[Publib] Monday thoughts on Sunday

[Backwage at aol.com]

Recently the New York Times has offered an article about the worth of a  
modern-day master's degree.  The link follows--if as happens it doesn't  
function you can always look the piece up yourselves.
 
_http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-
worth/?scp=1&sq=masters%20degree&st=cse_ 
(http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-worth/?scp=1&sq=masters%20degree&st
=cse) 
 
The Times has received quite a few comments on topic.  Reading through  
them we find the usual themes, many of which have been worked to death by  
newly-minted librarians over the years:  lack of jobs, student loan  burdens, 
terrific competition and of course, the lack of recognition by society  in 
general.
 
Most of these gripes ring about as true as the signs of the beggars on  
freeway on-ramps.   They more or less say "Will Work For Food" but the  reality 
is somewhat at variance with this claim.  I recall years ago when  there 
was a teacher's strike in Los Angeles, the longshore locals invited the  
strikers to work the docks on a temporary basis.  Very few did, and those  who 
did evaporated pretty quickly.  
 
Here in the building trades we often get inquiries by laid-off  teachers 
and other educated folk about apprenticeships.  They  sometimes fill out 
applications, and they always pass the tests, but they almost  never stick 
around, even though the starting apprentice pay meets or  exceeds beginning 
teacher salaries, and the top pay (after only five  years!) beats the heck out of 
what almost any teacher gets.  The  hourly wage for an electrician is $35.95 
and the plumber wage is almost 34  dollars, not counting the benefit 
packages.  Things are a bit slow  right now, but anybody can apply for the 
apprenticeship program.  In fact,  the laborers union is always hiring, and you can 
go to work ASAP.  
 
The reason that these folks don't is because they don't want to.   Work, 
that is.  Today they will use the excuse of the recession, but a year  or so 
ago when things were going fine they just griped about something  else.  Why 
is this so?  Well, we might look at a time when this wasn't  so.
 
The schoolteachers and librarians of my childhood mostly had other careers  
before getting their college degrees.  I had teachers who were  previously 
plumbers, landscapers and carpenters.  They even went back  to the trades in 
summer.  A librarian I knew had been a laborer; another  was a tech writer 
in an aircraft plant.  Another packed fruit in a  cannery.  These weren't 
summer-break jobs but what they did and would have  done forever if they 
hadn't gotten an M.A. degree.  My own father taught  school but was an aircraft 
mechanic before that.  By the time I did my own  librarian internships I 
found that none of my superiors had done anything in the  way of manual work at 
all.  Over the course of a couple of generations, the  working class 
connections had withered away.  
 
Side note:  I worked as a clerk in a public library where none of the  
librarians had ever worked outside the cloister.  All of them had gone  from 
college to college to the library.  In this same place the clerks were  all 
working class people, most with only a bit of college done.  Talk about  a 
culture chasm.  Sometimes I had to translate so the two sides could  understand 
each other.  I could do this because the librarians figured I  was going to 
be a librarian, and because the clerks were the parents of kids I'd  grown 
up with.  I could write a book just from the conversations each side  had 
about the other.
 
Nowadays the educated classes look down on manual labor.  This is not  to 
say that they don't give lip service to it, but the real measure of their  
feeling comes through in how they raise their own kids.  I've seen dozens  of 
librarians and teachers who would tell you "Whatever my kid does is fine 
with  me," but then they sit up late filling out applications to Yale so little 
 Dingbat doesn't have to dirty his hands among the lower classes.  Mind 
you,  the trade union officials I work with are the same--they direct their own 
kids  to college unless the kid is a very dim bulb, at which point they 
finance his  entry into a "music school" where the kid can learn the rudiments 
of guitar  playing until he finds himself (on the couch at home).
 
[As I look down the street where I live, not a single householder mows his  
own lawn or washes his own windows.  The trucks come around from the  
diaper service, the laundry and even to deliver groceries.  They look at me  like 
I'm crazy because I do my own gardening--they can't even name the flowers  
in their own yards.  I have yet to meet a young person in these parts who  
was not destined for college--the kids wear college sweatshirts from junior 
high  school onward.  What will happen to those who don't get into college?   
Will they hate themselves or feel betrayed, like the folks with degrees who 
 can't find the job they want?]
 
And tell me, what is it about actual work that the educated classes  
dislike?  Is it the duties or the milieu, or perhaps the label?  My  own Pop left 
the aircraft business to take a two-thirds cut in pay to be a  
schoolteacher.  For a smart man he was an idiot.  And very proud to be  an intellectual.  
Sometimes I wonder exactly what that means.
 
Once we had masses of people demanding jobs; now we have masses of educated 
 folk demanding jobs that won't dirty their hands--and also that these jobs 
be  located in clean, well-lit offices among others of their kind.  Tell me 
the  truth:  would you work at something other than librarianship for the 
same  money or better?  And why don't you now?  
 
M. McGrorty
**************Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy recipes for the 
grill. (http://food.aol.com/grilling?ncid=emlcntusfood00000005)
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