There is a ton of anti-intellectualism propaganda out there right now and you have willingly or unwittingly soaked some of it up.
No, you me and everyone here was told to go get an education not a diploma. That's what the phrase is. Get an education. That's why you used that phrase first. It was the first phrase that came to your mind. Not get a diploma but get an education.
So stop and think for a bit here. Really seriously. No jokes no nothing no laughs just stop.
Why did we start sending kids to school?
Honest answer? They needed to know how to read so they could work in factories we're reading was necessary. There's a bit more to it as far as the history of religion and the democratization of the printing press and all that fun stuff but early schools were focused on getting people who were used to farming used to factory work.
In other words we want it increased productivity by increasing their skill set. In this case the skill set was reading and basic math.
As technology advanced a few years of school wasn't enough. So we started to send them to a more school. High school.
High School became the minimum not just because of education or because us radical leftists were indoctrinating kids, high school became the minimum because we demanded higher productivity and higher productivity requires more knowledge and skill and more knowledge and skill requires more education.
And we are now at the point where if somebody wants to earn the right to have reliable access to food, shelter, healthcare and transportation then they need to be able to have even more education. Not because they have to be big brain Smarties but because they have to be tremendously productive .
The thread running through all this is that our society demands more productivity from the youth every cycle and the only way you can do that is by increasing their skill sets.
Going to be a plumber. If you learn the basics you're going to be lucky to clear what you could working at one of the nicer fast food restaurants.
If you move up to the equivalent of a journeyman or a master plumber then you're probably going to make at least enough money that if your wife has an equivalent job the two of you can get by as long as nothing goes wrong (sorry I only dabbled in being an electrician and making fun of plumbers because as the saying goes paychecks on fridays, shit runs downhill and don't bite your nails).
And finally when people talk about plumbers making good money what they're talking about is people that own their own plumbing business. Being a plumber and being a small businessman are very different things. They require very different skill sets.
Yeah it is possible for you to pick up the skills but honestly most of the guys I knew that did plumbing and ran their own businesses or honestly any blue collar shit had a wife that had gone to at least two years of college to get the degrees they needed to get the training they needed in order to run a small business because running a small business isn't anywhere near as easy as people think it is.
So typically you've got a husband that did a bunch of advanced training so that they had advanced skills and you have a wife who has a couple of years of college maybe even a full-on degree and then we all just kind of pretend that the only thing there is the husband who fixed sinks until he could make $50 an hour take home...
Again more education is more productivity and we keep demanding more productivity in order to access the good things in life, or frankly even the bare minimum needed to function.
The problem is explaining all this just takes too long. I doubt very many people are going to make it this far into my comment... Anyway if you made it here congratulations!
