Like all of us to some extent, I am a product of an educational system. I had the great fortune of what might be called a balanced education. Balanced is my shorthand description, one curriculum planner group said, “Education must be concerned with the whole life of a child.”
My K-12 education included athletics, vocations and academics. Having an education was important to my parents’ generation; they felt it was a key to a successful adulthood, but they largely deferred the details to the school systems of my youth.
My parents were from what is often labeled the “Greatest Generation” or, a somewhat less grand term I just recently learned, the “Silent Generation.” My dad grew up during the Great War (as they later discovered had to be labeled WWI), then became an Army sergeant in the less requisitely named World War II. He’d been through the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, and the 1930’s optimistically named Great Depression (as if there might only be one) along with the Roaring Twenties. He was a college graduate from rural Montana in a niche field. This conveniently tagged him for immediate military service in January of 1942 shipping off to Australia, where they desperately needed people with his background.
Life, I think, is about getting shoved in the deep end of the pool with the sharks and surviving.
The schools of my youth had curriculums created by the Greatest Generation that included a diversity of subjects like social studies, history, music, art, creative writing, science, math, shop, foreign languages and physical education. I recall tearing down and successfully rebuilding a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine in seventh grade shop, while learning about Greek tragedies, writing seemingly endless research papers on civics, government, history, social studies, and running the hill outside my school nearly every day in PE. I had woodshop and metal shop. I learned architectural drafting along with math, chemistry and physics — what later would get labeled STEM.
Having had kids of my own go through more recent educational tracks, I am amazed at just how much curriculum planners of my youth crammed into my day. And how well they did it.
Today, I wonder when did education become so divisive?
I got hired into an aerospace company out of college in the early 1980s. The majority of the people in my group were, politely, gray beards (one actually had a gray beard). These were people with the title of engineer, who had paid their dues starting often as machinists or draftsman in the slide rule days of the 1950s and 1960s. The company recognized that this group largely did not have college degrees so they had a college equivalence metric that gave an employee one year of college equivalence for every four years of work experience.
Somewhere in the 1990s, many companies started requiring actual college degrees in order for a person to be hired into entry level jobs. Applicants had to check off specific degree boxes to even be considered for a job. The resumes of those who didn’t never even got looked at.
When my kids got into high school, the curriculum planners were all about having a vocational track OR an academic one. Students could not do both. Fourteen-year-old kids, who likely had never been through economic hardships like the Great Depression or World War II, were directed to choose STEM classes OR vocational ones — essentially choosing their life path.
At my age, after 43 years in the workforce, I’m still trying to choose my life path, so I’m amazed at the pressure put on kids today.
So, what does all this reminiscing have to do with trucks? I’m currently mentoring a college student who is developing a NACFE report on maintenance in the Messy Middle, the challenges facing technicians and shop owners during the transition to a range of new technologies including renewable natural gas internal combustion engines, hydrogen fuel cells, battery electric vehicles, renewable diesel, automated/autonomous vehicles, hybrids, and more.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be an expert technician on all of these powertrain solutions. Computer-based troubleshooting is becoming critical. The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) systems will be key to keeping future trucks on the road, but there will always be a need for a human technician to touch the truck. Self-repairing vehicles and infrastructure are pretty far out in my opinion.
I’m a life-long airplane museum addict. I recall one museum in Addison, TX that hosted an SAE chapter meeting among the planes in the hangar. The museum director, who knew people like Chuck Yaeger, Jimmy Doolittle, Gene Kranz and many others, talked about how important it was to keep museum planes flying, and how difficult it had become. The planes built before 1940s can be maintained by as few as one experienced mechanic. As planes moved into the jet age, they increasingly needed more expertise to be maintained. He explained the reason the museum did not fly planes that came after the 1950s Sabre, was that they required multiple mechanics, each with specific expertise, and countless specialized tools and systems, many of which also require trained support people. The recent Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture Oshkosh fly-in had an impressive number of older planes that are kept flying by near Herculean efforts by their owners and volunteers.
Today’s Class 8 trucks have countless electronic control modules (ECMs or ECUs), millions of lines of code, communication buses like SAE J1939 with thousands of pages of specifications, radar and lidar systems, a growing list of complex sensors, high power electronics, complex cooling systems, and more. We haven’t yet even really got into how to support the future autonomous vehicle systems and all the infrastructure that may go with those vehicles. The messy middle powertrains can be substantially different than the diesel ones, sharing nearly nothing in technical content, and they all have infrastructure that also needs maintenance and support by skilled technicians.
AI will not fix your truck. AI will be just another critical tool in the technician’s toolbox. Education is the key. Rapidly changing technology tends to overwhelm educational systems. Curriculum planners can take years to respond to trends. It can take years for there to be results from the pipeline for trained people.
It’s critical that the developers of the new technology make strides to also support education. This is not a new concept.
In 1916, Henry Ford started the Henry Ford Trade School, recognizing the need to develop skilled resources to support the evolving automotive industry. Ford also felt that trade schools could help “make self-reliant citizens. Proper vocational training, besides being a preparation for practical living, is and should be a stimulus to independence of character.”
Students at Ford’s school also worked repairing tools and equipment for Ford’s factories. Education, in my opinion, is more relevant if it can be applied. As an engineering manager at a large truck maker, practical experience weighed heavily in hiring decisions regarding potential new employees.
Modern advocates of trade schools include Jay Leno, Mike Rowe, and the herd of reality media show creators with shows on custom vehicle manufacturing.
But I think back to my Baby Boomer generation and their “well rounded” education system designed by the Greatest Generation. It wasn’t a this vs. that life-changing career choice at age 14. Education systems prepared kids, as Henry Ford phrased it, to become self-reliant citizens. Primary education systems and colleges prepared people to face adulthood, to be able to think and contribute and to survive the unknown future.
Those “silent generation” students at Henry Ford’s Trade School and all the other schools had no idea that in their lifetimes they would need to navigate the Great Depression, World War II, nuclear weapons, geopolitical issues, the highway system, container shipping, rock and roll music, computers, etc. Yet they did navigate, in part due to their educations.
