This was pretty hilarious to me, and I really ought to be in its target readership: I've tried college a couple of times and couldn't stick with it. I am far more ashamed of that than proud, however.

From the article:

> Statistics like those put out by the College Board are misleading: they promote a foolish sense of tunnel vision, leading students to believe that the only possible way of obtaining even a middle-wage job is through the traditional, four-year college route.

...

> ...certain industries—business services, health care, education, and particularly manufacturing—have had record increases in middle-wage job openings, with not nearly enough qualified applicants to fill the positions.

Business services ... doesn't require schooling, depending on the service. That's pretty broad, though. Health care? Requires schooling. Education? Schooling. Manufacturing? That's not middle-wage unless ... schooling.

> Companies manufacturing high-precision products—car and aircraft parts, large-scale construction equipment—encounter a dearth of workers with the mathematical and technical skills necessary to operate computer-controlled machines...

Mathematical and technical skills ... that would be, schooling, and ... schooling.

> Thus, the positions remain unfilled, because the American educational system does not currently produce enough job candidates with the technical expertise to perform in the “blue-collar” jobs of the twenty-first century.

This is ridiculous. Does anyone here really expect to attend a four-year college, or even two years at a local college, to be a plumber? Or electrician? Or computer tech? This is blatantly conflating trades with education.

OK, maybe there's another point here I'm not getting. I'll give the article a fair shake ...

> It is in this respect that the prevailing “college for all” philosophy is most misguided...

ARGH. This article really is saying that kids don't need to learn math, because they can work in a factory instead. They don't need to learn English, because they can swing a hammer instead. They don't need to learn history, because they can wrench on a car.

Yet, if they're going to have an opportunity to be part of the force that could renew U.S. industry, they need to know math, English, and history. They need to be able to look at their job and calculate production waste, and make processes more efficient; they need to know how to measure things; they need to be able to quantify things. They need to be able to communicate their findings clearly and effectively, and with a minimum of misunderstanding. and they really need to understand the past; they need to know what's been tried before, and what did and didn't work, and why. I would love, sometime, to hear someone else say, "Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile! He just realized that he could build cars really efficiently if he built them like guns, with lots of cheap, interchangeable parts."

The possibly apocryphal example of Chris was not a failure of the education system; it was a failure of a social system (and, probably, familial system, and many other systems), and that social system is failing in large part because much of it wants to believe that nobody needs to know anything about anything, and that it's somehow wrong to have a solid general education, or that it's even possible to be "over-educated".

I condemn this English teacher to a hell in which everyone communicates via YouTube comments.

edit: Just to be clear, I am -- and have been for a very long time -- in favor of increasing the amount of trades classes in high schools, mostly because I think it's valuable to have multiple skills. However, I don't see the connection between the college track and the decline of these trades classes, and I definitely don't think that someone shouldn't continue their education just because they're active in a particular trade.