Replacing the Subs

[DBNSG]

They did ? Where ?

The Akerley Campus has a 100 bed building just in the back and the waterfront campus has a two hundred bed building overlooking the harbour.

They did ? Where ?

 

[Halifax Tar]

The Akerley Campus has a 100 bed building just in the back and the waterfront campus has a two hundred bed building overlooking the harbour.

View attachment 98389

That's awesome I had no idea. Good to see this.

 

[Grimey]

As a society we need to embrace the skilled trades and do a fundamental shift in how we prepare people for them.

My grandfathers were both British tradesmen, trained in the 50s and 60s. Their apprenticeships were levels above a current Canadian one mainly because they actually cared to train them.

The current Canadian model is a dog eat dog system which favours figuring it out yourself and stealing anyone with any skill from elsewhere. No one wants to train and everyone is lacking workers so they don’t want to dedicate what workers they have to training (sounds a lot like the CAF…).

They went into apprenticeships in grade 10 (gasp, not completing highschool!) based off a list of available trades. Basically the better you did in school let you pick which trade you wanted. If there was 50 millwright, 100 electricians, 50 plumbers, and a basket weaver if you were top grades you could pick and if you were bottom grades well if basket weaver was all that was left, guess where you were going.

By starting after grade 10 they were around 16 years old. By 21 they were both ticketed tradesmen who then proceeded to put in 40+ years of skilled quality work.

One went to management first as a draftsman then into the offices finishing as head of maintenance in a pulp and paper mill, all this without a university degree, or even highschool.

The other proceeded to eventually work in nuclear power and even though he never left the shop floor gained many specialized skilled tickets from NDE to high pressure welding. Again no highschool just skilled workers.

Both are extremely literate, competent, and knowledgeable in their fields, yet Canada doesn’t get it.

We focus on degrees and worthless highschool diplomas (which both seem to have less and less value) without any actual care about what those degrees and diplomas are supposed to represent. We pass anyone who shows up so they get the check in the box but those they are passing can’t actually do what they are supposed to be able to.

Real apprenticeship programs are needed. They need a national high quality standard. They need to take it out of, company, union, and the colleges hands to ensure it is quality.

Those three influences are actively fighting a proper system. Companies because they don’t want to pay for it and try and cheap out wherever possible. Unions because they undermine getting quality applicants in favour of seniority, well preventing management from getting rid of the worst workers. And the colleges because they aren’t focused on creating a quality education, rather making money. It also doesn’t help when most the college management doesn’t understand the trades and focuses on degrees than actual professionals with real world skills.


There is a lack of blue collar nationally. The best time to have started training them was a decade ago. The next best time is today. I suspect it won’t be for an other few years when it really hits us that they shall change, and even then only because they must.

The result of fifty plus years of the education system (and HS guidance counsellors in particular) pushing Uni as the be all-end all and trades (or god forbid - the CAF) being something you did if you were thick. I doubt this view has substantially changed.

 

[YZT580]

As a society we need to embrace the skilled trades and do a fundamental shift in how we prepare people for them.

My grandfathers were both British tradesmen, trained in the 50s and 60s. Their apprenticeships were levels above a current Canadian one mainly because they actually cared to train them.




There is a lack of blue collar nationally. The best time to have started training them was a decade ago. The next best time is today. I suspect it won’t be for a other few years when it really hits us that they shall change, and even then only because they must.

I seem to recall a few comments within these pages alluding to the necessity of transferring our skills off-shore as we were moving into an era where manual labour was disappearing and should no longer be considered as potential careers. Amazing how the outlook has changed. Starting in the 70's, society considered a person without a degree as being a somewhat lesser being. Guidance departments channeled students towards degrees but somehow forgot to identify the potential careers associated with those choices. Even our community colleges focused more on academics and less on useable skills. High schools were closing their industrial arts wings. There will have to be a wholesale restructuring of our schooling system starting with high schools if we are to achieve success in an increasingly industrial world. Centuries ago the Chinese nobility allowed their nails to grow to the point where they could do no meaningful tasks; that is the end result of our current system and is one reason we are importing labour which incidentally only seems to work for the first generation coming over.

 

[Kirkhill]

Greedy unrealistic employers at all levels.

Last apprenticeship posting I looked at out of curiosity wanted 2nd year or farther along apprentices, so basically looking for someone who already has a job.

There isn’t a shortage of people willing to work, but there is a shortage of employers who are willing to actually train employees.

Part of that is true but another part is that the Brits were early converts to life long learning.

Everybody was taught to read and those that wanted to grabbed the value of the public library and the morning paper.

But more importantly people were given the opportunity to continually improve their skills through night schools and colleges like the City and Guilds and the Mechanics Institutes.

My father was in the same classes as your Grandads. A mixture of academy schooling, a hands on life, the army, and a City and Guilds diploma in dairy engineering. He ended up managing an engineering department.

The industrial revolution was powered by men and women like that. Those old time business owners weren't less rapacious than the modern ones. But they saw the value in co-operating with the community to supply schooling and access to information through public librairies and working men's clubs, through supporting institutes that the trades could afford to pay for and, yes, through apprenticeships and on the job training.

That system was already in full flower when James Watt was buying night classes at the university by the penny.

They picked up knowledge along the way and were rewarded for it.

Yes. We focus way too much on the paper and not the skills.

And yes the attitudes of employers have changed.

But we can't forget the value of the pride those trades people got because it was their effort and their money, their sacrifices, that got them their skills and recognition.

They didn't have to go into debt to buy their bit of paper. But they could afford to buy a book or a class and challenge a test every now and then out of their wages.

Lifelong learning.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

High schools have gutted the trades training, with no real ability to teach trades, which is what they did when I went to high school. Even the night schools now do not teach any hands on trades stuff, which is stupid. Tried to enroll my daughter in a night school hobby welding course. there is none anymore. All courses are aimed at getting a ticket. Back in the day, my dad who was a doctor, took welding as a hobby course and loved it.

 

[Brad Sallows]

What is the current state of trades in high schools?

What was available "in my time": combined metal/wood intro in Gr 8, followed by separate metal, wood, power mechanics streams available through Gr 10 (and probably Gr 12 although I didn't track what was offered in senior high). Drafting, electrical starting in Gr 9; no idea how far those streams went.

It would have been possible to fill as much as half of a year with trades, if some of the other requirements (English, French, math, science, socials, phys ed) had been optional for people wanting a trades-focused stream.

 

[Kirkhill]

High schools have gutted the trades training, with no real ability to teach trades, which is what they did when I went to high school. Even the night schools now do not teach any hands on trades stuff, which is stupid. Tried to enroll my daughter in a night school hobby welding course. there is none anymore. All courses are aimed at getting a ticket. Back in the day, my dad who was a doctor, took welding as a hobby course and loved it.

My high school was brand new in 1967. It was actually two schools. A Secondary School and a Vocational Institute. The accommodations included barber chairs and greenhouses, machine shop, welding shop, autobody, printing presses, electrical shop, sheet metal shop and typing classes.

You could graduate from the Voc school in Grade 10 at about 16 with hireable skills and we had lots of factories in Peterborough hiring.

I started TASSS in 1969. By the time I graduated the Voc school had been downgraded. Everybody had to go to Grade 12 at least to qualify for the new technical colleges like Sir Sandford Fleming and take another two years of school or take Grade 13 in preparation for three or four more years of schooling. And everybody knew that a four year course was better than a three year course.

All those old Vocational Institutes that evolved out of the Mechanics Institutes are now gone.

....

Peterborough Government School - 1826
Peterborough was settled by 2000 Robinson Settlers, Irish Catholics largely, in 1825. They were provided with transportation, land, tools, rations and schools.

The Union School - 1855
A new larger grammar school. In 1868 the principal asked that girls be allowed to attend the way they were allowed to attend the Mechanics Institute.

Peterborough Mechanics Institute - 1868 - subscription library, lectures and evening classes available to men and women, the library evolved into Peterborough's first public library (1895) which eventually got a Carnegie building about 1910. The Institutes date back to the Andersonian Institute of Glasgow in 1796, now the University of Strathclyde. Women were paying students, alongside the men from the opening in 1796. Over time the fees were dropped in Peterborough and the Institute became just the Public Library.

In 1871 the government abolished the term grammar school and the Union School became the Peterborough Collegiate Institute. A new building was built in 1907 adjacent to the concurrently constructed Armouries, the YMCA (1895), the Carnegie library (1910)

In 1927 the vocational training service supplied by the Mechanics Institute was made publicly available by converting PCI into PCVI and addig a Vocational School of the type I initially described.

During that turn of the century era Peterborough became known as The Electric City with one of the first hydrodams powering street lights in 1884.
By 1904 the LiftLocks were built and the Trent-Severn Canal was open. Factories included General Electric, Westinghouse, Quaker Oats and DeLaval (originally known for its steam turbines). Other companies like Outboard Marine, Evinrude and Johnson followed, as did Fisher Gauge, Johnson and Johnson and Lakefield Canoes.

The people that built that city were not university graduates. They were people with information and the wits to use it.

 

[IKnowNothing]

What was available "in my time": combined metal/wood intro in Gr 8, followed by separate metal, wood, power mechanics streams available through Gr 10 (and probably Gr 12 although I didn't track what was offered in senior high). Drafting, electrical starting in Gr 9; no idea how far those streams went.

It would have been possible to fill as much as half of a year with trades, if some of the other requirements (English, French, math, science, socials, phys ed) had been optional for people wanting a trades-focused stream.

In Ontario it depends a lot on the school. Going back 15-20 years for first hand:
Grade 7-8 had a monthly/ semi-monthly 1 day module at the local tech centre hosted by highschool- over the two years you got a woodworking day, small engines, robotics, cooking, childcare with robo baby, visual editing, etc. Each module was largely self guided with floating instructors available to get you out of a jam / oversee key segments

My high school had no auto shop, but pretty decent manual (no CNC) metal shop, wood shop, drafting/CAD, and offsite multi-credit carpentry. The school was big into the Specialist High Skills Major program , had multiple medalists annually at Skills Ontario, and regularly placed kids into OYAC.

Rural school that really leaned into it- a lot of "at risk" types saved through those offerings, and the kids who had it as their "calling" so to speak had a great vehicle to get ahead. Looking back- the guidance failing was that it was too typecast in its application. Several B+/A- Academic stream guys would have really benefitted from being steered that way instead of towards the low entry generalist BA degrees that they abandoned after a couple of unfulfilling years to circle back on the trades.