The difficult art of letting go

Moderation trumps prejudice

When the crowd bays for blood

A friend of mine manages a vocational school, sometimes called a technical school. The students enrolled are junior high graduates, so it is not the equivalent of a college education. They train in skills like automobile maintenance and repair. Many receive job offers long before they leave the campus. The employment rate has been held at 100 percent for many years now. Yet when people talk about the school, they turn up their nose, saying only students who perform poorly academically would pick this school.

It may not be able to recruit the top students, but they seem to be doing fairly well in the job market and, judging from salary data, graduates from such schools are often better paid than those from a regular college. The pet peeve of Chinese employers for a new college graduate is, "His eyes are high, but his hands are low", meaning he can wax eloquently about a problem but has no idea how to solve it.

Of course not all professions are paid properly. By Western standards, Chinese healthcare workers are paid a pittance. The best doctors often supplement their income by moonlighting, rushing to nearby towns to patients who are willing to pay the market fee for their services. This is a clear indication that resources are not distributed in the most scientific way possible, which will serve to smother future crops of talents from emerging. For one thing, a bachelor's degree in medical science takes five years instead of the usual four.

Other than the economic stimulant of payday, respect from society at large is a big factor in channeling more human resources toward the field of professional training. An artist or writer could be struggling at the beginning of a career, but people can usually understand his or her aspirations. Businesspeople used to occupy the lowest rung of China's social ladder, but the emergence of the business school, as a result of influence from the West, has lifted some of them onto a higher plane. Even though newfound wealth has complicated public perception on this segment, it is at least considered a legitimate pursuit for those with talent.

The same thing has to happen for a wide array of professions whose practitioners need highly technical skills to perform their tasks. They may be called engineers, technicians or simply skilled workers, but their importance can only rise as China's economy moves from farm to industry, to an economy of information and high technology. For most people, humanities and social sciences should be part of one's upbringing, not a means to a livelihood. Learning something useful should not be a notion brushed aside by snobs, and enshrining such knowledge in the pantheon of the college exam is a good first step that will ripple through the cultural pond.

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