[lbo-talk] Re: Beyond Cosby, ... part 2

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sat Jul 10 04:18:06 PDT 2004


Part Two.

Why doesn't education work for the working class? The simple answer is because schools don't teach working class skills. In the post-war boom years it was possible to get out of high school and go directly into a trade or manufacturing job and get `skilled' on the job as you moved up, or as you went through an apprenticeship program through the unions. If you needed `book' learning you when to night school in machining, welding, electrical, or mechanics schools in autos, trucks, aircraft.

The year before I got out of graduate school in art, I went into construction as a carpenter's apprentice (needed money) and went back to school at night as part of the union apprenticeship program. Two nights a week, apprentices showed up at the Berkeley High School woodshop. (The other three nights I was going to art graduate seminars.) It took me about two weeks to find a commercial construction job, which was on UCB campus remodeling California Hall (Chancellor's Office and Graduate Division administration). I was sitting on top of the roof stripping off hand made tiles (made in 1906 ca. by immigrant Italians in Port Costa--echos of Hearst endowment and the hand craft art movements of the period) and watching the campus Third World Strike during lunch break...discussing radical politics with my assigned journeyman, a German carpenter who started off in the National Socialist trade schools in Nazis Germany. We used to laugh in existential glee at the radical disjunctions in our lives that brought us to the same roof top.

Unfortunately, nobody in the carpenter apprentice class could use any of the BHS power tools (it wasn't allowed) so we sat there bored out of our minds and read our textbooks and took stupid exams every few months. The same kind of set up was going on at Laney for machinists, welders, and so forth. It was pretty hard to get too excited about color fields, composition, and overly mannered student paintings in seminars while I was passing out from working all day---but that's another story.

While I was blowing off these night hours at Berkeley High School, I used to think about how to do this program right. I had met Swedish, English, German, and Italian carpenters who had been trained back home. All of them entered the trade at fourteen as apprentices, so they combined work with a technical high school education. This meant that they learned some applied geometry, some drafting, architecture, and plan reading, cabinet making, and other advanced skills at school. None of this sort of thing is now offered in most US schools at the high school level. Running full blown power shops with all the tools needed in multiple work stations, plus drafting rooms (or cad stations now days), modeling, libraries, and coordinating all that with local industry is very expensive, very central planning intensive, very socially conscious raising, and just about everything the US neoliberal horseshit pigs in power, absolutely will not do. Doing the same thing for mechanics, machining, and lower level mechanical engineering and industrial design is even more expensive.

Besides, US capital doesn't need any of that kind of labor any more. We get all that stuff from places that do run high schools like that in China or where ever.

So, getting back to the problem with education...is it has nothing to do with the physical work of creating, building and maintaining a large scale industrial society. We're post-industrial right? So all we do is learn how to cop attitudes and sit around posing all day long in front of a computer. Papers come and go, phones get answered by machines, managers wonder around, and hopefully stay in meetings all day, somebody calls in a pizza order for lunch, and everybody dodges anybody who is working and that sort of finishes off the day. More of the same until Friday. It's all basically bullshit. Achievement? motivations? Work? For what? For Bush and Empire? For Capital?

I can honestly say that I have never, ever used a single thing I learned in school on a job, past ninth grade shop class, and tenth grade geometry---and I went to college for eight years full time.

If I try to imagine myself as an eighteen year old kid and then try to imagine what the future would look like, all I see is a big gray fog bank coming in off the Pacific. Nothingness to the horizon.

So, the working class doesn't need a new identity or a new life plan, the fucking society does.

CG



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