I read a list of all the things a man should be able to do. It was long and included such diverse skills as plan an invasion and take care of a baby. I’ve noticed that young adults can’t do even a fraction of the items from that list. I am much less capable that my earliest coworkers who had been brought up in the forties and fifties. I had to overcome such advances in education as “sight reading” and “new math.”. Modern kids will have to overcome diversity and critical race training. The Renaissance man had been a dead ideal for a long time.
Of course skilled labor in the Renaissance was controlled by the guild system and apprenticeships, the older version of SloJo’s wet dream of a Union-controlled labor force.
The problem here is that with all the off-shoring, those High Paying technical/mechanical jobs become almost politically seasonal.
A well established electrician, in a big-city suburb with lots of highly paid Goobermint or Financial job holders, can make a very good living indeed.
That same electrician is putting in ceiling fans to pay bills in a downturn.
In MAGA land, skills would rule the roost. That’s why Blue Collar, NON UNION, NON GOOBERMINT is all in for our PDJT.
Roll MAGA, roll!
"No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. . . ." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233
"An enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion... will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." --Thomas Jefferson to Chevalier de Ouis, 1814. ME 14:130
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820.
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782.
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
"Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, the people, if well informed, may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
"Although all men are born free, and all nations might be so, yet too true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant they have been cheated; asleep they have been surprised; divided the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?... The people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it." - James Madison
"A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people." - James Madison
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." - James Madison