American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth
I&#x27;m a huge fan of Mike Rowe. He&#x27;s done some amazing journalism with &quot;Dirty Jobs&quot; and his mikeroweWORKS foundation is terrific. He claims that unconditional encouragement toward intellectual dreams does not help most people, and argues that more kids should be pursuing professional trades.<p>This overlaps with one of the better suggestions from this article. In general I think these are hit or miss, and maybe too academic, but the problem is a real one and it&#x27;s not going to go away tomorrow. People have this notion that robots will just replace all manufacturing jobs next year or whatever, but as usual it&#x27;s a lot more complex and subtle than that. And it&#x27;s a cultural problem as much as an economic one.<p>Of course I&#x27;m not able to say this from firsthand experience, having had little difficulty in school, and having accumulated enough skill with computers to find plenty of good work. And I can&#x27;t really call for some given change before understanding more about the people in worse situations. I did go to a trade school though and more of those sounds like the best idea so far.