3 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love 494”

  1. “What’s wrong with vocational education even more structural barriers to social mobility?
    Fixed that for you.

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  2. Unrealistic universalization of college prep is also a structural barrier to social mobility. There are plenty of people who don’t have the full basket of intellectual gifts to get through a BA, but are gifted in particular areas and can do something more focused.
    We just had a visit from my grandpa, who is 90. He had a brief and unsuccessful brush with college in the 1940s. We were realizing during his visit that he is very spatially gifted (he was pointing out a section of fencing and noting that all of the posts would have needed to be put into the post holes at the same time). He’d wired and plumbed his house himself (with advice from professionals), built the rest of the house, taken care of farm machinery, been an Army medic, done routine medical care for cattle (shots and obstetrics), and worked for decades at a high end saw mill, extracting the most commercial value from cedar logs. He is quite a gifted person. However, he isn’t verbally gifted, and I can easily imagine why he didn’t fly through college–a 5-10 page paper on pretty much any subject in the humanities would have been his Waterloo.

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  3. I should mention that he had an older brother who became a vet and built a very successful Pasadena practice, so my grandpa’s not managing to get through college and become a veterinarian wasn’t a question of either lack of family resources or a bad high school. (Getting drafted after freshman year didn’t help, though.)

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