Random thought triggered by another of those Natl Assn of Mfrs films. This one was showing how Houston became a major port after building the 60-mile Houston Ship Channel. A wide variety of industries, not just oil, built factories along the channel. I knew about Houston’s role as center of the oil industry, but I’d never heard of the Ship Channel.
Inland waterways are not part of national media or discussion. In school we learned about ocean ports like NYC and New Orleans, but we never heard about Houston. Even stranger, we never heard about the barge traffic on the Missouri, which was only 100 miles away from Manhattan. The same traffic was how the Yankees got to Manhattan in 1855.
This is irresponsible. Schools should be giving students a background for the jobs they could find nearby, not for jobs that New Yorkers could find. We don’t need to know about Columbus sailing from Spain to Haiti. We don’t need to know about NYC. We’ll never work in those places. We could easily drive to KC or St Louis and apply for a job in those ports or the companies that depend on those ports. If we had learned about the practical and commercial geography of our region, we’d be able to imagine living in the nearby cities.
The only background we received came from television, which exclusively showed job situations in NYC and Hollywood. We had no way to daydream about being a welder or accountant right here, or working for the Santa Fe railroad in Topeka or Boeing in Wichita. Those were the jobs we’d seek after graduation, not NYC ad writer or Hollywood cameraman.
Polistra's Mill 