Temple Grandin discusses how the U.S. overvalues grades while ignoring skilled trades. In the Netherlands, shop class is respected. Many successful heavy-industry entrepreneurs never finished high school, starting with a welding class and building companies that made them wealthy.
that kid who should be inventing it now is playing video games in the basement and not even getting a job in the video game industry, which would make me a lot less critical if they were getting a job in the video game industry or some other programming thing.
And I also, when I was reading your book, um, learning about how it could be cultural. You know, in the US we're focusing so much on the neurodiversity and autism that we're not seeing what people perhaps in Asia and Europe and are doing with their children, which is they're encouraging them, and thus they grow up and they accept all different ways of thinking.
The kid in Holland took shop class, and they also don't stick their nose up at skilled trades. We have a gigantic shortage of plumbers, electricians, all of these kind of hands-on jobs. And what's happening— I don't even know if I could graduate from high school today, but some of the people I worked with that owned big businesses barely graduated from high school. I know about 3 of them, single welding class. That was the beginning. Started out doing tiny projects, and then that business grew, and one of them now has a corporate jet.
And I understand that it's, it's those who, uh, we do not see, or, or in the, the regular patterns of thinking and learning, that can be the most, uh, successful. It's just about unleashing it and enabling them to become truly great.
