Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
You just hit on a big pet peeve of mine so bear with me. :) It seems to me that the professions kids look up to now are a lot less "blue collar" than they were 30-40 years ago. Railroading is blue collar, and I have my doubts that it is even on the radar screen for most kids, the more likely answer one will get from kids is something generic like "I want to make a lot of money" and they are fed the idea that a college degree in computers or business is the way to go. It's a shame, really. A business or computer degree means starting out in an unstable, degrading job like tech support or data entry (or worse, flipping burgers or a convenience store clerk) making just above minimum wage until they can land that big break (and that "big break" for an MBA often means getting to *manage* said McDonalds or 7-11), while going the blue collar route - whether railroading, driving trucks, entering an apprenticeship to be an electrician, lineman, plumber, steamfitter, welder, what have you - means good pay ($30/hr for some jobs!), a job they can be proud of, and at least some job stability despite the number of blue collar jobs continuing to shrink. This is reflected in the culture too. Kids used to be encouraged to take up hobbies like model railroading. Or amateur radio, or model rocketry, or archery, or other similar things. How many of those hobbies are now mostly adult hobbies, including model railroading? Instead, kids have their PlayStations and their Harry Potter, and they want PalmPilots and wireless phones to carry to school because they are sooo unhip if they don't have one. They are being sold a (sometimes violent) fantasy world fueled by high-tech electronic games, but nothing that will prepare them for a real career or spark a lifelong interest in railroading or any other career. No wonder the responses you get these days when you ask high school kids what they want to go into are, "business, I guess"; "computers, I guess", "I don't care as long as I make a lot of money". In the 1950s and 1960s, kids learned songs about John Henry's hammer, Davy Crockett, going North to Alaska, loading coal, lumberjacks, and of course TRAINS! Even into the 1980s we still had Springsteen and Mellencamp. What music do the kids have today, and what things are kids being encouraged to take an interest in because of it? I'm afraid to even ask but I think the Backstreet Boys and Eminem have a lot to do with it. Yeah, I was fed the "go into computers or business" line too, hit my teenage years just as video games and malls became all the rage and the Reagan era of commercialism and instant gratification got into full swing, and I'm bitter about it. If I had to do it over again and knew then what I know now, I know exactly which way I'd go, even if it would have meant putting up with "working for the railroad, do people still, like, even do that? It sounds hicky fer shuuure, like totally" from the peers. Kids today aren't interested in things like railroading as a career because we live in a society that doesn't encourage them to be interested. Sad.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag