Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
Totally agree, that is how it should be.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.