On Apr 10, 2006, at 4:21 PM, D. Jay Newman wrote:

>> (There USED to be "Vocational school" for people too dumb to go
>> to college...
>
> There still are these places. However, due to the stigma placed
> on them, they aren't as visible as normal colleges.

Well, yes.  Even in my day the "too dumb" was part of the perception.
If your interests were in the mechanical and you had brains, you
were expected to go to college and get the ME degree or whatever
before you placed yourself in the work force...

And today the limitations in the workplace without a "College Degree"
are significant.  Somehow, if you want to be a middle manager in
some random business, a bachelor's degree in art history is supposed
to be more useful than machinist's training.
>
> And many of these jobs require at least as much intelligence
> to do as programming.

Maybe.  Machining and programming skills both seem to be pretty
orthogonal to "intelligence" as used in "intelligent people go
to college."

> I wish that I *had* taken a few more shop classes in high
> school or college.
>
And likewise, and today you can get out of high school without
EVER having taken anything resembling either Shop or "home Ec",
because all HS has to do is prepare you for college.  "life skills"
are rather out of style.  And then we wonder why people don't have
them.

BillW
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