Like all of us to a certain extent, I am the product of an education system. I had the great fortune of what could be called a balanced education. Balanced is my description of stenography, a program of programs said: “Education must be concerned with a child’s life”.
My education K-12 included athletics, vocations and academics. Having education was important for the generation of my parents; They estimated that it was the key to a successful adult, but they largely postponed details to the school systems of my youth.
My parents came from what is often labeled the “greatest generation” or, a slightly lower term that I learned recently, the “silent generation”. My father grew up during the Great War (as they discovered later, were to be labeled from the First World War), then became an army sergeant in the Second World War II. He had crossed the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1919, and the optimistic great depression of the 1930s (as if there could be one) with the 1920s. He graduated from the University of Montana Rural in a niche field. This conveniently labeled him for an immediate military service in January 1942 sent to Australia, where they desperately needed people with their history.
Life, I think, is to grow in the bottom of the swimming pool with sharks and survive.
The schools of my youth had study programs created by the greatest generation which included a diversity of matters such as social studies, history, music, art, creative writing, sciences, mathematics, boutique, foreign languages and physical education. I remember having demolished and succeeded in rebuilding a lawn engine engine Briggs & Stratton in a seventh year store, while learning Greek tragedies, writing research articles apparently infinitely on civic articles, government, history, social studies and the management of the hill outside my school almost every day in PE. I had a wooden and metal shop. I learned architectural writing with mathematics, chemistry and physics – Which will later be labeled the rod.
Having had my own children through more recent educational tracks, I am surprised to see how the programs of my youth of my youth are piled up in my day. And how well they did.
Today, I wonder when education has become so divisor?
I was hired in an aerospace company outside the university in the early 1980s. The majority of the inhabitants of my group were, politely, gray beards (we actually had a gray beard). They were people with the title of engineer, who had paid their contributions often from machinists or designers in the days of the part of the 1950s and 1960s. The company recognized that this group did not largely had university degrees, they therefore had a metric of university equivalence which gave an employee a year of university equivalence for all the four years of work.
Somewhere in the 1990s, many companies began to demand real university degrees for a person to be hired in entry -level jobs. The candidates had to check specific diploma boxes to be considered even for a job. The curriculum vitae of those who have never even been looked at.
When my children entered high school, programs planners were throughout the professional track OR an academic. Students could not do both. Fourteen -year -old children, who had probably never followed economic difficulties such as the Great Depression or the Second World War, were invited to choose STEM lessons OR professionals – Choose their life path essentially.
At my age, after 43 years on the job market, I always try to choose my life path, so I am amazed at the pressure on children today.
So, what has all of this to do with trucks? I currently supervise a student who develops a NACFE report on maintenance in the DisorderlyThe challenges faced by technicians and store owners during the transition to a range of new technologies, including internal combustion engines with renewable natural gas, hydrogen fuel cells, battery electric vehicles, renewable diesel, automated / autonomous vehicles, hybrids, etc.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to be an expert technician on all these solutions in the powertrain. Troubleshooting on a computer becomes critical. The evolution of artificial intelligence systems (AI) will be the key to keeping future trucks on the road, but it will always be necessary for a human technician to touch the truck. The vehicles and self-repair infrastructure is quite distant in my opinion.
I am a drug addict of the aircraft museum of a lifetime. I remember a museum in Addison, TX which organized a SAE section meeting among the hingar planes. The director of the museum, who knew people like Chuck Yaeger, Jimmy Dolittle, Gene Kranz and many others, explained how important it was to fly the planes of the museum and how difficult it had become. The plans built before the 1940s can be maintained by as little as an experienced mechanic. As the planes moved to the age of the jet, they needed more and more expertise to be maintained. He explained that the reason why the museum did not fly any planes that came after the 1950s saber, was that they required several mechanisms, each with specific expertise and countless specialized tools and systems, which many also need trained people. The recent experimental association of Oshkosh Fly-In Airventure Airplanes has had an impressive number of older planes flying near the Herculean efforts by their owners and volunteers.
Class 8 trucks today have countless electronic control modules (ECMS or ECU), millions of lines of code, communication buses such as SAE J1939 with thousands of specification pages, radar and Lidar systems, a growing list of complex sensors, high power electronics, complex cooling systems, etc. We have not even really managed to support future autonomous vehicle systems and all the infrastructure that could go with these vehicles. Motopropulsers in disorder can be significantly different from those of diesel, sharing almost nothing in technical content, and they all have infrastructure that also needs maintenance and support by qualified technicians.
AI will not repair your truck. The AI will only be another essential tool for the technician’s toolbox. Education is the key. Fast evolution technology tends to overwhelm education systems. Program planners can take years to respond to trends. He can take years to have pipeline results for people formed.
It is essential that developers of new technology are also making progress to support education. This is not a new concept.
In 1916, Henry Ford launched the Henry Ford Trade School, recognizing the need to develop qualified resources to support the evolving automotive industry. Ford also considered that commercial schools could help “make autonomous citizens.” Appropriate vocational training, in addition to being a preparation for a practical life, is and should be a stimulus to the independence of the character ”.
The students of the Ford school also worked on tools and equipment for Ford factories. Education, in my opinion, is more relevant if it can be applied. As engineering manager in a large truck manufacturer, practical experience has weighed heavily in hiring decisions concerning new potential employees.
Modern defenders of business schools include Jay Leno, Mike Rowe and the herd of reality broadcasting creators with emissions on the manufacture of personalized vehicles.
But I think back to my baby-boomers generation and their “well-rounded” education system designed by the largest generation. It was not a choice in relation to this career choice that changed life at the age of 14. Educational systems have prepared children, as Henry Ford has formulated, to become independent citizens. Primary education systems and colleges have prepared people to face adulthood, to be able to think and contribute and survive the unknown future.
These students of “silent generation” of the Henry Ford’s Trade School and all the other schools did not know that in their lives, they should sail in the Great Depression, the Second World War, Nuclear Weapons, Geopolitical Problems, the Road System, the expedition of containers, Rock and Roll music, computers, etc. However, they have sailed, partly because of their studies.
