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A $90M Bloomberg initiative will route 15,000 high schoolers in nine cities toward welding, HVAC, and carpentry. Five workers retire from the trades for every two who enter.
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life… and to work with your own hands.
1 Thessalonians 4:11
On June 8, Bloomberg Philanthropies put $90 million behind a push to move high school students directly into Registered Apprenticeships. Welding, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, auto tech. Fifteen thousand students across nine states and cities. Last year there were 600,000 trade job postings against 150,000 new apprentices. Five workers retire for every two who enter.
Paul wrote those words to a Greek port city full of artisans and dockworkers, the people Greco-Roman culture looked down on. Aristocratic opinion reserved honor for philosophy, politics, and civic life. Manual labor marked you as low. When Paul tells the Thessalonians to make working with their hands their ambition, he is reassigning honor. He was a tentmaker himself.
That reassignment mostly held in the West for two thousand years. American policy spent the last generation undoing it. College got framed as the only respectable path. Shop class disappeared. The trades got coded as what you do if you cannot do better.
Now the labor numbers have made that framing untenable. The economy cannot run without electricians and pipefitters, and it is paying dearly for the shortage. The teenagers signing up in Detroit and Chattanooga and Houston are picking up the line Paul wrote.