Vocational Trades Education And Students

The current hot discussion in education is the demand for training youth in manual trades. Many people insist that a trade/schoolindustrial education is vital to giving students the opportunity to market the skills that they will have gained from this learning environment. I agree wholeheartedly with this concept. But unless the present attitude of parents, students and the community towards manual labor changes, nothing will be gained from this attempt. Unless parents feel proud that their son or daughter is a tradesman, students will not want to learn manual labor skills let alone become a tradesman.

As a contractor for about twenty years, I have met and worked with many tradesmen, many of whom have become quite wealthy with the labor of their hands. An example is a close friend of mine with whom I worked for about ten years in Hawaii. Today at 55 years, he has retired with a tidy savings amount and two houses which he constructed himself. One he lives in, the other he rents.

In the CNMI, we feel that being a laborer is a menial job, fit only for nonresident workers. We feel that working in a government job is prestigious work. Our hands are always clean, our clothes are neatly pressed and we don’t sweat. Our salaries are guaranteed and the time off is great. Then after twenty years, we can retire with a pension. Forget the fact that perhaps we never enjoyed the work. Who could ask for more. Frankly speaking, a good tradesman can earn a better living working with his hands and with greater pride than few other people ever experience.

Examine the trades market, why do we have so few residents working in them today? Why does everybody rush to and plea for a government job? What happens to the students who study voced at MHS? The Northern Marianas College has one of the finest vocational educational facilities in the entire Pacific area, yet why do so few study there? After graduating, where do they work?

Why are so many unemployed young people begging for work? Aren’t there jobs available in the private sector for them or is it that they are too proud to work along side a nonresident worker earning the minimum wage? What should an employer pay a nonskilled worker who cannot mix cement, or plaster, or weld, or do an electrical installation, or other needed skill? Where does one start in the trades if not at the bottom learning it from fellow workers? Once one has learned, does he have to remain in the same job? Can’t he earn a better wage after he is skilled?

Logic tells me that it would be better for me to take a job paying me perhaps $3.50 an hour to learn a trade by actually doing it on job sites, than instead of going to a classroom and paying to learn how to do the same work. To complement my hands on manual work/learning, I could go to night school and take some courses on reading and perhaps drafting or some other related course to further my trades ability.

The major obstacle to succeeding in promoting any voced program is that unless parents change their attitude towards skilled labor, all the demands for vocational education training will come to no avail. Parents must encourage sons and daughter to want to enter the trades field Then and only then will we ever have a resident tradesman skilled labor force.

Ample opportunities are currently available for young people and adults to learn trade skills, why aren’t they being utilized? (To be continued)