The 'not so clever country' faces looming crisis in skilled trades

We as a society - that is, business and government, left and right, young and old, have made a grave mistake. What began as a good idea has evolved into a bad one. At first, there was a social consensus that everyone should aim for a tertiary education - working-class people wanted something more for their children. Fair enough. That consensus then evolved - everyone should have the opportunity be good enough to attain tertiary education. And now - everyone has the right to a tertiary education.

From the point at which we began to believe tertiary education a right, we created problems for ourselves - because everyone wanted one. We then began inflating peoples’ sense of self. If everyone wanted a tertiary education, then we had to start making sure everyone qualified. We stopped failing people in school - near enough became good enough. Apparently, it’s bad for a person’s self-esteem to tell them that they’re not so good at something, and then to try to discover what it is that they are actually good at. But eventually, everyone leaves the educational cocoon, and when they do, and they find that they are only qualified to answer a big corporation’s phones, they get deflated.

And so, no matter how I look at it, I don’t understand what is wrong with reverting to the principle, everyone should have the opportunity of becoming good enough to attain tertiary education, but if they’re not, let’s tell them so. Indeed, not everyone has the right tools to complete tertiary education. Some are designed for manual work, some for service-based work, some for administration, some for designing buildings, some for drawing up contracts.

This isn’t an elitist proposition. It’s a balanced one. Because as strongly as I believe elite students should be recompensed with more money than mediocre students, I also believe that people should be paid handsomely to train to become plumbers, electricians and carpenters. Moreover, trades training should be afforded a similar status to university education.