#pink floyd's ''the wall'' idfk… how can you eat your pudding if you don't eat your meat!!! kind of shit…

[princessnijireiki]

like honestly 1000% fuck mike rowe, BUT he is not wrong in terms of wanting to remove the stigma from blue collar work (even air quotes “blue collar work” that should, by like the criteria of requiring higher education or w/e, be “white collar,” but it’s too gendered, gross, or racialized for ppl to see it that way*) & vocational ed…

I mean, he’s coming at it in terms of social stigma + a push for nationalist capitalism… more work for ppl domestically is good, as is self-sufficience, but this goon supported donald “union buster” “we need more coal mining” trump— which, side note, we stopped using as much of in america & in the west in general bc of environmental impact AND its relative inefficiency as a fuel source ESP. in costs-benefits analysis including both energy generated & environmental/health dangers in use + acquisition— so, it’s either a “more work but fuck your lungs & poisoned drinking water” angle, or a “more work bc fuck all those FOREIGNERS stealing our jobs here or via outsourcing**” angle, and fuuuuuck that…

but if the idea, or at least the SALES PITCH of the idea of education is to prepare people for various stages of workforce readiness— and the idea people like who dislike vocational ed in k-12 cling to is that you want people to have the tools to aim high, try things & be whatever they want to be, rather than merely “settling” for what they are limited by in terms of education/capability— then more options is good, a portable skillset you can do with your hands/body/physical capability in order to support yourself wherever you go from there is good; NOT emphasizing a narrow curriculum/theme to education that forces everyone to tread a narrow path (whether that’s “one lane” narrow or “but you had stuff to pick from!!!!” when it’s a 3- or 4-option, if that, multiple choice “question"— french or spanish? algebra now or algebra later? music or art, but not both?) for over a decade before cutting them loose & watching them struggle while the seats in that next probable point on the one line of progress they’ve been trained for are fought over, filled up, or never existed… is good

like even just in terms of 1. don’t starve. 2. psychological well-being. and 3. until such time as all employers and/or the state must provide healthcare to all persons (citizen & non-citizen alike), you may need to aim for either gainful enough employment to afford your health needs (whatever they may be) on your own; the professional expertise or access to such care as a perk, a favor, or something you can do for yourself; or employment that typically DOES provide that healthcare and/or worker protections, esp. if you can also unionize. that is like… way more fucking important than analysis of walt whitman or the fucking sats, ykwim?

and then on top of that, it’s institutional subjugation tailor made to normalize an incredibly poor, toxic & exploitative work-life balance, where like… the books you wanna read. art. music. meeting people. expanded horizons. THAT’S where the walt whitman should go.

there is learning a skill for work/skilled labor, and there is learning for love of a thing, and there is learning for growth, and tbh there should only be a grading criteria for one of those things anyway. I’m not saying like abandon grammar & math classes, tools of language are important, and 2 + 2 does generally & consistently equal 4. but I didn’t learn my colors for a bubble test on them… I didn’t learn what letters and numbers were by force, or under pressure of evaluation, I learned them to try and understand the world better as a little kid.

and like… between these hours for school— which were traditionally specifically set to line up with a GROWN ADULT’S work day, aka, not for any efficiency, or for benefit to, or for appropriateness for the child— and even then, Bee Tee Double You, unions had to fight HARD to keep work hours within those limits + mandatory breaks/meals in SOME, not ALL, states (while many school districts also practice carrying student lunch debts, meal shaming, grade repercussions or not releasing student documents for carrying debt; or assignments asking what kids ate as a way to monitor who’s not getting fed, not in order to feed them, but to call dcf)— and the stringency of classes as they are designed, the kinds of thing curricula force vs. omit vs. ban even before teacher bias enters the picture, the time demands of at home work + study + pressures for extracurricular performance in order to have a "better chance” in education-/job-eligibility-as-competition…

people don’t have time to just be fuckin’ people. they don’t even have time to learn what that’s supposed to MEAN, let alone what it might ACTUALLY mean to THEM, without their “performance” (!) suffering, or “risking their chance to succeed,” as if it’s one chance, and as if there’s one success.

—

* (in the same way as I’ve dealt with my fair share of incompetent or just cruel teachers— and considering academia, that’s v. telling in a stanford prison experiment kind of way— there’s A LOT of competent nurses, ARNPs, and PAs out there doing a lot of work covering for ignorant, cruel, oblivious, and lazy doctors’ asses out here in the world, including protecting patients FROM those same doctors. I’m not saying doctors are all bad or don’t know a lot of shit, I’m not saying all nursing staff are angels or that there’s not a hierarchy WITHIN those other medical worker rankings. but that a nurse with a 4yr degree & a decade of hospital experience could be considered blue collar while a resident fresh off the school bus, not even graduated from med school, is considered white collar, is a fucking disgrace & incredibly fucking weird.)

** (people who complain about outsourcing & esp. the ways devaluation of the products of others’ underpaid labor are affecting their income— even when they complain about low cost items, though it’s generally with an implication of lower quality work by “foreigners"— hell, even the people who DO bother to complain about or decry sweatshop labor conditions or low worker wages in comparison to wealthy ceos— are almost always, universally, CONSTANTLY silent abt prison-industrial complex slave/underpaid labor "insourcing,” or human trafficking victims’ exploitation into debt slavery as a human rights matter, or, like, the cheapness of bananas or canned fruit or rice as an extension of globalized agribusiness’s exploitative practices… it’s not JUST a matter of “the work americans don’t want to do,” it’s that they’d rather not have to pay for it or think about it at all while collecting a paycheck themselves, and they blame the “injustice” of not getting their way on that on “foreigners,” bc xenophobia is easier than campaigning for workers’ rights locally + worldwide, or criticizing the wealth disparities of free market capitalism & labor devaluation.)