The Need for Vocational Training

 My grand daughter has wanted to be a podiatrist since she was 5 years old.  I remember asking her, really just to see if she was thinking about it, what she wanted to be.  With her answer, you could have knocked me over with a feather.  "You know what a podiatrist is, right?" I asked.  She was insistent that she did indeed.  She is now 15, and still wants to be a podiatrist.  Clearly she will need a lot of education to achieve her goal,  and one wishes the best for her.  My grandson has no idea what he wants to be, which is fine too.  But for him, I think a vocational training may be in order.  As much as college education is necessary, it is also true that we need craftsmen, a lot of them.

Over at the American Thinker Brian Parsons has an interesting article entitled Skills Not Schools: Lessons From the Renaissance. He discusses the philosophy of the "Renaissance Man." in the context of Christian thought.

Renaissance education is the foundation of the modern university system. It was based on the concept of the Universal Man or Uomo Universale. As mankind was the ultimate creation of God, it was man’s job to reach his maximum by continual self-improvement. This idea led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible. To be a Renaissance man, one must develop his knowledge base as well as his craft. Perhaps no person embodies this concept more than Renaissance artist, scientist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. In Leonardo, a duality of the mind and hands is found. Out of this ideal, the university and the journeyman education are born. Yet, rather than striving for this unity of the mind and the body, the education system has juxtaposed these two disciplines in competition with one another.

We have become an over credentialed society. As Parsons points out, you practically can't get a job at a gas station without a degree. And colleges have been accommodating by providing "degrees" in various "studies." How many film majors does the World really need? And what does a
"Feminism Studies" major actually do? The problem with these relatively new degree programs is that they are not grounded in reality, and thus are not rigorous.  But what these "studies" programs lack in academic rigor and real World grounding, they make up with the evangelical fervor of there students.  Self important stuffed shirts like Ibrihim X. Kendi or Cornell West may seem loony tunes to you and me, but the gullible press takes these guys seriously.

On the other hand, a craft, whatever it is, takes place in the real World. You can not wire up a building with imaginary wires and theoretical wiring devices and have it actually work. There are physical constraints, and sometimes one must consider things like, say, friction. If friction did not exist, we couldn't move about. Every time you take a step, you are relying on the friction between the soles of your shoes and the earth. At the same time, friction inhibits motion, imposing a need to expend energy to move an object from here to there.  This is what I mean by physical constraints.  You have to have imagination, but it has to be within the realm of the possible.

But there is something more than simply turning out quantities of items. Perhaps the best way to understand our work is as Martin Luther did: that there is dignity in any work that serves humanity. The farmer as much as the physician, the sewage treatment operator as much as the artist or musician. Or, as Parsons puts it:

Tangible benefits like wages and demand are not the only attractive qualities of skilled labor. There are very real and intangible benefits of it, such as the value of personal production. Renaissance philosophers believed that men were made in the mold of a creative God; we create because God Created. There is a very real fulfillment that arises from the act of creation, and it is no coincidence that the Bible begins with Creation. Observe craftsmen upon completion of a project as they scrutinize their work and you will witness the picture of a Creative God, who on the seventh day marveled in fulfillment of His Creation. Vocational training is neither lesser than a college degree nor contrary to a fulfilling career. There is a valid argument to be made that skilled labor is the perfection of a whole person, and our Renaissance predecessors believed that.

“Everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.” -- Plato