Respect for skilled trades
 

 

In a recent symposium in Toronto, educators and business leaders warned of the looming shortage of people of skilled trades, e.g. plumbers, welders, construction workers, in Canada, and called on governments, schools and employers to encourage more young people to enter the skilled trades.

The warning mainly focused on the crisis of unfilled jobs, projected to be one third of a million by 2025. From the latest census data, Canada has the most proportion of people with college or university credentials in the developed world. Yet, there is a gap in terms of matching the skills people have and the skills that are required.

However, the root of this discrepancy is not only a mismatch of skills training, but a reflection of the lack of respect for work done with the hands. Somehow, there is this snobbishness that work done with the head is better and has more respect than work done with the hands. Therefore, most young people choose not to enter skilled trades.

The crisis is also more than training people to fill skilled jobs, but a disconnection between our head and our hands, which can lead us to live abstractly in ideas, without concretization in forms, or a lack of mastery in intelligent expression. Looking back in history, we notice the importance of work done with the hands – builders have left us beautiful monuments, museum, cathedrals, networks of communications, railways. We need builders who leave footprints of culture and civilization.

Nature is a beautiful example of expression in intelligent forms. Human beings also have this innate need to express themselves. Let us recover the pride of building and making things with our hands. Let us master the skills of transforming matter and let us express our deepest values through beautiful and inspiring forms.

 

March 19, 2008

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