There’s so much to love about this story–the use of a feminist icon as an educational motivator for women in non-traditional trades; the acknowledgment that jobs dominated by women aren’t valued monetarily the same way jobs dominated by men are; the determination of Lynn Shaw to not be the only woman on the job anymore, just for starters. But what really stuck with me was the value the school places on training young people for post-high school life other than college.
When I was in high school 25 years ago (my freshman year), a number of my classmates looked forward to becoming juniors so they could start taking classes at the Vo-Tech school. We were a lower to middle income school, and most of us didn’t even think about college. Lots of us already had part-time jobs, and we were thinking full-time work force upon graduation, assuming we got that far. So the Vo-Tech offered us the chance to learn plumbing or electrical work, to be an air conditioner tech (always valuable in south Louisiana) or mechanic, and to get that (we were told) invaluable document, the high school diploma.
But it seems that our education system is now geared toward college attendance only, with little thought to trades, and the result, from my vantage point as a person who teaches a lot of first-year classes, is that there are a number of first year students who shouldn’t be in college–not because they’re unable to do the work, but because they don’t want to. They’re in college because they believe it will help them get a higher-paying job, but that’s not necessarily the case. A plumber makes more, on average, than an assistant manager at The Gap with a BA in Business Administration, which is where a lot of these kids end up, assuming they finish–and about half of them don’t, at least not in the six years their cohort is counted.
And the nice thing about Rosie the Riveter High is that while not everyone attending is planning on going into a trade, everyone there is being exposed to the trades as a whole. It brings together two worlds which often eye each other with suspicion–it demystifies both the academic and the physical worlds of labor.
