Ruminations of a Plebian (Post 1)

By: Richard Yeagley

The following words are based on my opinions, expressions, interpretations, and philosophies. They are rarely absolute fact. Hopefully my personal observations and inferences will produce thoughts of your own. Agree or disagree, like or dislike, hopefully this piece of writing will impel you to think about the topics addressed. Some may call it a diatribe written by an aimlessly meandering wannabe blogger. I would like to call it, Ruminations of a Plebian.

Working Class Economics

For any economy to have true wealth and sustainability, a legitimate and robust middle class must exist. Not an enervated and struggling middle class, but a robust middle class that is able to consume without perpetual dependency on large scale credit. This description opposes the view of the  over-consumer who lives life with false wealth that is based on future production, production that is always based on uncalculated speculation. This model serves immediate gratification as an end and instant consumption as a means.

The middle class mentality is based on characteristics of diligence and duty. Is there an actual middle class in America? Of course, but it is reducing in size and clout. These individuals are the backbone of our economy. They are working class with familial or personal finances and are stable. Or, at least they were. They do not live pay check to pay check; they have limited investments, and assets in the form of mortgages and automobiles. If the middle class cannot save even a modest portion of their earnings, the whole system is distorted. If the middle class cannot live without overleveraging their personal finances and borrowing extensively, then they are not middle class but lower class, interminable debters living beyond their means. As much as social class is a difficult topic to address, there are current distortions in the tiers existent in American economic policy. These distortions thrive in an inflated belief inherent in many Americans that is founded upon the expectations of an entitled lifestyle. A lifestyle that is unattainable for most and unsustainable for all under our current economic system. 

I will repeat my point one more time, our system of lending is based not on the idea of borrowing against future production, but on the premise of excessive and additive consumption. As long as we intake, it doesn’t matter if the output is proportional. Americans are ingrained with a compulsory attitude towards consumption and our feeling of production and service are dismissed as secondary. Do you see the incongruity?
This one subsequent comment (although it currently seems out of place) will be the predicate for my next section; the idea of the utopian society is a fallacy and impossibility. Peace and harmony exists only in brief glorious moments but can never be realized.

Specialization

This brings me to an important point about the transformation currently taking place. Specialization in capitalist systems is absolutely imperative and was one of the factors behind the success of developing economies. Even on a teleological and epistemological level, man found a purpose for this structuring of his life. He would master a trade, profession, service, etc. and would find meaning and knowledge in his occupational arena. Our society is now creating a pervasive idea that this specialization is repressive and creates a life of deterministic banality. Capitalism in its very essence requires specialization in order to produce greater yields. When the working class is not specialized, capitalism will naturally transform into another form, a more unproductive one. We are currently at an intermediary stage between self-reliance and partial reliance. America’s economic pendulum is gradually swinging towards the latter position. This current cultural malady is caused by the reinforcement of the "academic college" for every youth attitude and the perpetuation of the utopian society which implies a collective and classless system. It is thought that the broader our understanding, the better off we will be, even if it is at the expense of producing economically unskilled citizens and even if it convolutes the understanding of the people. This idea is most salient in the shunning and vilification of the vocational form of schooling and the support and praise of the four year liberal arts college. Now let me state that liberal arts colleges and academic institutions are indispensable and do serve a purpose for our nation. There are several occupations that are specialized and functional in these environments, i.e., law and medical school, business and so forth, and there are plenty of individuals who obtain knowledge best within these models. The problem is that there has been an outpour of liberal arts colleges that exist in a paradigm that is helpful to many but inauspicious to the majority that are told that this is their best form of education. They are business schemes that have nothing to offer to its students except a degree which states their attendance to the four year college in exchange for huge amounts of debt. These colleges attract  students who have no interest or concept of philosophy or humanities. These students are convinced they will learn a great deal about the world in an open forum and will graduate with the skills necessary to enter a competitive workforce. But this is rarely the case. Many of these students sleep walk their way through college (also drinking and copulating) and others soak up all the knowledge possible from their professors with no clue how to implement it into a functional well-paying occupation. This is where the specialized trainees or tradeworkers are at a great advantage; they have the skills and knowledge which can be directly applied to an occupation and economy. 

These specialized workers have the satisfaction of knowing that they are on the path towards mastery of a particular skill. One needs to gain worldly knowledge through her own curiosity and self initiated experiences. Liberal arts professors are not the ones to force an inquisitive mind on their students. Students who enter liberal arts institutions should already have that curiosity and should be further exploring the arts, humanities, and philosophies. If a student enters an educational institution without the least bit of curiosity, they will be highly susceptible to the demagoguery of the unreasoned and didactic professors that are sometimes employed at colleges. This will not produce introspective and individualistic minds, but will in fact train our students to accept dogmatic ideas and will render their own personal convictions as invalid. This will prepare them to be the minions of the demagogues, dictators, bosses, and teachers, and will populate a society with a paucity of amount of thinkers, innovators, creators of ideas, products, and services.

There is nothing more satisfying for a teacher than to galvanize her students to think for themselves. Lectures can be read. They are in a thing called books. Our college institutions are attempting to turn our young into uniform intellectuals by pithily disseminating social and cultural ideas that have no place in a classroom populated with so many disengaged students. How about this for an idea: students pay to go to school for practical knowledge that can then be incorporated in economic output and will produce financial prosperity and creative innovation. The accumulation of intellectual, philosophical, and social ideologies can be discovered through conversations, readings, and forums in the public sphere. Go to school to learn a specific skill set, train six hours a day as a musician or as an electrician apprentice, then go home and read the local paper or seek information from a trusted journalist. Then you can form your own inferences, questions, and judgments, and have discourse with your colleagues, friends, or relatives. Learn a practical skill and gain your own metaphysical and epistemological basis through personal experiences and self-reflection. Internal thought influenced by the senses produces personal ideas and unique philosophies. They can act as our own educational lectures that set up an individual's understanding of her own perceptions and thoughts.

Vocational Training

My aim is not to deride all departments at all major collegiate institutions. These institutions are infinitely valuable. But we should start to reconsider some of the antiquated structures and formulas employed in teaching and preparing our youth for a modern workforce. Potential students should consider the costs, risks, and return of their education. If you are going to work with a specific technology, get your hands on that piece of equipment. Work with it on a daily basis, hours and hours a day. Don’t just speak of the concepts and leave the practical usage of that technology for once you graduate from you schooling. That is major problem with the academic realm; too much talk, no application. Without the application of the concept, we are left with a philosophical void. This philosophical belief that is perpetuated unknowingly in our school systems is a renunciation of mankind’s desire for tactile experience, or as it is often referred to (in hopes of mitigating controversial connotations) "career and technical training," or CTE. CTE is a taboo for many inexplicable reasons. It implies a lack of intellect when a student mentions that he would like to focus on a particular vocation. This educational path creates a specialized worker and specialization is for whatever reason subordinated by general and esoteric forms of knowledge. But isn’t the surgeon a highly specialized worker himself? Secondly, vocational education often implies work that is done in the manual spectrum. This is grotesquely limited in its semantic interpretation of what vocational actually entails. Also, isn’t their skill involved in the manual realm? Isn’t the surgeon performing duties of manual dexterity? Thirdly, vocational training is thought to be inferior in occupational prestige and in potential wages. But how can that be true when fewer students specialize in an industry and therefore create a higher demand for workers in that industry? Will this subsequently produce higher wages for the unmet demand that is being produced by the void in unskilled workers? We, meaning society as a whole, need to break the barriers of what vocational training actually means. Is the film student not going to school for vocational reasons? Is the surgeon not an individual seeking knowledge for a particular vocation? But the so called intellectual, those who like to create and disseminate cultural ideas--when in reality most cultural sentiments are created from the progressives and entrepreneurs, would clamor that students don’t receive a rounded education in vocational schools. To which I would have two points. Firstly, as I have stated before, most majors in four-year colleges do not produce students who are specialized in any capacity and in any particular industry. This intense fixation with creating a society replete entirely with academics is in fact a nightmare, a dystopian society in which no one creates anything of utilitarian value but in fact creates an abundance of verbal diarrhea predicated on philosophical and political inanities. I would prefer to eschew the polishing of my rounded education and focus on my own inquisition and development and would much prefer to garner an education and training in a skill and industry that will produce both a gratification of personal agency and will allow for the cultivation of a successful and prideful career. Secondly, have our primary and secondary school systems failed us so diastrously to the extent that we have an illiterate and uneducated youth generation that needs further assistance with basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Our public school system, as well as learning in the domestic arena, should be the place where our students procure a rounded education.