The White Man Wasn't Much Help To The Indians.

       Sitting in the waiting room at the doctors office this morning I read, in an old magazine, an amusing story of a meeting between the Six Nations, of American Indians, and a Colonist's contingent from Virginia. It seems the Virginians offered to take a half dozen Iroquois boys and support them generously while they attended the fine college in Virginia. After deliberating, the Iroquois thanked the Virginians profusely but declined. They explained they had sent a dozen boys to a white mans school once before. But when the boys returned home, they knew nothing of how to live among the native Americans. They couldn't hunt or fight or properly treat a deer, nothing. But they offered to have the Virginians send a dozen boys to them and they'd teach them to be men.
       Now what's funniest about this story isn't so much the sincerity of the Iroquois, or the Virginians, thinking they could help the other's children. What's funny is that neither could really help the other even though they thought they could.  And it's even funnier that folks haven't changed much over the intervening years.
       These days, in America, people seem to think that all young people should go to college, or just go get a job. The thing is that when we try to convince every young person to go to college, we do a disservice to those young people. Many will prosper as a result of attending college, but quite a few will not. I think that proves itself with the dropout rates we have that nobody wants to mention.
       All those who drop out of college or didn't attend in the first place, should, perhaps, have attended a trade school to prosper. The other opportunity we used to have in America is to apprentice under a craftsman. Mostly unions offered these opportunities. But Unions have been bad-mouthed by politicians so much that they've suffered in membership and are no longer strong enough to offer that training in the numbers needed. So ya see? We're still tripping over our tongues at a cost to our future.