Agreed. The US will need to find a more efficient path for a 'greenhorn' to get an apprenticeship position. IMO, the education system at the high school level needs to be revamped which is a tall order especially in the US. There needs to be people on the lookout for potential candidates and guide them towards the Trades. I could be wrong but I believe the European model is similar to what I mentioned. Anyone here from Europe is free to correct me.
However, there are lots of problems when you're dealing with a union shop. I support unions but there are days where the union leadership needs to get their asses kicked.
My honest opinion of the entire
world's educational system is that it's very backwards. Every countries. Yes even China's.
Give me a second to explain.
I guess my useless psych degree isn't all
that useless now.
Here's the thing about brain development. We know that even as early as in the womb different fetuses respond differently to stimuli. Thus indicating that the things that make us different. What we are good at. What we are bad at. What we have natural talents for, and what we naturally suck at. What we like. What we dislike. All of that stuff. It's already beginning to be laid out even prior to actual birth.
This process of what parts our brain and our talents get stronger and what skills we can later be best at continues all throughout childhood. Early childhood is especially important.
I've always thought that it should be a good idea to begin to make assessments of people's talents, their brain patterns, and just what they seem to like and what they're good at almost as early as possible, and then an annual, bi-annual, or tri-annual reassessment.
If the baby shows strong natural born talent in quantitative skillsets or tasks then making the kid go through art classes and poetry isn't the best use of his time. Vice versa too. If someone's kid is naturally a people person or shows social adeptedness then forcing him against his will to study STEM-related stuff that he's neither good at nor likes is a waste of what his full potential could've been.
Now I'm not advocating that we start right off the bat with specialized schools right away, but I do advocate that schools
initially begin as the usual general curiculum that every country seems to think is best, and then gradually over the course of the entire childhood lifespan we do reassessments and begin putting children towards more and more specialized schools so that when they do enter what is traditionally high school they are studying something that directly translates into going to an actual career. If we do stuff like bi-annual, tri-annual, or I guess even quadri-annual splits where each time we do a split the schools are more and more specialized and less and less generalized then we can make churn out effective workers and well-adjusted adults who have something productive to do with their lives as soon as they leave home and enter adulthood.
Granted some stuff will require college, master's, or doctorates levels.
For the U.S. the absence of not only millwrights, but qualified blue collar workers in like
all of the trades stems in huge part from the fact that all U.S. schools are just general curiculum.
And the quality of that general curiculum is utter trash most of the time.
So we have 2 problems adding on top of each other. A curiculum that really isn't useful for anyone, and kids are barely competent or outright idiotic at this curiculum that is useless in the first place.
For those of you not in the U.S. I cannot begin to tell you how absolutely worthless almost all of my studies were. Even in college. And that's not just because of my goddamn psychology degree. Because if I had tried to pursue a Psy. D or Master's half my time in college was similarly useless.
But in a nutshell the issue with the U.S. education system has a lot to do with the fact that almost all high schools (and a lot of colleges in their general education 100 and 200 level courses even) eventually just converge to a few common knowledge points. Everybody reads some shakespeare, A Tale of 2 Cities, some Ancient Greek boringness (Odyssey, Illiad, fucking Oedipus), make sure you can do algebra (most U.S. high schoolers cannot do calculus at all even if they took it in high school unless they went to a very good high school...the teachers and courses make it easy to at least pass if you do some effort), make sure you know how to throw a football or dribble a basketball, make sure you know that the world's coolest country was founded in 1776 and that this country did nothing bad ever except for thsoe few occassions where outright denial is too crazy, oh and then know that there's this thing called gravity and this other thing called evolution (southern schools literally don't teach it or they go through the motions and nobody actually learns it).
The overwhelming majority of U.S. high schools converge to these points eventually...and that's only if your school was competent. Trust me you do
not want to see how bad the 'bad' schools are.
OK now that's cool and all but take a good look what you're actually teaching the kids...fucking nothing that can actually help in the real world.
No real world marketable, applicable, or valuable skills. Nothing.
What if the kid wants to be a doctor? Lol congrats! You know that evolution basically says "he who fucks da most maximizes the chances of his offspring guiding the direction of the species". OK now you will waste like your first year or 2 largely repeating most of this stuff (there is some interesting stuff offered in some colleges as general education that actually is worth the 3 hours a week BTW...I can't tell a lie), then spend 2 years trying to get to Med school. A med school where they will definitely take a look at your race and if you're Asian you have to be twice as good just to have half the chance as a fucking affirmative action racist diversity hire candidate.
What if the kid wants to be a lawyer? Good for you kid! The knowledge of the Bill of Rights and the whole 1776 thing will not help you at all when you take the LSAT. You also get to join your doctor buddy in taking like 2 years of useless crap then speed rushing through actually relevant information.
Same for the rest of white collar careers.
As for blue collar?
It's even worse.
Blue collar careers oftentimes require you to have work experience. Many contractors straight up hate some of the trade schools because those schools are glorified scams.
Since trade schools are not often acredited...basically nobody with any power or authority actually verifies if they are actually at least meeting some sort of acceptable minimal standards half the trade schools are trash.
Therefore, some high school kid goes to trade school and now wasted time and money only to find out that half the contractors in his city would've just hired him as unskilled labor first while he was studying. Now they won't hire him at all because they know he learned bad habits and bad knowledge from a glorified scam.
For the highly skilled or even moderately skilled trades there is a problem wherein you have to start out as an unskilled helper, and then get into an apprenticeship. Your helper hours do not count towards the apprenticeship because MURICAAAAA that's why.
Here's a problem though. You obviously cannot just have a ton of kids go into unskilled helper positions. Those are jobs. Not college or school. nobody can afford to have a helper if they truly just already have a fully working and perfectly good staff.
So the helper positions as well as the apprenticeships are not able to find the best people but rather merely whoever gets to the application first or whoever is at the right place at the right time through dumb blind luck.
this problem continues throughout the apprenticeship and even into journeyman status. Notice how badly the TSMC Arizona plant went? Ya it's because most blue collar workers in America suffer from the same problems as millwrights. They do commercial and/or residential stuff a lot, but not a whole lot of industrial. And semi-conductor plants are very high-level complexity and difficulty industrial projects. Even having industrial experience as an industrial electrician, pipefitter, plumber, ironworker, sheet metal worker, etc. will not be enough to successfully tackle this problem.
But don't tell that to the American blue collar guys. You'll instantly see the racism spew forth when they get their itty bitty little feelings all butthurt because they dont' realize that they just simply have never worked on something this hard before.
