So yesterday morning I went down to the studios of KFNX-Radio to record a 12-minute blurb about The Copyeditor’s Desk, a freebie perq for members of the North Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce. It was kinda fun…and interesting. The host of this program is none other than the Chamber’s executive director, Joe Galli, who, it develops, is a veteran broadcaster.
Don’t know if it’ll bring us more work—Joe seemed to think it will, but then, that’s his business and it pays to be optimistic about one’s business. If you’re interested, it airs at 11:00 a.m. Mountain Standard Time (which is the same as 11:00 Pacific Daylight Time) on Saturday, November 10. It looks like you can pick up a live stream on the “Daily Lineup” page. The logic of KFNX’s web site is a little hard to follow, but from what I can tell, it looks like the Chamber Business Hour is accessible online only as a live stream, not as asynchronous downloads.
Anyway, after our conversation was recorded, Joe pulled off his earphones and said, “You know, this touches on a big concern in my business. Every time I hire new employees, they can’t write! Their grammar, their spelling…they can’t even put together a whole sentence that makes sense. I need people to help me, but what I’m finding is I can’t trust anybody to do the job and do it right. I end up having to go back and rewrite everything they do—and if I had time for that, I’d do the job myself in the first place.”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to discuss this much before he had to record the next session; about all I could say was “I can’t teach in 16 weeks what people haven’t learned in 13 years of K-12 education.”
The problem is, in the absence of any formal training in grammar and style during the lower grades and with virtually no consistent, across-the-disciplines practice at writing, they come into my classes ignorant as posts and they go out almost as ignorant. When you have nothing to build on, you can’t add much to the edifice.
Instead of learning their subject matter and spending class time teaching their subjects, educators get swept up in amazingly stupid stuff, faddish psycho-social theories that distract from teaching content in favor of the teacher-as-social-worker model. In America, we’ve subscribed to theory after theory after theory, and the result is that kids arrive in college thinking that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state, World War I happened in the 19th century and was the only event of note during that century, and that all essays must contain either three paragraphs or five paragraphs. Many of my students cannot work with fractions. When asked how to figure out how much a tax of 9.13% would cost them if they bought $12 worth of laundry detergent, they have no clue. Social work may keep students in the lower grades from tearing each other apart, but it sure isn’t helping them to learn anything even remotely academic.
While this may look like an educator’s problem, Joe’s anguish over the state of his employees demonstrates the real issue:
The state of K-12 and higher education in this country is a problem for business and it’s a problem for our national security. Businesses cannot function when their white-collar workers arrive on the job unprepared to do white-collar work. The nation cannot function if its businesses cannot function. It’s as simple as that.
If the U.S. is falling behind as the hegemonic leader of the world—and that hegemony, IMHO, is not uniformly a bad thing—it is because over the past two generations our educational system has been sinking into the slough of despond. We try to educate everyone so they’ll fit into the same round holes, but not every child is suited to absorb that education, and not every child’s time should be spent in that effort. We need to provide reliable employment for kids who are better fitted for jobs that require skill at working with one’s hands and one’s common sense—here, in America, not in Indonesia or India!—and honor those jobs, both with respect and with decent pay. At the same time we need to make space and provide high-quality content for the kids whose cast of mind suits them for sitting in front of a computer screen all day. Then we need to get rid of all the psycho-socio-babble theories and teach the real stuff.
Elitist? Sure…unless we bring back manual jobs and bring back good pay for those jobs. It may cost business more to pay American workers a living wage. But the cost of offshoring the work that two-thirds of our population is best suited to do is far higher: one day the cost is likely to be the loss of America as a First-World economy.
Image: 1942 photograph of carpenter at work on Douglas Dam, Tennessee (TVA). Alfred T. Palmer. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID fsac.1a35241. Public domain.
Genie. Bottle. One’s out of the other. No going back.
Manufacturing jobs are gone for ever. Globalization patiently and inexorably moves production to where resources (especially human) are the cheapest. Reversing that tendency would take a dismantling of all of the economic, social and physical means that made it possible in the first place.
Ask the Japanese, and the British. The Japanese once created their own hegemony, with the innovation to create brilliant electronics and automotives, and the quality control to make sure every last shipping unit worked.
The British had their own hegemony, with social mechanisms (rarely military) that engineered civil service organizations that brought backward cultures to full productive, revenue-creating, tax-paying nations in a single generation.
Both of those empires are gone, and both cultures are still seeking their next place in the global ecosystem. The North American culture is going through something similar, with an extended holiday thanks to some really smart technology and business guys and girls. But manufacturing, especially the jobs-creating, man-employing type – gone.
Well, it would seem so, Vinny. But actually…a movement to move offshore operations back onshore has been slowly growing over the past two or three years.
Manufacturers have found that overseas outfits, especially in China, pose some real quality control problems. Who among us has not cringed to see “Made in China” stamped on some product we ordered from Amazon? Currency fluctuation has posed significant risks, US companies have discovered that the rule of law means something different (or nothing at all) in other countries, and changing economic conditions have undermined benefits of offshoring…to say nothing of the resentment engendered among American consumers and their elected representatives.
That’s not to say the US won’t struggle to maintain its status as the world’s leading manufacturing nation, or that broad hostility to organized labor has not impoverished men and women in blue-collar jobs. However, many jobs in the trades, some of which are still decently paid, can’t be offshored. What are you going to do when the kitchen wiring needs to be updated: ship the entire house to Bangladesh?
It’s also important to remember that the US actually still IS the pre-eminent manufacturing nation in the world. We outproduce China by 40 percent. Here’s a report, for example, summarizing this: http://nbcnews.to/mRkxj3.
My point here is that we need to improve our educational system for all our young people, on the K-12 level — so that 18- and 19-year-olds leave high school reasonably literate and able to do practical arithmetic, algebra, and geometry — skills applicable to almost any job. But at that point (or possibly at the end of middle school) we should get realistic about what different people are suited to do, and we should recognize that work is work, skill is skill, all of it deserving of fair rates of pay — whether the work is done with a keyboard or with a piece of heavy equipment.
Not every kid should go to college, and not every job that earns a decent wage should require a college degree. Constructive work of all kinds should be recognized and honored for what it is: an indispensable contribution to the well-being of our country.
I definitely agree with the ‘bring back manual labor jobs’ thing! I was okay in school, not great, but man, put a car in front of me or tell me to rebuild a chimney or weld a pipe, and I was golden. Not everyone’s meant for white collar work. I know in the highschool I used to go to they’ve dropped shop class, woodworking class, and home ec class. And it’s really too bad.
Also, man, that radio host dude could be someone that you can get work from, right? Their writer dummies could write their dumb stuff, you could do your golden whatever to it, and then send it back to him!
LOL! It probably would be carrying coals to Newcastle. Also, given my crazed left-wing politics, I really couldn’t justify supporting some of the political stands this group supports. I have to bite my tongue until it bleeds around those good folk.
Very well said!
And, while I see the point of the comment above, I don’t entirely agree. There are currently some small but significant efforts to return production to the US and/or keep it here in the first place. They are not huge but they have so far been successful. We’ll see how it all plays out.
I can’t say I’m surprised by Joe’s frustrations; I saw it first-hand as a tutor over ten years ago. I was asked to help seniors in high school with their essays, they ostensibly just needed help with the topic direction and superficial editing.
The atrocities of the English language that were being committed, the utter drivel that they were asking me to help burnish and make presentable – oh, it was terrible! And they were not failing out of their classes! I was absolutely appalled that they were allowed to write at that level, quite honestly no better than a sixth grader in my opinion, either in comprehension or composition, and they were being allowed to graduate and attend college.
That was the average student being released from an average high school in Southern CA. It was not a top rated school nor was it a bottom rated school.
I will warrant that I was no great writer myself. But as an avid reader I could recognize and place writing on all ends of the spectrum and good writing just nourishes the soul. Bad writing, well, you know.
At the heart of the matter, someone who cannot string together five words to form a coherent sentence typically fails to comprehend most complex and even most simple notions. For example, one of these students couldn’t follow the train of thought that a talking head using the phrase “the X do not have a dog in this fight” was not actually being racist and calling X “dogs”. As you can imagine, the use of metaphor and analogies were not tools in that student’s toolbox.
To get into the real world with this, even the entry level jobs I’ve been in and have later hired for require a level of ability to think beyond the most basic, spoon feeding, blank eyed, 1 + 1 is 2, comprehension demonstrated by the drones we’ve been calling high school graduates.
I don’t know that that’s great for them and or for our future. There really has to be a more solid educational foundation before we can truly expect a better, more functional society. Certainly there are graduates who do better than that but it struck me how many who don’t.
@ Revanche: The particularly depressing thing about this state of affairs is that these young people are not stupid. The people who show up in my classes are, by and large, pretty bright human beings. They’re just tabulae rasae. And by the age of 19 or so, you shouldn’t be a blank slate.
I write relatively well. Knowing how to write intelligibly was required when I was in high school almost thirty years ago. I managed to test out of Freshman English, and scored a 5.5 (out of 6) on the GRE writing section. He has jobs. I can’t find one. Granted, I don’t live in the Phoenix area, but even if I did, I’m reasonably sure he wouldn’t hire me strictly based on my writing skills. I would also need to have a fair amount of experience in his business area. Something is definitely out of whack with the current state of affairs.
@ Julie: Public relations nuclear physics does not make. An entry-level job for someone with reasonable literacy ought to be an option if you’re willing to work cheap and you have enough nerve to walk in the door and ask to talk to the boss. Or if you’ll work on a freelance basis cheaply. If you’re blogging, you have writing samples coming out the wazoo.
Some years ago a friend of mine wanted to be a journalist. She’d been a florist — went bust during the S&L crisis — and was working at a Kwik-Kopy. She started freelancing for local publications, which pay very poorly. Though the pay was absurd, she got printed clips (i.e., evidence that some editor thought she could write her way out of the proverbial paper bag), which got her into regional and national publications; from there she managed to parlay her way into a full-time job at a weekly, and then she ended up on a Texas daily. Last I heard, she was a section editor for a big-city paper in Texas.
I don’t think she had a bachelor’s degree, come to think of it.
Try starting small and working up.
I would add to this that while I’m not sure sure manufacturing jobs are coming back, the skilled trades are going to potentially experience an upsurge. That’s certainly what I’m encouraging my own son to go into, as he’s very hands-on and very anti-desk. There are people around here looking to hire vo-tech kids right out of high school for a damn good base pay. The local high school offers the opportunity for these kids to earn a certificate and walk out the door with a job paying basically what someone else might make with a bachelor’s degree, on average. Good opportunities for some folks.
On the other hand, my friend teaches vo-tech in a high school one county over…and she’s making note of the electricians she will NOT hire after graduation, LOL! So, it’s not a magic bullet.
@ budget glamorous: LOL! I’ve met a few amazingly incompetent electricians myself. That’s why we have building inspectors…
It seems to me that a bright person who learns a trade, works at it for a few years, and stays alert to how businesses run, to what works and to what doesn’t work, would have a very good shot at starting his or her own lucrative business within a decade after apprenticeship.
Don’t know the situation now, but some years ago a report said that most US millionaires own small service businesses — carpet cleaning companies, exterminating businesses, etc, roofers. In some areas, a person who owns a good landscaping business can do quite well.
One really interesting man I met got himself certified as an arborist and has a flourishing tree service. He grew up in Germany, is well read and very bright, speaks fluent German and English, works like a horse, knows his business to a T. And he and his crews have more work than they can handle. Given what he charges, I expect he’s doing just fine financially.
My mechanic, who has no college training but is some sort of a genius with cars, is about the same: he has a reputation for honesty, and the customers line up in the streets to get at him. One of those outrageously expensive auctions brings its staggeringly valuable antique vehicles to him…you can imagine what he must charge for that work.
I think the trick is to find work you don’t hate, get good at it, build a reputation for integrity, and learn the basics of operating a small business. You may have to do the minimum-wage jobs yourself for the first few years, but after awhile you’re the one who’s paying minimum wage and collecting the profit on the work.