Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili assured: "The personnel who have mastered the technique, decide everything." Subsequent experience indicated: in order to really solve, cadres must possess not only technology, but also the social sciences (their transformation into dogmas under the successors of Dzhugashvili is one of the most important reasons for the temporary failure of socialism). Nevertheless, possession of technology remains vital to the individual and society (in the same dogmatization of the social sciences, the transfer of their development to the discretion of people not connected with real production and / or exact sciences played a significant role).As far as I know, from countries that still out of habit call themselves developed, at the moment, except that Germany does not complain publicly about the lack of specialists to work in its own industry. Basically - because it itself preserves and develops this industry. All the rest lack not only the laborer force, but also specialists in various branches. The famous “Polish plumber” became a horror story for France, among other things, also because the French, who want to seriously study how to work with modern sanitary equipment (and its insides are rather complicated), there are less and less every day. Less, in particular, because, as far as I can tell, the lack of technically competent personnel is to some extent a manifestation of attempts to create a so-called post-industrial society without the proper technical prerequisites for it.
Initially, the idea of a post-industrial society was that machines should be produced, and people only think out - and come up, of course, not only what machines create, but also various more or less pleasant things and pleasant ways to spend time. Alas, the equipment has not yet matured to fully automate the entire production cycle (even the parts made by volumetric printers most often need to be assembled into a seamless structure). Therefore, they tried to simulate the post-industrial dream by transferring jobs to regions with cheap labor.
But as soon as the transfer became widespread, many discrepancies with the ideal of post-industrialism appeared. One of these discrepancies: a rather small part of the people can engage in creative activity at a level of interest to others. Moreover, it turned out: learning all sorts of pleasant things is inseparable from the training that is required for production. Roughly speaking, when they stopped seriously teaching people to the natural and technical sciences, it turned out that they at the same time learn the humanities much worse. This can be seen at least by the example of our current creaklists: most of them are focused on pure humanitarianism, and experience shows that they, in the humanitarian sphere, to put it mildly, are not oriented - they don’t feel the difference between the desired and the possible, between the pleasant and the useful, spectacular and effective, between the formal and the informative, between the state and the process ...
I’m not even talking about the many disciplines on the border between the exact and humanitarian sciences. Medicine, sociology, architecture and urban planning ... they all obviously suffer from the hope of replacing the exact knowledge and the exact measurement of the wishful thinking.
But to revive the natural-technical education is already quite difficult. During the time when postmodern utopia was in fashion, a significant part of not only those who want to learn what is needed for production, but also those who are willing (and able) to learn what is needed for production have been lost. For too many believed: there will be no production itself - it means there will be no need to learn and teach it. At the moment, there is a decline in the vocational education system itself. Most likely, in the near future, those countries that deem it necessary to preserve their own production will have to recreate this system from scratch.
For example, the recent meeting on education and engineering with the President of the Russian Federation, in my opinion, shows very negative trends. And a few of my acquaintances, who are somehow interested in these issues, say in a friendly chorus: you need to recreate everything, starting from the conceptual level - from understanding why you need a technical education.
But we have one trump card: we, fortunately, started moving into post-industrialism much later than others - when many people had already seen the ineffectiveness of this idea with the naked eye. Therefore, our education system has so far been ruined to a lesser extent than the western one - and we still have hope to revive faster than our opponents. So I think: we will not suffer so much from the post-industrialist utopia, as Western countries.
But, naturally, for the revival of the education system demanded by industry, it is necessary to revive the industry itself. And most importantly - for both of these revivals, we need to understand the causes of the problem we are facing. Unfortunately for me, I have a very shaky hope for this, since, for example, the economic block of the government (EBP) of the Russian Federation itself repeats post-industrialist and other libertarian spells. So from him - and from other lovers of liberal alternatives to thinking - one does not have to wait for an understanding of the causes of everything that happens with the country and the world. In particular, the current composition of the EBP is not indicative of an understanding of the causes of the inoperability of the current imitation of post-industrialism. This means that our education will again become meaningful and useful not earlier than replacing the libertarian EBPP with a sane one.