Originally posted on Facebook, July 16, 2013. Sounds like Mayor Bloomberg has been eavesdropping on Becker family dinner discussions. Here's businessman Eric Roper in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg got it right the other day when he encouraged kids to think about forgoing college and becoming plumbers instead. Not everyone needs to go to college.So true, and it doesn't mean consigning yourself to an attenuated intellectual life or blinkered prejudice—a point made by Will Hunting long ago:
The sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.Plus, plumbers really help people—and the industrious ones go on to create jobs for others. More from Roper:
After all, what's wrong with plunging those toilets? You get good at the job, do it for a few years, and maybe you open your own plumbing business and hire people to work for you.So, a decent, honorable job that helps people and allows you to support yourself and your family. At night, you can read all the Kierkegaard and Spinoza and Nabokov you want—for free! Maybe no degrees or letters after your name, and almost certainly no fame or great fortune.
But you'd have the satisfaction of being a good plumber, serving your customers well, and honoring God through your hard work and craftsmanship. As Robert Bolt's Thomas More offered in A Man for All Seasons, "Not a bad public, that."
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