Continued

His other complaint was about personnel managers with no idea of assessing the value of technical personnel. He was not allowed to advance highly competent, but not degree qualified, existing staff, but had wasted months trying to train qualified engineers, who disappeared quickly once they found the job beyond them.

I had similar problems with the production programmers at some customers. Unless they had actually worked an injection machine they really did not understand how critical to production is colour & material changes, & the order in which they are done. Do it wrong, & you have hours of wasted down time, stripping & cleaning machinery.

spot on Brian; our society seems obsessed with the proper paperwork, but seems to ignore the value of TAFEs and on-the-job training. But Ivan Illich said it all more than 25 years ago in Deschooling Society.

Perhaps we need all those institutes of higher learning to keep the kids off the streets for as long as possible hoping they can pick up something of value.

I myself am a uni dropout and never bothered to complete it or many other things in my life, but I reckon the best education I've had has been from leading hands, managers, mentors and on-the-job workmates who taught me what i really needed to know. And that's how my dad got by, too - an unlearned uneducated man who could barely read or write but had enough nous to ask his mates where he could find some work, and they always lent him a helping hand. A degree well-earned is a rarity, but the university of hard knocks offers what unis can't and don't - experience.

WE must be all about Holden them back to INCREASE OUR CHANCES!

The LORD gave US dominion over the land, the waters, the skies and all that's in them.

How dare young people believe they can escape our divine caveat.

Get hair cuts and REAL jobs! The CAPRICE & BULLYING of the workplace will teach them ALL THEY NEED TO KNOW & give US a better standard of living. Then OUR mindless IMMIGRATION program can replace them all with DEGREES and cultural assets that other countries have paid for.

Think of the BULK SAVINGS.

NEAT Huh!

And don't worry about Australia's fragile environment. Immigrants exploring their new domains here, 4 wheel driving there, soon there won't be anything left to worry about & what's gone is SOON forgotten. THEN we can Singapore style DEVELOP the coasts and make squillions.

That's Labor's NATION BUILDING in a NUTshell! Zeich Heil!

We loves ya Julia & Ya lamb chops!

...“Past working man” had skills honed by multi-skilling, innovation, initiative, dedication and loyalty. All these ingredients produced a useful finished product.

-:-

...“New working man” is defiled by Commodification, modulising, conformity and blind obedience, unreasonable expectation produced by over-education; all qualities from which will be viewed with suspicion by the above group, as unreliable.

I think Houllie makes a valid point, we are educating them in the
wrong courses. Australians seem to like things like womens studies
and philosophy. Meantime around here there are doctors from Nigeria
and Bangaladesh, as not enough Australians are trained in medicine.

Open the papers in WA. They are screaming for accountants, dentists,
doctors, engineers, geologists, welders, electricians, plumbers etc.

Too many of our kids decide that flipping burgers is all they need
to learn, well sorry, but those days are over

Germany is a high skill/high productivity economy par excellence. They do it because they only put the brightest on the path to university and produce engineers not womens studies graduates.
The majority of kids (who are not academic) go through one of the best vocational training regimes in the world.
An ALP full of, at best mediocre apparatchiks, pushes credentionalism because
a) they have no understanding of how a capitalist economy creates job(spending their lives sucking from the union or public teat)
b) because they have no answer to part (a) they mindlesslessly repeat the slogan that what we need is more university places
c) are beholden to provider capture at the universities
d) know that university gratuates, having spent three/four years being brainwashed in an all ALP environment will take much longer to come to their senses, grow up and start voting for adults
e) the economy is unimportant to them so long as they transform society to one which fits their ideological world view.