Response #4- Workers and the Paradigm behind Them

Workers and the Paradigm behind Them

     American standards for pushing higher education has always been to encourage the concept that only the uneducated should fall victim to the labor class. People with high degrees in education belong on higher pedestals than those who choose not to further their knowledge through greater schooling. However, in the end, doesn’t everyone end up working for what they want? Whether they’re a doctor and they work in a hospital, or a server and they work in a restaurant, work is inevitable. Both Ken Robison who challenged education paradigms and the Kentucky Labor Institute advocate ideas that the labor class isn’t any more futile than the higher educated class is.

     People from the labor class have knowledge in different areas than people from the scholarly class. Isn’t that society’s reflection in the first place? Everyone is different. It is understandable that everyone’s form of knowledge would be too. There is a difference in “book smarts” and “street smarts”, but both are crucial and distinct. Ken Robison depicts how people with lower levels of education are made to feel guilty or just plain dumb for not having completed greater levels of schooling. The Kentucky Labor Institute teaches the history of the labor class and the positive aspects that have come about because of the accomplishments of the labor class.

     Every person has their own specialty in life. Some have the ability to finish school and attend college while some have the ability to work on farms and do hard labor to achieve their own goals. There is not any shame in the quality of work you do to achieve your goals. For some, physic laws, biochemistry research, and engineering rankings are meaningless compared to predicting cattle stock rates, fishing forecasts, and the productivity of crop rotation. However, an attorney with multiple college degrees would not even begin to understand the world and techniques of a cattle herder and vice versa.

     A person with limited levels of higher education are not any less intelligent than those who have dedicated most of their lives to going to school to get their name on stamped pieces of paper with their names on it known as diplomas. Ken Robison realized this and challenged the paradigm that the uneducated are inadequate and the Kentucky Labor Institute promotes learning more about how important and crucial the labor class is to America. Everyone must work to get where they want, and how they choose to get there, highly educated or not, is their decision. It’s not wrong; it is just society’s reflection. Everyone is different.