Comment 42021

By moylek (registered) - website | Posted June 16, 2010 at 08:21:48

An information-based economy is based on a resource of high-skilled, well educated labour, people smart enough to know they want more out of life than just a job.

This jumped out at me, too, Michelle. When I was in high school, I knew a lot of kids for whom education was neither a priority nor, really, a possibility: some kids are not prepared for a long education and skilled work, some kids are too damaged for it, and kids are just plain dumb. My teacher friends tell me that - surprise, surprise - this has not changed in 25 years.

Some people are well suited to work which does not require education and challenge: I don't just mean that they can't do anything else, I mean that it's what they want. They just want to be told what to do, where to do it, and receive a fair wage for their day's labour, and then go home and pursue "recreation and culture". Some dumb people - even damaged people - live happy lives and give of their time and talents to their neighbourhoods and cities.

I'm all for our economy shifting towards more brain work and less grunt work - the trend has served us pretty well over the past few hundred years - but I get nervous whenever I hear talk which makes white-collar brain work sound like the "normal" thing do to, as if a manual labourer is merely a failed office worker. Granted, that might be true for many individual manual labourers, but not for all and I don't think that it should be true for our society as a whole.

Someone needs to build the roads, to raise the roofs, the collect the trash, to cut the trees, to dig the holes, and to clean the toilets. And the people who do these jobs need to be part of our society, not sad leavings or desperate brought-ins.

I'm not saying that we have ever put as much value on being a dustman as a doctor nor that we should, but rather that we can't aim our education and economic systems at producing a doctors' world in which the dustmen are merely embarrassing failures.

Comment edited by moylek on 2010-06-16 07:37:49

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