Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe's Senate Testimony

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We've elevated the importance of "higher education" to such a lofty perch that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled "alternative."

Education is a three-step tango between intellectual awakening, job training, and socialization. In its mad pursuit of a better "ranking" in the world, America has lost sight of job training, and begun a dangerous two-step that will leave us, once again, privileged starving colonists in want of a carpenter or a farmer. Our empire's lifespan will be bookended by Roanokes.

Okay, I'm being melodramatic, but the most striking thing about the Australian higher education system, and the reason I chose to avail myself of it instead of America's, was its practical bent. They seem to believe in a tower of mortar and brick instead of ivory and parchment. (Also, tuition was cheaper, by no coincidence.)

Until jobs that have no business requiring a four-year degree stop using the BA as a screening convenience for HR departments, we will continue to suffer from runaway tuition inflation, degraded vocational education, and a disturbing undercurrent of internship slavery for our "overeducated" youth.

Is this a white a guy in a tie with a master's degree arguing that "we need ditch diggers, too"? Perhaps. But those ditches have a more practical and beneficial impact on the city I live in than whatever pixels I push around in my cubicle today.

The one thing I always liked about the left was its insistence on lionizing labor. It evens out America's baser impulse to worship wealth.

But there's the rub. Labor has a salary ceiling far below intellectual or corporate work, and one version of the American dream is access to that endless vista of money. Too often, we think of high school vocational training as something that dooms a child to a lower stratum of employment. But it doesn't have to be that way. Business skills and vocational skills are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their marriage is the stuff of entrepreneurialism, and entrepreneurialism is the real key to financial Valhalla.

If we included practical skills in our standardized tests, would fewer children be "left behind" in the system? If we expanded our notion of schooling beyond the 19th century schoolmarm's skill set, would we produce more well-rounded graduates? Or am I romanticizing vocational training as an "other" that was, quite frankly, beyond my abilities?

So... don't let this political digression keep you from clicking that link up there and reading Mr. Rowe's testimony. It's quite moving.