Isn't Germany, one of the more booming economies of Europe, a place that promotes the trades and provides educational tracks for interested students to easily get into apprenticeship programs? And where there isn't stigma against entering such a field?
I remember reading a study about happiness of people who did or did not get far in their life in stratified (like a caste system) and non-stratified societies. The surprising (or not) result was that people find it easier to accept an unlucky birth than only having themselves to blame. (Of course it is never only themselves.) With this unexpected result, some other things start to make sense.
Caste and class systems do cause inter-class resentment, but history has shown that it is usually not enough to tear a society apart. Such resentment can even be useful to make the working class recognize that it has to stick together to get a piece of the pie (cf. social democracy). So now you have decent conditions for the working class and it's somewhat respected by everyone. Being working class is not a stigma, it is... just less prestigious.
The German school system creates a kind of stratified society - do note that it selects nominally by actual ability (in fact the parents are quite important, independent of other factors). A small problem is that the lowest stratum has become the lowest few percent and, like almost everywhere, education standards are decreasing in the now enlarged highest stratum. Electricians (my parents know one) are struggling to find good enough apprentices, and some academics have trouble finding work because there is no demand for their academic skills.
Do note that evening schools to prepare blue-collar workers for university exist.
It is all very un-American and counterintuitive, but stratified societies seem to work. Of course I recognize the downsides - inequality of chances and lost opportunities.
Very likely my opinion is also rose-colored because I grew up in and benefited from a time of great upwards mobility.
AFAIU, the class system in the UK is stronger and less permeable than the German system. The French system seems more permeable but it has a special kink in that it is stratified at the highest level - you either get into one of the top three or so Paris universities or you don't. More than half of all French industry leaders come from these top universities.
> And where there isn't stigma against entering such a field?
This isn’t true. Germany is the second most credentialist, title obsessed country in the world, with a class structure as obvious as in the UK, if different.
Those days are long over. The behaviour might still remain in some small circles (60yr old trophy wifes in a golf club) but is basically unheard and frowned upon pretty much everywhere else in society.
My last experience was 10+ years ago, so maybe there has been a drastic revolution, but I once worked on an 'account profile' page for a large, national company (in Germany) and one of the meetings went into this topic - should there be a 'doctor doctor' entry in the dropdown with all the titles someone could choose to be addressed as (so Prof, Dr, etc.). I, the barbaric foreigner, then proposed we just get rid of the field all together - more to fill in, more to get wrong, and who cares anyway? Jeebus, I might as well have kicked a puppy in the nuts right there on the table. How was a letter to Prof. dr. Mustermann ever going to end up in the right mailbox, if they couldn't specify whether it was Prof Dr, Prof dr, Prof or just Dr. Mustermann? These people spend hours coming up with the most ridiculous UI ideas of multiple comboboxes, check list boxes, what have you. So after a few hours I said 'then why don't we just put in a free form text field, so that people can just type whatever they want?'. Well that was the one suggestion I could have made that was even more ridiculous than leaving out the field. What if somebody would type in 'poopyhead' (or whatever the German equivalent is), and they would send a letter to Poopyhead Mustermann, and somebody would take a picture of that letter and send it to the newspaper, mocking the company for doing such idiotic things? (in those days they were more concerned about newspapers than websites).
I don't even remember what they choose in the end. I think just a dropdown box. I probably told them I'm make the list of titles to choose from configurable in their backend system and they could make it however they wanted later - which nobody probably ever bothered to do.
Yes I agree. It's by design, so that only the ~30% best are recommended to visit highschool. It's a much better solution than just forcing everyone through college, even if they are just not meant to be academics.
Germany also has strong protections against international competition and public/private enterprises like Airbus to keep all of those trades-persons busy.
Do that in the US, and we'll just end up with blue collar wage slaves instead of white collar ones.
