You can still get a decent job without finishing school 

Ian took one look at the engine of the Ford Cortina lying forlornly, stubbornly, silent. Then he spoke to his father who had been assigned the task of putting everything together after the finished decoke of the cylinder head.

“Yissis, Old Top, you arsehole! You’ve got to torque them down in sequence!”

Once Ian did that to the cylinder head bolts, the 1500 Ford engine fired up first kick and purred like a kitten.

Me, the clever journalist with all the fancy book learning, had not the faintest idea what was going on.

But Ian, who left school at 16 with a “school leaver’s” certificate and was now a qualified electrician, was one of those people who could fix anything.

Decades later, working in England, he annoyed a number of university-educated electrical engineers (mainly by calling them arseholes, I suppose) by showing them they were wrong – and there were better, more efficient ways of doing things.

In the army, I had a mate called John who, like Ian, went into a trade after leaving school. He may not have been able to chat about literature or argue about world politics, but he was an artist with his hands. His perfectly restored Volvo PV544, packing an engine rebuilt and hotted up by him, was testament to that.

Yet, even so, clever Gary, with his father the architect, his mother also a professional, still looked down on John. School leaver’s certificate equals stupid … in Gary’s mind at least.

One day, we were looking at Gary’s beach buggy, with its wide back tyres. John walked up, gave one of them a thump with his fingers, thought for a few seconds and said “30 PSI (pounds per square inch)”. Gary, amazed that you gauge tyre pressure using that technique, asked: “How did you do that?”

Three of us watching burst out laughing. Even I knew that was rubbish but, apparently, Gary’s fine education had been deficient in the common sense curriculum.

I was reminded of Ian and John this week when the negative blow-back started about the government’s plans to introduce a new plan for pupils in Grade 9. It will not be a school leaver’s certificate, but it will be part of a process to identify those pupils who are more suited for vocational and trade training.

In its principle, it is very much like the highly effective German education system, which sorts pupils into three distinct tiers early on: basically, those who can do labouring type work; those who will be the technicians and those who will be engineers.

It sounds very fascist – but it actually isn’t because there is no stigma attached (hope you’re listening, Gary, wherever you are) to the supposedly lower sectors. The system emphasises quality and commitment in whatever is being done and acknowledges the dignity of all workers, as well as the fact that even manual labourers are paid a decent, living wage.

And, looking at Germany, you cannot argue with the fact that it works.

In South Africa, we need to stop filling kids’ heads with the ideas that they can be lawyers or doctors or engineers and live like kings. That’s the reason why so many hopefuls bail out of university and that even those who get degrees are unemployed on street corners.

This country needs people who know cylinder head bolt torque sequences, not those who spout high-falutin’ rhetoric.

Brendan Seery.

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