Hands-On Help From the Governor

Arnold Schwarzenegger flies to Washington this afternoon. Before he departs, people in coveralls will make sure that the gizmos mesh with the widgets so the plane doesn’t crash. Before he eats dinner, people in white chef’s coats will cook his Austrian pork stew. Before he settles into his hotel bed to read, people in hard hats will have made sure the lights go on.

The rich own the world, but the people who operate it don’t have Swiss bank accounts or MBAs. They have skills. Schwarzenegger spoke of them in his State of the State speech, using two words: vocational education. Someone has since let him know that it’s now called “career tech education,” but it must have played well in the overnights because since then he has been voter-shopping and photo-oping it like mad -- in Norco, at a high school ag program; in Concord, at a cooking academy where he reminded students that his countryman Wolfgang Puck got rich and famous via pots and pans.

Schwarzenegger will be asking for more dough from George W. Bush, who has already said he intends to slice and dice $1.2 billion-with-a-B off vocational education. This from a president who got into Yale on white-tie coattails but who makes himself one with the people by cutting brush for the cameras at the ranch he bought as he was getting ready to run for president.

At least Schwarzenegger, a farm boy who became a bodybuilder, knows something about the payoffs of skilled physical labor -- those rare, well-paid American jobs that won’t be outsourced, unless you insist on taking your date to dinner in Jakarta.

The dirty trick of education inflation is that a college degree is peddled as a guarantor of good work and good wages. Ask any English lit grad: It ain’t necessarily so. But at the same time, labor -- know-how, hands-on work -- has slid steadily down the social ladder it once built.

Schwarzenegger told the kids in career tech in Norco that “too many people have made the mistake of looking at it as a second-class education.” True -- 30 and 40 years ago, “vocational ed” was almost as bad as going to school on the little yellow bus, a virtual admission that you weren’t too bright. Tracking -- assigning one student to college prep and another to an auto-shop destiny -- became casually elitist and racist. Kids who should have had a shot at college never got one. Now we’ve fled so far the other way that students interested in aircraft mechanics or animation are being herded on the up escalator to a bachelor’s degree.

Santiago Jackson taught graphic arts at Jordan High in Los Angeles for six years. He is assistant superintendent of adult and career education for the Los Angeles school district, and he hears unceasingly from businesses “raising the flag, saying, ‘Who’s taking care of training these people we need to hire?’ ” -- construction specialists, computer techs, nurses, auto mechanics. Too many of those programs just disappeared, not least because they cost more money than, oh, passing out 40 copies of “The Great Gatsby.” Prop. 13, says Jackson, put the kibosh on them.

About 70,000 high school students show up now for LAUSD career-tech classes, and hundreds of older students can be found any weekday at L.A. Trade Tech, studying machine shop or welding or tailoring. The place used to be called Frank Wiggins Trade School. I have one of its diplomas, mounted in suede and silk moire, just like an academic degree. It acknowledges that in June 1930, Marshall Livesay achieved “trade proficiency” in “janitor-engineering.” Livesay died in 1952, having used his trade proficiency to become head janitor at the Micheltorena Elementary School. The Times saw fit to run an obituary.

I don’t often stand in Schwarzenegger’s corner, but on this one, if he’ll work up a sweat for the people who know how to make my shower flow and my airplane fly and my IV run, I’ll hold his towel. Honor the work and you honor the worker.

My friend Pat York, an accomplished photographer, asked her plumber to pose for a nude portrait and then suggested that he write about the experience. Three months later, he sold his company and moved back East to be a writer, a thinker -- an artist. Her husband, Michael, the actor, was incensed: Sure, it’s great for him, he said, but we’re losing the best plumber we ever had.

How about it Governor, can you help California find another one?