1 post tagged “mike rowe is like a god to me”

I just love Mike Rowe:

So, on the subject of infrastructure, I've been wondering about two things:  One of them is something Mike already mentioned a bit, although I've been wondering about it from a slightly different angle.  The kinds of education programs that Obama seems to support don't really have much to do with training people for infrastructure-related jobs.  Granted some of these jobs do take a college degree (drafting, engineering, and so on require different kinds of degrees), but a lot of the jobs we most need people to fill--especially since they effectively cannot be outsourced--require apprenticeships rather than college of any kind (although some apprenticeships do have some technical school courses as a component).  But, as Mike points out, it's hard for Ivy League wonks to get their heads around the idea that these people who didn't go to college and work in some kind of dirty job or another have an inherently important role to play in society and can and do have meaningful lives.  I've said it a million times before, but going to college doesn't make a person smarter or their life more important or meaningful or anything, though most college-educated people like to fancy that it does.  And it seems clear to me that the last thing this fucking country needs is more people running around with lit degrees.

The other thing that has occurred to me is that Obama's big push to send people to college is really rather a setback for us, at the very least it is a setback in terms of competing with other nations.  There was a time when a high school diploma meant something.  It meant you were educated enough to be a functional citizen and capable of doing or learning most jobs.  It doesn't mean that anymore.  Now, so often in this country, you need some kind of college papers--even if it's just a two-year degree.  Effectively this means that we need a minimum of 20 years to turn out functional, employable people, where most other European and Asian nations only need 18.  There are, of course, further ramifications, including the ever-increasing need for remedial classes (only most colleges aren't supposed to call them that anymore, lest anyone be made to feel badly about themselves).  Since a college education, even at a university that offers advanced degrees, so often begins from a level that should have been mastered sometime in high school--and, believe me, some of the remedial composition classes start at levels that should have been mastered by the sophomore year of high school--the level of discourse in all classes is lowered (except, in my experience, some of the less popular disciplines.  Philosophy professors still seem to hold to a basic, if outdated, idea that if you don't understand the material, it's most likely your fault and you probably just need to study harder). 

The problem is that nobody really seems to know how to fix our public schools, do they?  Well, there are some ideas--even a few that I support--but it's all very political, and no idea that might actually work is ever going to happen.  So, what the hell?  Give up and see if we can just push more people through college.  For our kids, we're planning to use a combination tactic that includes homeschooling and some time in the paramilitary schools of Japan (kiritsu!).  Right now and for the next couple of years, my son goes to public school, but we supplement at home with our own program (his preschool is doing a good job teaching him phonics, so right now we're focused on science, arithmetic, and learning to read Japanese).

But anyway.  Today is one of those great days when I just don't care about the news, and thank goodness, because it's fucking dismal.  None of it--not Chris Dodd, not the breathtaking incompetence at the Treasury Department, none of it--is going to bother me today.  Because today was a beautiful day, and we took a stroll through the garden (the snow is all melted for now), and there is not only spinach coming up already but also the rhubarb is pushing up through the mud and mulch, and it's looking like a good year for rhubarb.  We're already dreaming of the rhubarb cake and cobbler and jam.  Oh, yum.  I guess spinach and rhubarb are related, right?  That's why they're our first two performers.  Oh, well, there is also radicchio, but I never know what to do with it anymore since my husband has decided he hates it.  And so, with the prospect of new fresh food on the way, we're starting our yearly push to empty out the pantry and freezer.  Tonight I'm putting a compote of dried fruits in the crock-pot.  We'll eat it for breakfast, and it should use up some of the fruit I dried last year.  Yum. 

On that note, I just finished reading Consuming Passions:  The Anthropology of Eating.  Interesting stuff.  That stuff you hear about how the Asian concept of "meal" is, basically, "rice" is true, at least for my husband.  He can eat a big spaghetti dinner and not feel full until he's gone and had a nice bowl of sticky white rice. The thing is that, for him, it's not just rice, but white rice, and not just white rice, but Japanese white rice.  The jasmine rice doesn't quite cut it, and if I make brown rice for dinner (as I often do, because I think it tastes good), he still needs some white rice after.  It's really weird.  I was talking about it with my mom (she's the one I borrowed the book from) and we were talking about what might be like "rice" for an American.  I speculated that it might be bread, but I actually think now that for most Americans, it's meat (and especially if you can expand your definition of meat to include eggs).  I think the American conception of a meal revolves around the meat, whatever meat it is.  Mine doesn't really, although I guess I usually assemble meals based on what's going to be our protein and then what will complement that, so I guess that's still the American mindset at work, because in Japan I know I cooked differently.  In Japan, I cooked more Japanese-ish, in that I thought, "OK, there's rice and there's side dishes.  Tonight for side dishes, I want X, Y, and Z side dishes."  Rice is always given, though.  I guess when I cook Japanese food now, that's how I think about it, too, but since we have access to so many different things here than we did in Japan, I only cook Japanese a couple of times a week (and almost never for breakfast, much to my husband's chagrin.  But you just can't buy natto around here). 

Now I'm re-reading a book from one of my philosophy seminars called Poor Richard's Principle by Robert Wuthnow.  I thought it would be interesting to re-read it in light of the current state of the economy, and it is.  I know when I read it the first time around I severely underestimated the importance of it.  Not "important" in the sense that it's going to make some big difference in the world, because, yes, I know:  nobody has read it.  But "important" in the sense that they probably should.

One final thing:  I've been reading on another site a debate about abstinence-only education versus comprehensive sex education, and people have been citing these statistics that purport to show that "abstinence education doesn't work."  To me, what they seem to show is that there is not much difference in the behaviors or attitudes between students who receive abstinence-only ed and those who receive comprehensive sex education (although every study shows something different, so who the hell knows?).  To my mind, that doesn't mean that "abstinence ed doesn't work"--it means neither of them "works."  I mean, I see that the point is that abstinence-only education doesn't cause extraordinary abstinence.  But that doesn't mean that comprehensive sex ed, then, must work better, just because we've set that up as the opposite.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't have a great impact on when kids start having sex or even how likely they are to use protection routinely.  In other words, I think this is a totally false debate.  Neither "works."  This is not at all surprising given the completely mixed signals kids get from our culture as a whole.

Meh.  Anyway.  Fruit compote!