One of the most enjoyable parts of visiting Japan was a trip to the Mazda factory in Hiroshima.  One thing stood out – used as I was to oafish, slovenly and un-motivated car mechanics in big dealerships in Europe, I remember being impressed at how professional and motivated the people on the assembly line were.  I didn’t get any impression that they were desperate to have a degree to keep their parents happy.

From today's Irish Times:

"But the most important factor in Germany’s low jobless rate is its vocational training model.

Where other countries produce masses of graduates – often more than their labour markets can handle – German university-leavers have always been a minority of their age group. More than half of German school-leavers study part-time at vocational college and work three days a week as apprentices.

Chancellor Angela Merkel never tires of underlining this as a key to Germany’s economic success."

Hear hear.  100% correct.  Anytime I drive through Germany, I marvel at the amount of factories displaying world brand names - reminding you that this is a country where, unlike the rest of the West, they have a world-class manufacturing base.  People there make stuff - and are proud to do so.  

I always felt universities were clogged up with hundreds of people who should never have been there.  Think back to your college days and the amount of people who had zero interest in studying outside the confines of their course and just did the bare minimum to get by.  It wasn’t that they lacked intellectual ability; it was more that they had no intellectual curiosity; no interest in anything other than drinking and then doing enough question-spotting to “get the grades”.   Which is fair enough, but they hardly needed to go to a university to get drunk for 3 years.  Wouldn’t they have been far better off at a vocational college, learning something practical, given that they were so obviously uninterested in what they were doing?

PC types rail against the “divisive” 11+ transfer exam in NI, but the real problem has never been the exam itself; but the background of snobbery - the small-minded, outdated snobbery of a society which insinuates that academic intelligence (which is but one form of intelligence) is somehow “better” than practical intelligence.  This snobbery creates a society where someone with practical intelligence feels a failure.  This is what needs to be addressed; not streaming into vocational and academic streams; which is just common sense.  

Instead of pretending that “everyone is academic”; and that “everyone has a right to go to university”; it’d fit us better if we wised up and realised that a few egg-heads have an academic form of intelligence and many others have different kinds of intelligence.

Our current snobbery means that:

-         Our economies don’t produce anything.  Everyone wants to be “academic”.  This means no one can make anything.
-      Universities are under continual pressure to subordinate themselves to industry.  Why, cries the average mogul, waste time doing general science or arts degrees when they should exclusively be learning how to do jobs in my factories?  A valid point; but instead of trying to make universities "practical" (not their point - first, many of the best discoveries come out of blue skies research and second they should train people how to think, not how to regurgitate); we should be honest about the need for high-class vocational colleges to meet and indeed anticipate the needs of industry.

-        Our universities are full of people who shouldn’t be there.  In order to maintain the pretence that “everyone is academic”, our universities are trying to be all things to all people and will end up being useless at catering for either the practical or the academic sides.  Universities, no longer clear on what their role should be, have stopped caring and are reducing themselves to degree mills.  It’s all about student numbers and money.

And it cuts both ways.  It was a source of regret to me that I never had an opportunity to do carpentry or tinker with engines (both of which interest me much more than law).  Part of the reason was that I was, to some extent anyway, in the “academic” camp; and, as a result, I was steered away from woodwork or mechanical work.  It was made very clear to me that those kind of subjects were less desirable and certainly weren’t for the "likes of you".  This was hard enough to take, but at least I was sufficiently academic to be able to pass myself at academic subjects, even though I didn’t have much interest in most of them, apart from a few “useless” philosophy subjects.   Since then, the mania, led by crazy parents, for being “academic” has resulted in a situation where universities have been flooded with non-academic students to a point where universities effectively have ceased to be universities.

When are we going to take our heads out of our middle classes bottoms and start to respect people with practical intelligence and revert to seeing academic intelligence for what it really is – a minority pursuit for a few egg heads that has little to do with the real world that most of us should be living in.