A Room, Not a Fence

The apprentices had bright faces and a relaxed shuffle. Teenagers who are not in a hurry are not afraid.

Twenty years ago I spent a year and a half inside Mercedes-Benz in Germany. Sindelfingen. Untertürkheim. Rastatt. Bremen. Engine plants, transmission plants, assembly plants.

At every one of them I found the same room. The training center, where the Ausbildung happens. Nobody sent me there. It was on no agenda I was handed. I went the way you step into a shrine in a town you are passing through.

The apprentices are called Azubis. My phone, trying to help, corrects this to Anubis. Wrong shrine.

They were sixteen to nineteen years old. They hung out in small groups, eating, chatting, learning together.

The Meisters worked beside them, quiet, close and patient. The instruction was very advanced, and it was offered so carefully. That is the best definition of formation I know. It is the opposite of neglect. It is also the opposite of sink or swim, which is what most American plants call onboarding.

I have worked on factory floors in four countries for thirty-six years. I have never seen anything like that room anywhere else.

Now the reason I was in the building.

My assignment was AK-Reduzierung. Headcount reduction. In Instandhaltung, which is maintenance, and Nacharbeit, which is rework. I was there to take people out at the far end of the same system that room was feeding at the near end.

I did it. I was good at it. I hit the targets.

Formation happens at four gates: home, school, the trade or the college, and the first employer. The last is the only one that pays, and it gives the other three their point. When young people can see it, school is for something. When they cannot, school becomes a holding pen, and the anger comes out somewhere. A country can build a room for its sixteen-year-olds, or it can build a fence. That’s the argument.

The shirt

The people whose numbers I was reducing knew what I was doing. It was no secret.

In a meeting room at Untertürkheim we debated planned maintenance run on machine data. It meant one skilled tradesman covering a much larger set of machines than he did then. Every time the Instandhalter saw that it meant fewer of them, they hit the brakes. They shuffled. And they took comfort that the Betriebsrat, the works council, would protect them in its job bank. I cannot give you one of their names now. It has been too long. My targets counted them as headcount, not as people.

The future Azubis were on their own.

On the Kurbelwelle line there, where they make crankshafts, Herr Albrecht, the big boss over the business, handed me a grey T-shirt. The Meister’s shirt. It had Padmanabhan on the front.

It is the greatest trophy I brought home from Germany, and I have to be careful how I say this. I am not a Meister. That word takes a German tradesman about ten years of examined work to earn. He handed it to a visitor who had come to shrink the headcount.

They knew. They were happy with the way I went about it. Respekt. Grace. Logik.

Herr Albrecht put it to me plainly. “You don’t insult our Instandhalter. You respect them and reason with them, and when you do, they respond as they always do, with logic and care. This always improves the business.”

The shirt says more about them than about me. People formed that carefully can tell a cut from contempt. They can look at the man holding the scalpel and judge the hand.

Was the room my atonement? I did not call it that then. I called it curiosity. I am not sure which word is true. I know that the thing I went looking for at every plant was the one thing my targets could not count.

The fire

In the last week of September 2026, high school students around Paris began blockading their schools. They said there were not enough teachers. They said the buildings were falling apart, the classes were overcrowded and the budgets were being cut. A seventeen-year-old in Saint-Denis named Fadila told Reuters, “There are cockroaches and rats everywhere in the school.”

Within days it spread across France, and it turned violent. In Marseille a crowd surrounded a fire truck, drove the firefighters out of it and burned it. Officials said a headteacher in the same city was doused in petrol. By October 2 about 400 of the country’s 3,700 high schools were closed. The justice minister counted 2,000 people taken into custody. Nine in ten were minors.

Nothing excuses petrol on a teacher, and I will not pretend to know who lit what. The Atlantic summed up a piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams in one line: “Much of the protesting by students has become an exercise in nihilistic resentment.”

That may be right. I have never run a lycée. But the verdict leaves a question open. Resentment of what?

The young people in custody in France are the same age as the young people in that room in Sindelfingen. Sixteen. Seventeen. One group had an adult beside them, patient, with a trade to hand over. The other had a building with rats in it, and no door they could see at the far end.

The gates

A German sixteen-year-old can see the apprenticeship contract waiting for him. He can name the company. School is for something. By the time he sits his journeyman’s exam at nineteen and a half, he has about 7,500 hours of structured formation behind him. The typical American manufacturing hire gets perhaps forty hours of onboarding and is told to watch the next guy.

Take the fourth gate out of sight and the second gate becomes a holding pen. Staff it and paint it all you like; the people inside it know what it is.

France has tried. It nearly tripled its apprenticeship contracts after 2017. But the French Treasury’s own review says the apprentices are now more likely to be in higher education than in secondary school. France built its door