Dear Editor,
When I lived in Canada I once gave a lift in my car to a male York University student. He told me he was in his final year Sociology degree programme. I asked him how he intended to deploy the knowledge he had acquired after graduation. His reply, word for word was, “Huh! What does deploy mean?”
Poor fellow, he and countless others in and out of university are much more preoccupied with words such as employ, unemployed, welfare, youth counsellor, etc. When I was a growing boy my parents used to threaten me like this: “If you don’t learn you maths, chemistry, physics, spelling and reading, we will remove you from high school and send you to learn a trade.” As if reading, writing, maths, etc, were not prerequisites for trades such as electrical, refrigeration, motor mechanics, carpentry, bricklaying and plumbing.
My parents and their contemporaries would have had me believe that a tradesman’s role in society was less than desirable, would relegate me to a lower station in life and would condemn me as a high school dropout having failed miserably in my brief pursuit of excellence in such fields as law and medicine. So I plodded through high school giving my parents enhanced standing in their silly society, I ploughed through a profession and got to the top of it – maths, chemistry, physics, psychology, and management are all strings on my bow – but the tap continues to drip in my home, the floor continually gets flooded and all because I never learned to change a simple washer. Do you call your lawyer when your car breaks down?
We all play roles in the society in which we live, but we tend to overemphasise the importance of some groups and underplay those of others. We pay the penalty for our inattention by being held to ransom by TV repair outlets, car mechanics, electronics shops, carpenters, fence-menders and plumbers.
Another threat my parents loved to work me over with was, “We’ll send you to work on a farm.” The impertinent and fallacious implication seemed to be that farmers were also high school dropouts placed several degrees outside the boundaries of acceptable society and therefore of no consequence. Yet when the milk failed to be delivered and the meat looked like offal and the chickens were scrawny and the vegetables were wilted and withered, those in acceptable society could talk of nothing but farmers, their produce and how hungry they feel.
It is foolishness like this that is hanging up our pride when we look for vocations. We are still encumbered by our inability to analyse and to recognize the hypocritical pecking order on which we place ourselves and our contemporaries. It may be socially chic to discuss space flight and the planetarium; to evaluate Einstein, Rembrandt, Hume, Shakespeare and Calvin, but in daily living is it not equally important to distinguish between an alternator and a generator, a TV fuse and TV tube, to what causes overheating in your car, to be able to replace a window pane, to grow vegetables or to erect a few shelves or ceiling tiles?
If my own son decides to drop out of school at grade 10 do you imagine I will be ashamed for myself and would feel I have failed to give him direction? That I would bemoan the fact that I did not show him the quality of life he would create for himself by completing grade 13? Of course, I will feel all of these things but I will immediately dismiss these guilt feelings inherent in the conditioning process our society imposes on us. I would quickly realize that at age 16, my son, will have broken free of the intellectual shackles suffusing his individualism and potential. He will be free to become an apprentice tradesman or something similar. He will be so many years ahead in his chosen field so that when our university graduates begin their job hunting he will probably be the one to interview them. They will of course present their paper degree mouthing their psychology cliches attesting to the fact that they mastered the theory of relativity and have written countless dissertations on George Orwell’s 1984 and on the Renaissance and the Reformation periods. But when my son picks up his soldering iron and his Phillips screwdriver in his roughened hands and with his unrefined speech tries to elicit how much they know about electrical circuits, fuses, air conditioners, insulation, metal stress and pipe fittings, they will squirm in their seats and with wide-eyed wonder come to realize that the misdirection and lack of focus in society is the monopoly of those who would underestimate, misunderstand and downgrade their own needs.
When our society chooses to redefine the role each of us will play, the puzzle of the vocational bottleneck will be solved, the meaning of the word ‘deploy’ will be clearly understood by all, including university graduates, and will come closer to realizing our individual needs. The question now becomes, is this what our society wants for us? I doubt it. Take a look at the classified columns in any daily newspaper, examine the countless positions open, evaluate the background training of the unemployed masses and see whether our vocations are misdirected or not.
Yours faithfully,
George L Munroe
