It takes political courage to tell it like it is.
The National Councillor Nicolas Kolly did just that this week when it questioned the Federal Council head-on about the systematic devaluation of learning from compulsory school age. It deserves to be supported - because what is at stake goes far beyond a pedagogical quarrel.
For years, a creeping ideology has been undermining vocational training. Good students« are pushed towards secondary school as if intelligence could only be academic, while apprenticeships are treated as a relegation route. But the facts are stark: cantons that overrate gymnasiums also have higher youth unemployment.
We've seen this scenario elsewhere.
In France, decades of contempt for technical subjects have produced cohorts of overqualified graduates... and underemployed. The result is masters degrees that end up at pushing trolleys at IKEA, There is no real market for them.
Switzerland is moving in the same direction.
The number of socialising“ training courses” - psychology, humanitarian law out of touch with reality, ideologised social sciences - while companies are struggling to recruit new recruits. technicians, mechanics, automation engineers, electricians, IT specialists. All too often, university has become a a den of internationalist do-gooders, They are more concerned with producing discourse than value.
Dual training creates skills, autonomy and dignity. It anchors young people in the real world, in the productive economy, in society. It is one of the pillars of Swiss success - and precisely for this reason, it upsets certain ideologues.
Rehabilitating apprenticeships is not a step backwards.
It's an act of lucidity and sovereignty.
Conclusion
Destroying apprenticeships means producing unemployed graduates.
To defend it, as Nicolas Kolly does, is to defend the Switzerland that produces, that trains and that stands on its own two feet.
True modernity is not to be found in ideological lecture halls.
It's in the workshops, the companies and the know-how passed on.