Society of Engineering Ethics

As someone who went to a trade school, I cannot stress how fucking true this feels. There is an air of superiority to everyone in that building. Everything there is "oh, well, we're better because we won't have student debt" "we'll be able to fix our own houses" "college is useless" and yeah college is overhyped but so are the trades at this point! Please, please, please just tell people all their options! It's genuinely better for everyone. Not every kid is cut out for college and not everyone is cut for the trades, either, so present people with their options.

Also, I just want to add - some of this is definitely due to how we're raised. The guy with the bachelors thinks that the plumber is dumb because that's what we've been raised to expect - that the trades are for people who were "too dumb" for college. The plumber thinks that the guy with the degree is gullible and stupid because he fell for the big scam that is college. Neither of these are true. But we've been taught to believe these things. People look down on the skilled trades and hygenic work and manual labor as being stuff only stupid people do, and trade schools really feed the narrative of tradesworkers being better than people who went to college. Everyone is like "oh, well, we want the kids to be invested so we'll just like, tell them what a smart choice they made" or "oh we need more tradesworkers and it pays well so we'll tell kids that it's the better option" and eventually it stops being hyping up the trades and starts creating a culture of ragging on college.

Please, just educate people of all options and stop being like this.

people of all options and

stop being like this.

No longer a student but JSTOR helped me out quite a lot when I was, so have a meme as appreciation :D

(the meme is described in the alt text)

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

a society learned

from our mistakes

Mercer Museum

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Mercer Museum. Doylestown, PA.

ISO 1600 | 18mm | f/5.6 | 1/6 sec

Expression sheet, cyclopses can be expressive too!

- Recursion, Blake Crouch