[Publib] Monday thoughts on Sunday

[Sharon Foster]

I like being surrounded by books all day--it eliminates the need for
me to create that environment at home at my own expense. Maybe I would
be happy doing any other work that paid me as well or better that
involved computers and programming, as long as it didn't require me to
work in a cubicle. That eliminates most corporate jobs.

Sharon M. Foster, JD, MLS
Librarians bring order out of chaos.
http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/






On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:54 PM, <Backwage at aol.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> 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.
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