I was very fortunate to be in middle school (ages 11 - 13) in the late 60s when shop classes were still going strong. Here's what I recall of our curriculum:
6th grade: industrial drawing, hand tools, shop safety, home maintenance: replacing windows, wiring bulbs, switches and outlets, faucet installations. Basic fabrication with plastic, hammered metal forming and band sawing wood.
In high school, all of the above plus architectural drawing, project management, metal machining, and fiberglass (mold design, making and part-making). Student projects included dune buggy car bodies, boats, water skis, furniture and all the usual (cutting boards, knife blocks, spice racks, etc.)
In today's world, parents (and lawyers) might find it unsafe for boys (very few girls elected to take these classes) but in seven years of shop, I only recall one serious accident involving the loss of a finger tip.
I went on to college major in Industrial Design and business then spent a career designing and producing projects for major consumer product company clients.
The best advice I ever got (after my Kindergarten teacher telling me, "Now young man, you should _never_ pass up the chance to go to the bathroom.") was my shop teacher advising:
>Before hitting the switch on a power tool, slowly count to 10 under your breath to yourself on your fingers, visualizing all the forces involved and planning out the entirety of your movement and how you will be moving the stock/tool, and considering what might go wrong and the results thereof and what will protect you (all guards should be in place and all suitable PPE worn) or where you should be positioned so as to avoid any potential projectile, reminding yourself that you want to be able to repeat that count in the same way when the tool is switched off.
Sawstop wouldn't have a business model if all tablesaw accidents were tried by a jury of shop teachers.
I have a similar habit: Before applying power, I manually turn the blade (or workpiece on the lathe) through one full rotation. I also think my way through the entire cut, including where my body and hands will be, and what I'll do if something goes wrong.
I've also mentored younger colleagues. I think there's a problem with shop safety, which is related to computer programming: Some people are able to learn it, and others just aren't. There's a certain situational awareness that you have to develop -- a sixth sense for when something is unsafe, that goes beyond just remembering all of the rules. There's also an intuition that you develop, like in programming, of being able to "think like the machine."
Like it or not, there are people who shouldn't be in the shop.
Pattern recognition. Some people have and some don't. It's also situational for some people.
I had a friend who could immediately see patterns in fighting games, after a few plays they'd immediately know how the CPU would react in certain situations. I could never.
I can see patterns in code, how it relates to other code and in the processes surrounding it, especially when I'm not taking my ADD meds. It's a superpower when shit's on fire and needs to be handled fast.
Similarly some people form this "sixth sense" situational awareness for physical tools and safety. They'll just look at a worksite and "feel" something is off. Or they pick up a tool and immediately know something is off - something in the balance or how it feels in the hand, or maybe it made a noise it's not supposed to.
I ran a small light plastic assembly factory years ago and within 20 minutes of a new person starting I could tell if they could, what I call, “think in 3D” if they couldn’t they would never meet the standard we needed and I’d sadly have to fail their trial at the end of the first day - about 30% of people fell in to this category.
Can you go into detail on this with an example or two? It sounds interesting.
A little bit of a ramble here:
Different mental models is kind of a fascinating thing for me. I don't always pick up on something as quickly as my peers when it comes to things like math and pattern recognition, but I've tended to make up for that with a hard work ethic and what I think of as rabid curiosity and a strong desire to constantly grow my work skill set and knowledge. I've grown a lot during my career as a result when colleagues who had much higher GPAs stagnated. It's interesting how wide and varied our brains are. Again, when doing any pattern recognition games (e.g. speed, set...etc) with my wife...I don't think I'm bad, but she is grasping things at a rate of 3-6x what I can and it was the same in any hard STEM classes that we took together. It's the opposite for things like history where she can't pick up as much of what is going on in a lecture or documentary or whatever. Physically speaking I'm not sure how the brain works differently between us, but I'm guessing the weights are just different if it's anything like the NN in computer science. We were playing dominoes the other day and I had to pause to check which had already been played and she got a little frustrated that I was taking too much time - like what do you mean you don't already know which ones have been played? So I guess it's a greater ability to recognize and retain patterns quickly.
In your case of the worker, I wonder if they were just dangerously clueless or just needed a little more time to build that mental model to grasp how the pieces all fit together. I also wonder how I would have faired.
Sure, difficult to really explain it as I don't think I have the correct physiological knowledge/vocabulary but I can try to paint a picture.
We assembled a plastic product with about 20 components of different shapes and sizes. There were slots to align and friction fit, there were things to click, wires to route, glue to dab etc.
The far extreme of "can think in 3D" were the people who could be shown the finished item, the kit of parts and pretty much just assemble it. They would miss some "trick" or "knack" we had developed and they might not quite get the alignment or placement of a part perfectly but the product would work.
The opposite end were the people who unless I was stood with them and helping to move the components in to alignment just simply couldn't "get" it. It was as if they didn't have a the ability to retain the finished view and movement through 3D space required to complete the movement. Could also have been a coordination, dexterity or proprioception issue.
Of course this was a spectrum and we had to make a judgement call (often in discussion with them) about how they would improve/get up to speed or if it was a lost cause. We built jigs and tools to help remove the finesse required in the assembly which helped a lot BUT, when you got someone who could just see it no amount of training or jigs could get everyone to that speed.
On quiet days we would have little competitions on certain stations to see if people could get a new record and it was those days when you could really see the people who just got it. The best example I can give was making the final cardboard packing boxes, this was an 8 movement process from flat box to assembled with lid open, the record was 2.7 sections, a sustainable pace (so the time that actually mattered) was around 7 seconds, people who just couldn't get it were over 30 seconds and usually with many quality issues as at those people were often fighting the box and material.
The best math professor I ever had was a fantastic instructor because he had in head a catalog of wrong mental models and could nearly immediately grasp where a student might have taken a wrong turn and try to get them on the right path.
(It was a graduate level real analysis course, and people who had been calculus whizzes were struggling with point set topology proofs.)
I touched what I thought was a stationary wheel on a lathe as a child. it was of course under flouro tube lighting: it was synced to the tube, the strobe effect made it look stationary. I've never forgotten it.
The guy owning the lathe made some short, sharp observations. But I also suspect he sweated blood later on. Explaining his role in this had I lost a finger or worse would have been nasty
A lot of young children will have accidents because they forget, or don't want, to go to the washroom. That's true even if it is urgent. (They either don't know what their body is telling them, or they are fearful of washrooms, or they are simply having too much fun to be bothered by what their body is telling them.)
Reminds me of when I interned as a medic. My instructor gave me a list of rules:
Walk, don't run.
Never trust the public in a vehicle.
Always check the rigging yourself before rapelling down the embankment.
Sleep when you're tired.
Eat when you're hungry.
And never, I repeat, NEVER wait to pee.
When you live in a world where you may have to scramble at any moment, and you work 72 hour shifts, you can't take simple things for granted. We might go from chilling on base to not being back for 15+ hours.
While I was lucky to have shop classes in my school, this curriculum makes me extremely jealous, to be honest. We didn't have neither welding, nor forging, nor working with fiberglass composites nor "big" projects, had to learn it all by myself. Still, those classes taught me the basics of actually doing something with my own hands, which is pretty important.
I also remember that we were trusted to behave like adults in front of heavy machinery like routers, circular saws and lathes.
No incidents whatsoever aside from minor cuts, which is normal. We were genuinely interested and behaved accordingly, nobody wanted to get hurt and / or get kicked out of the class
P.S. Not sure of how it works in the US, but we also had "shop classes for girls". The curriculum for those consisted of the basics of cooking, baking and working with fabrics (starting from sewing two pieces together in grade 5 and gradually evolving to designing and sewing clothing for yourself by grade 9). Though, in my opinion, those things shall be taught to everyone, not just girls
I had “agtech” in HS. Learning how to use a cutting torch and weld was the most memorable. Heh our welding unit was pretty much all about working on our teacher’s horse trailer. We also did hunter’s education which spent a lot of time on gun safety and was very useful. (Yes, I went to HS out in the sticks)
Both these (sløyd /woodworking, heimekunnskap/cooking and home economics) were mandatory for everyone in Norway back in the nineties(although to be fair shop time was limited to wood, we weren't allowed to use metal lathes etc anymore), as was sewing (both with hand and machines).
I'm still thankful because of all the stuff I can relatively easy cook, fix or make thanks to those few hours in school.
(I'd also say they made for extremely welcome breaks between boring stuff in other subjects and being bullied during breaks.)
I entered junior-high school (as it was then called) in Pasadena, California, in 1969. In seventh grade, all of the boys took four 10-week modules: electricity (make an electric motor), print shop (typesetting by hand and printing with a platen press), wood shop, and drafting (pencils and straightedges). The girls took a year of home economics; my two older sisters learned how to sew in those classes, and one made most of her own clothes when she was in high school.
The next year, the classes were made co-educational, with students choosing which stream to take, but at least in that first year the gender divide remained sharp. I chose to take drafting for all of eighth grade; there was only one girl in the class.
I can’t say that what I learned in those classes paid off for me directly, but I did pick up knowledge and skills that I applied indirectly in my later careers: from printshop for writing and editing work, and from drafting for learning how to use drawing and graphics software.
It would been nice if I had learned how to sew and cook then, too.
I had to take either home ec or shop in high school. I’d already done all the shop stuff I’d wanted to while growing up helping my dad make things, so I took home ec instead. I was one of two boys in the class. It was awesome. We baked. We sewed. We hung out with a roomful of girls. It was one of my better high school decisions.
In middle school we could take Industrial Arts, Home Economics, and Art. Seventh graders took all three, so they were each 2/3 of a semester, with one of them broken across the semester break.
In eighth grade we got to select two of the three, and they were each one semester. I took Industrial Arts and Home Economics because the Art teacher was a complete wacko who in the seventh grade class destroyed any interest I had in the subject.
I am pretty sure seventh grade Industrial Arts was co-ed and everyone took it. But maybe girls had another option, I don't quite remember. In eighth grade since it was an elective, it self-selected to almost entirely boys.
A basic education should include a lot of stuff you never use. If you're not exposed to things that don't interest you, how are you going to find the ones that do?
Closest I got was building theatre sets. But they were some awesome sets, with huge moving parts counterweighted via airline cable and sandbags, and we conceived and designed it all from scratch under very little supervision. Come to think of it I'm sure it wouldn't fly these days (I remember a substitute teacher walking into the gym flabbergasted at one point when I was climbing in the rafters drilling anchor holes for pulleys... the regular guy knew well enough when to be present and when to stay away).
Did a lot of the same in middle school in the late 1970s. Less of the home repair stuff, and no welding or machining.
We used hand tools and small power tools (hand-held drills and sanders), and drill press and scroll saws. Only the teacher could use the table saw, planer, and jointer.
One kid made a muzzle-loading rifle as his project. Can only imagine the hue and cry that would cause today.
I was in middle school in the 1990's, in Canada so the legal bit wouldn't be all that different from the US. We had welding, machining, and all sorts of power tools. That said, the teacher used their discretion while deciding who could use the more dangerous tools and supervised their use carefully.
i went to middle school starting in ‘98 (7th grade). I used a hand saw, glass cutter, sandblaster, and drill press. That was just a quarter. The second quarter we had home-ec. Stitched and baked and maybe something else. In shop I made a book shelf thing and a nameplate (sandblasted mirror)
In 9th grade I used a jointer and a band saw, built deep bookshelf out of poplar. In 10th grade I built a night stand (used shaper, Joiner, jointer, etc..)
The table saw was off limits in every class I remember, but most the other things were usable. With saw stops available, I think that reduces liability quite a bit.
Also in high school I did drafting and cad (2D and 3D).
Anyway, that was across 3 school districts in two states, and was as recent as 2003 - so it’s not like shop/industrial arts stopped being a thing 40 years ago.
> it’s not like shop/industrial arts stopped being a thing 40 years ago.
Unfortunately, I live near two school districts - one in a major metropolitan area in the US - which have closed down shop classes in the name of preparing students for college instead of work in the trades. It is hard to undo those decisions.
Fortunately some local “industrial arts” departments continue to thrive.
I didn't have access to heavy machinery or welders until high school (14-18), but I was very fortunate to go to a high-school that taught most of the above while I was there in the late 2000s.
The "product design" class (which was really either woodworking or metalworking depending on which stream you ended up in) was definitely my favourite class, and I think the most useful for later life too.
> In today's world, parents (and lawyers) might find it unsafe for boys (very few girls elected to take these classes) but in seven years of shop, I only recall one serious accident involving the loss of a finger tip.
A lot of the danger can be ameliorated by using CNC machines instead of circular saws and hand lathes. Standing 3-6 feet away from the machine when something goes wrong is way better than being 3-6 inches away.
Gantry CNC machines are superior to table saws for almost all sheet goods, anyway.
Sure, the jointer is still kind of dangerous. However, it has a very specialized function and normally you can keep your hands safely away from the blades with various push mechanisms.
I think the return on investment is underplayed, it's not just what skills you graduate with, it's whether you find going to school at all rewarding. I was bored stiff in most of my classes, but having marching band to look forward to and the reward of traveling to different cities on the band bus kept me from completely checking out of school.
Maybe another aspect missing from schools lacking shop is the sense that you're trustworthy enough to put in front of a potentially lethal machine, a little bit of self worth goes a long way.
> Maybe another aspect missing from schools lacking shop is the sense that you're trustworthy enough to put in front of a potentially lethal machine, a little bit of self worth goes a long way.
I have the distinct memory of this thought crossing my mind during orientation in shop classes. The instructor gave us the rundown of how to be safe and then he actually let us use cool machines without hovering around us every second of the period! The trust involved in that exercise was immense, and even kids who were the class clowns in other classes rose to the occasion and were responsible in shop class.
I can only imagine how important this kind of experience would be for today's kids of the helicopter generation, many of whom would be receiving this type of trust to handle danger like an adult for perhaps the first time in their lives.
We had to watch a movie on day one (or very early in the class) with pretty graphic scenes of shop injuries. Blood, fingers getting cut off, a guy speared in the stomach by a scrap of wood binding and then thrown from the table saw blade.
I also got the scare treatment. 25 years later and I still refuse to buy a table saw despite being characterized as risk-tolerant is many other dimensions.
I use a table saw, but am extremely slow and careful with it. It's a terrifying tool.
The router also terrifies me, because in shop class I hadn't tightened the chuck enough, and the bit came out and ate through the work and fell on the floor, then zinged off at high speed. It missed me completely.
The other thing I do not like are the oxy and acetelyne cylinders. The metal shop teacher showed how to blow the dust off by cracking the valves. OMG, 2000 psi. Nope nope nope nope.
This is why Sloyd woodworking is taught in northern European countries:
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
A slightly different angle could be whether it needs to be school and can't be handled by the town in a different setting for instance.
I grew up in a town that had a community center where kids of my age played in bands, learned crocheting etc. School was boring, but it was short, and it was easy to meet with other kids from other schools, including other towns. Kids doing classical music have the same experience in general I think.
Maybe - but if it's not handled by the school, then there's going to be some sort of access problem for some kids. Transportation, time to do it, financial for the parents, etc.
Yes, depending on the city it can be more or less complex. It comes down to how kids are viewed, and a good indicator could be how libraries are handled.
How much does the local library cost ? is it easy for kids to access ? is there a library in the first place ?
If the local library is thriving, a community center can be an extension of that. If it's dead, that city is in a pretty bad place from the start.
All it takes is installing cameras and if anyone is caught up doing stupid shit the shoptime is over for them, permanently if it's anything serious.
I remember one clown kid in my class back in the days put a hottish drillbit to another's kid neck acting like a cool spy or something like that (we were 14 years old, luckily got only a mild burn which healed quickly). The teacher punched him in the face, probably not with full force but it was not a soft slap either, and banned him from the shop for some time. No incidents after that.
> As someone who was shoved and occasionally bullied while operating machines like belt saws... I'm not sure it was worth it.
This. It's all fun and games until one of your classmates shoots you in the face with an air compressor while you're using a bandsaw. I still have all my fingers but did end up in trouble because everybody only saw the immediate aftermath of me making it abundantly clear how much I didn't appreciate his antics (only verbally, of course).
We had a metal lathe in our high school shop class. I still can’t believe someone didn’t kill themselves on that. I think wood lathes are fine, but honestly that should be kept out.
Wood lathes are much more dangerous than metal lathes IMO!
They run at high speeds, the workpiece is typically less secure, the material has a grain structure prone to catching the tool and digging into it, ventilation is required, and most importantly, the cutting tool is gripped in the operator's hands instead of being secured on a toolpost.
In metal shop, one kid left the key in the chuck and turned the lathe on. It punched a hole in the wall opposite it. It would have killed anyone in its path.
These things aren't actually as dangerous as Reddit and the white collar internet make them out to be. The "being dumb" to near miss conversion ratio isn't that high and the near miss to someone gets hurt conversion ratio is abysmal.
Wood lathes, and generally woodworking tools like saws and routers are substantially more dangerous. Especially at the scale of machinery you have in vocational classes.
A metal lathe is the fundamental machine tool. You learn how to calculate feeds and speeds, plan depth of cut, thread cutting, parting, etc. You learn about surface finish, chatter, cutter shape... Why rob students of this? Should nobody learn basic machinist skills? It's no more or less dangerous than any other shop tool.
I generally agree, young people respond well to responsibility.
And whilst it doesn't help me day to day, knowing how the make dovetail joints is one of the things I cherish most from year 10.
Are shop classes mandated by states anywhere? No schools I know offer it. I am not sure if it’s a good or bad thing. I’ve heard of children having accidents in those classes - sometimes not just an accident but the result of other children intentionally harming them. On the other hand, I feel like our society has lost the ability to DIY and do things that are … less online. Maybe shop classes can help with that.
They should also revive or create classes that teach other important, basic, life skills - budgeting, banking, getting a loan, investing, hiring a contractor, buying appliances, tiling, roofing, drywalling, etc, etc.
I would create a modern version of Home Economics to teach things the average person should be able to do.
1. Basic cookery. Including how to use the stove top, induction range, microwave, air fryer, stand mixer, and oven. How to choose a refrigerator, dishwasher, and other big ticket appliances.
2. Basic economics and finance. What is taken out of your paycheck e.g., state and federal taxes, social security and Medicare taxes, health insurance premiums, and contributions to 401k etc. How do credit cards work, how do car loans work, and how do mortgages work. Understand the different interest rates they charge. How do medical, auto, and home insurance work. How to file a tax return.
3. Elementary engineering. Basic concepts of how things work and how not to get injured. How electric circuits work (avoid touching the hot wire to something other than the terminal). How the house electrical circuits work. What is the purpose of the breaker panel and the GFCI mini breaker. How fires start and how to put out an oil fire vs regular fire. How to start a wood fire including feather sticks, fire steel, and steel wool & a nine volt battery. How house plumbing work including where does the pee and poo go. How the HVAC, furnace, and mini split work.
4. Basic technology. How to stay safe online. What to do if your credit card or identity is stolen. Password managers, MFA, and passkeys. How to shop for a mobile phone and understand all the fees the carrier will charge. How to use a LLM and ChatGPT.
#2 there reminds me of all those "got a first paycheck" teenager reaction videos, when having to pay taxes and everything else sinks in for the first time because nobody bothered to tell them about that stuff earlier.
We called that "Home Ec" (as in "Home Economics") when I was a kid. (I'm an elder millennial.) To be honest, I didn't find it particularly useful, and I think many of the calls for "practical" classes in primary or secondary education miss the mark.
We had something similar, our home ec classes had some household management, but the focus was largely on cooking and making/repairing clothing. This further split into seperate elective classes in the last few years of high school. That said some aspects of homekeeping were absorbed by other classes (math module on balancing a budget, social studies modules on how you'd start a business, etc.).
> It was basically "home ec" is for girls, shop is for guys.
We didn't have too many girls in the shop classes, but we had a surprisingly large numbers of guys taking the clothing and textiles classes. It was regarded as one of the most relaxed and enjoyable electives, and there was an unofficial exemption to the uniform policy that you could wear things you'd produced in class, so it was nice to see the schoolyard brightened by students wearing strange and colorful clothing.
Did you by chance receive supplementary lessons at home? I didn't take a home ec class, but my mother made it a priority to teach me budgeting and such.
Something like 25% of high school students can’t do basic arithmetic and you want them to budgets and retirement planning? I’m not saying “home ec” (as it was called through the 90s - no idea what happened to it) isn’t potentially useful, only that we might have bigger fish to fry.
Except they're not practical uses. Every well meaning civilian attempt to propose these topics is rebutted by educators who report back that these concepts are totally alien and abstract to teenagers until they actually own and are responsible for their own money.
The retention rate for these classes are abysmal, which is why you have people propose they should be taught, despite they themselves actually sitting through these classes, simply because any memory of these classes have been erased from their memory.
Exactly. In my case, Calcilus didn’t really “click” until undergraduate economics. Before that “why the heck do I care about the area under the curve?!?!”
Of course, I then went into software and haven’t used calculus since.
If we taught kids the basics of compound interest then maybe we’d have fewer people struggling under the load of some extremely heavy debt burdens. Good for usurious banks, I guess, but probably not society as a whole.
When I was a kid, cooking was part of the "Home Economics" class, which also included budgeting, shopping, basic repairs (home, clothing, etc), and some other useful "adulting" skills they apparently don't teach in school anymore.
Late 40s here. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to take home ec - the school considered it beneath me. Latin was elective as a senior. And I still can’t bake a souflee to save myself.
It's at least partly because, starting with NCLB in 2001, schools got defunded if students didn't do well on standardized tests. That resulted in curricula being redesigned around those standardized tests, and in an even more exaggerated way for obvious reasons in poor schools.
I found that in ethics classes, a lot of it was holier than thou and virtue signaling instructors preaching but not necessarily practicing. I am not saying all of the instructors and people who teach ethics are bad, this is what I have observed.
This is interesting to me, none of the ethics classes I've ever taken even had room for a holier-than-thou instructor; they were taught as "here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time".
A professor saying "And I'm great at doing the right thing" would be as out of place as them bragging about their fitness or wealth.
I remember my equivalent (they called it "Commerce" but it was basically law/politics/ethics) spent some significant time navel gazing at legislation that had directly influenced the private school system we were in.
"here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time" would have been vastly preferable to "heres how private schools with private funding successfully managed to extort the government for even more funding"
Maybe you can consider the teacher to be good because I remember the (many, many) lessons on the topic.
That was my experience as well. OTOH I don’t think ethics classes will magically make the students “more ethical” or something. Might as well let students have a choice of philosophy electives if possible, I don’t think making everyone take ethics is better than making everyone take aesthetics.
Although if you were going to have something more concrete, like Engineering Ethics except somehow for high schoolers without a particular career chosen, a few weeks of philosophy would probably be good background.
Half of those are things that parents should learn them, and the other half are things most won't ever actually do. Buying an appliance is not a thing you need class for, your parents can take you with them when they're buying one and show you the process... and roofing.. well, let's be fair, most people won't be doing that themselves.
In my small country we have a website where random people can post suggestions for the government, and if it gets enough votes, some PR representative has to look at the suggestion and write a answer.... every few weeks there is a suggestion about how schools should teach kids stuff that their parents should teach them at home... even cooking, cleaning, etc. Have the parents really "failed in life" so much, that they can't even teach the kids to cook and clean and wash, etc.?
Shop class... somewhat understandable, power tools are not realy a thing parents living in apartments in large cities have, so yes, that's beneficial to kids... but other stuff?
Half of those are things that parents should learn them
I think the goal is to help boost the kids whose parents don't know some of the basics, like budgeting, balancing a checkbook, buying an appliance, typing, etc... The people who aren't doing well in modern society lack these skills, and teaching their kids is an opportunity to boost them out of potential poverty.
If you start teaching all the kids this, then the vast majority of parents will stop teaching their kids, because "school will teach you". This is fundamental human nature. So society ends up in a degraded state where instead of most kids learning these things well from parents and few not at all, you have all kids learning it a lower average rate.
This is not the way. If some kids have lacking home life, intervene directly for those students. Don't take away responsibility from parents.
I don’t think that’s true. Parents read to their kids, play sports with them, show them how to make art, etc. even if it’s taught in school.
I do wonder though if some personal finance, consumer research, etc. skills won’t be taught as readily thanks to the smartphone, though. Having paper forms or a checkbook out makes it easier to start a conversation
It doesn't take responsibility from parents. If parents stop teaching their kids they making the choice.
The reality is, in places this matters, parents already are failing to teach their kids, and where there are successful families, parents continue to teach their kids.
The parents' job is to understand what is being taught in school and to fill the gaps. Either by teaching directly or by influencing the direction that the school is taking.
There's no reason to make a list of school topics and keep it separate from parent topics (except perhaps in particularly sensitive cases, but that's now what's being discussed here).
> and roofing.. well, let's be fair, most people won't be doing that themselves
Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a roofer out to fix your roof? In my area if the job is less than $50k you can't find anyone who is interested. Not doing it yourself is an incredibly expensive luxury. Best know how to do it properly and safely.
these are high schoolers we’re talking about, sure people have used the excuse of the classes not being given but if they were, nearly no one would be interested.
also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage
Vote in superintendents with more education experience than corporate.
I'm sure there are some corporate superintendents, but I've never seen one. It is almost always a teacher's union endorsed ex-teacher who was recently a principal in the district, or a superintendent from another district in the state.
Good point, I was looking up LA and Chicago (NY has many small districts), and oddly both Superintendents have just been fired. Chicago was indeed a "CEO Type", and LA was the teacher principal type.
The cooking class at my middle school was insanely popular, same with shop. A surprisingly large number of students also signed up for “consumer math” which was all about taxes, budgeting and such.
Looks like you're being downvoted but you're right. A tiny fraction of high school students would actually care about these classes -- high school me wouldn't
It’s not just about acquiring “basic skills” or “marketable skills”. Shop enables practical, skill-appreciating minds to use geometry, physics, and science in concert to solve problems. You learn about symmetry and measurement, force and torque, and materials and chemistry simultaneously.
Many learn better at a workbench than at a chalkboard. And even those that don’t often appreciate the chalkboard more when they can relate what they’re learning to what they are doing.
2 of my big safety lessons from elders when I was growing up:
- my Nana always wore her hair up when in the kitchen, she had worked somewhere she saw a woman get scalped by having her long hair pulled into a mixer
- my Dad was wary of synthetic clothing after having seen people in fires have synthetics melt onto their skin (not sure if this was in the Army or growing up in St. Louis)
It's very interesting how many "non-trivial" things can go wrong with power tools. Kickbacks for example. They sound very trivial when you know about them. But to the layman that does a one off cut with a table saw, circular saw, chain saw, angle grinder, ... it's not so intuitive.
One might say and be very careful but then a kickback shows up and causes brown pants at best, a life changing injury or death at worst.
Long overdue, in my opinion. I grew up desperately looking forward to wood, metal, and automotive shop classes to compliment my computer electives; by the time I reached High School, all but wood shop had been replaced by more weight rooms for the football team to use.
Primary education should always include basic skills in craftsmanship, inclusive of at least shop class and cooking/home economics. Hopefully this marks a more general rebound of these long-neglected skillsets.
I had a shop class in middle school (mid-to-late 80s) and I learned a ton of useful skills even though i went on to software engineering. Got experience welding, etching, knew what a "tap and die" was, did drafting (and got exposed to AutoCAD). I also had "home ec" which taught how to cook, clean, and sew. A few others that I would have liked to see: basic plumbing repairs,working with hand tools (plane, chisel, etc), building structures from framing lumber.
It really seems like having a good non-academic curriculum for life skills is broadly useful beyond folks who are going into the trades.
I remember wearing ties but tucking it into the shirt (in between the buttons) and also wearing an apron. Incredibly unsafe to just have a tie on normally around machinery so imagine that is just for the photo op.
I hated shop class. It was an enormous waste of time I could have invested in learning more about computers, or to reduce hours in school. It should be completely abolished and people with an intense desire for carpentry and similar activities can learn about it after school without tormenting all children with this nonsense.
Even in the rural midwest in the early nineties you didn't get a big shop education in middle school, and I was on the academic track in high school. But we did a lot of woodworking in Scouts. Pretty much everyone grew up in families that worked with their hands. Some of us came factory work, the farm kids all learned how to use tools. And even the "rich" kids families owned small companies who worked in these areas.
Fast forward to the beginning of architecture school and we all had to draft by hand (which I had been doing in some capacity since 7th grade) and learn to and use the shop. We didn't learn to draft because it was a necessary skill anymore, but to learn 1. spatial thinking and in turn 2. how to turn ideas into real things you could communicate. Same with the making of physical models (even if you didn't use the shop).
These require the attention to detail and understanding of process necessary to break a sophisticated design idea down into individual actions (single lines, cuts, etc), and are of immense value even if you never touch a wood shop after undergraduate.
Even today, 25 years later and a time when we don't even necessarily teach 2d -CAD- drafting anymore we still require shop work, physical modeling, and hand drafting of ALL our students. So much that in a lot of places the first year of a 5 year professional Bachelor of Architecture doesn't even touch digital modeling of any sort.
If you want a foundational read that touches on deeper meanings around workmanship let me recommend David Pye's The Nature and Art of Workmanship[0].
Got 60 minutes/day in Ontario Canada in elementary school, and I felt like it wasn’t enough but I guess I liked to run a lot. And that was in addition to 1-2x/week physical education “classes”.
Structured recess in elementary school and such is usually around 30 mins a day. You'd also have gym class that might meet outdoors on the athletic facilities if the weather is good for it, that would be a full class period maybe 50 mins with some time banked in to change in an out of your gymwear in the locker rooms. In highschool your schedule might look a little more "collegiate" where you might elect to take certain classes (even local community college classes potentially that you could count for college credit in undergrad), and might end up with some free periods during your day if schedule permits. When I went to school people would use those free periods either to do homework, slack off, go home early, or smoke weed in the woods. In college on the other hand you might only have a class or two a day depending on your schedule.
Just recently my mind went back to shop class actually. In the middle of southern sweden in the 90s we had annual theme days and one of them was candle making. Probably went there because of all the "stearin" that is thrown out with modern disposable candles.
Going to middle school and high school in the 90s, I never got to take shop class, and I still wish I had been able to. I was told those classes aren't for people who are wanted to go to college. (I was told the same thing about taking weight lifting for someone who wasn't an athlete, but I took it anyway.) What a bunch of bullshit. But I did get to take computer science (in Turbo Pascal!) with the guy who was the shop teacher, and he was of the best teachers I had.
I still use a steel toolbox I made at school. Did the lot: cutting, folding, welding, painting and got an A+ which is fair because it's now almost 40 years old.
My kids didn't get to do any of that which is a shame. There are obvious downsides like having the tools to make throwing stars from the metal off-cuts.
I had no shop class in my middle school years 99-2002 but technical theater is the closest thing that may still sneakily exist in many schools. I learned basic carpentry and electrical, including lighting design and sound, all in the service of making sets for the yearly plays.
First day of metalwork I managed to catch my hand on a sharp edge and got a cut that was bleeding juuuust enough to warrant a bandaid. I went to the teacher to ask for one. The look of confusion on his face is emblazoned on my memory. After a few minutes of scratching his head and thinking about the situation, he found some packing tape and covered the cut with that. And that was the last injury in that class!
Tangentially related, Jony Ive of Apple fame recently did an interview on BBC's desart island disks where he discussed his father's involvement in bringing Design Technology to UK schools: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00289vf
The confidence I gained from my middle school wood and metal shop classes in the late 80s came in handy 30ish years later when I remodeled significant portions of my own house in the 2020s, from the building fabric in to the floors and finishings. My white collar peers were surprised I could do such a thing, to say nothing of my South Asian professional immigrant family.
I feel like I got the best what those classes were meant for: teaching people how to build many of the things they need in their lives rather than be dependent on the consumerist systems. Self reliance taught through a socialist public education system in the Rust Belt. Go figure.
I'm so lucky I had it because most such classes were cut in the following years as public school funding was cut back.
I still have one of the industrial art pieces I made back in 8th grade shop class - a cast aluminum Great Seal of America, mounted on a wooden plaque.
I think there's another really important set of lessons available from basic tool use which translates directly to the software industry--intuitive understanding of what makes a tool good. Tools (as opposed to appliances) scale with the user's ability. A good lathe in good condition does better and better work as you learn its behavior and capabilities. You could spend 5 decades with one hammer incrementally improving your forging technique day by day and week by week. Your dishwasher, however, just always does the same thing.
Knowing the difference between a dishwasher and a hammer is something it seems like many of the engineers, designers, and product managers in the software business are completely incapable of.
This is an excellent subject to teach in schools. I'm a software developer and I felt like I benefited from woodwork and metalwork lessons at school. I think if the future generation is to automate systems, they will need to understand the manual processes.
Another thing that's needed through is to make it easier for young people to buy land in remote areas and/or to access funding to start companies. It's insane how difficult it is to obtain funding for any venture dealing in the word of atoms. I hear stories of young people moving to China to access opportunities; in the west, it feels like entrepreneurship in the space has been regulated out of existence.
It's bad enough that you have to compete with China on price and quality, but regulations make it essentially impossible.
this wont have much effect, as the origins of "shop class" was to introduce kids to power tools and modern equipment, who were living with all kinds of basic hand tools and work shops as the basic backgound of a world with a large percentage of hand made things.
That background is gone, and with it the ability to tinker and practice, scrounge, and build stuff.
Out in the country, you might still find plenty of that, but they dont need shop class, as there is any amount of tools, for free, or cheap, cheap ,cheap, building cars or anything from parts.
bumper sticker says "built not bought"
old timer told me that you used to have to watch your tools, and put them away, lest they go missing, now they are perfectly safe anywhere, presumably because tools have a negative conotation
Using tools is a skill. Wood lathes, for instance, are extremely simple pieces of equipment - they hold a piece of wood and spin it. You can see and understand how they work in about 30 seconds. But even with years of practice you'll generally find yourself far less capable than a master lathe worker who seem to have this ability to take any piece of wood and chisel it into seemingly anything imaginable with a few strokes. Shop class is about teaching these skills, which are also highly transferrable.
And everything, at some fundamental level, is hand built. Think about the building you're in right now, or the road you're driving on. Or whatever else. Even for things where processes can have some high degree of automation when they break or need customization - it's back to a guy and his tools. For that matter on the factory line those machines need regular maintenance and repair once again from a guy and his tools.
And no, tool boxes are prime time theft targets in highly urban areas - probably more so than rural. Thieves don't usually steal things to use them (with such skills they wouldn't be thieves in the first place!), they steal them to sell them. And tools, especially high quality, are relatively expensive and one of the most resellable things in existence because good tools last practically forever - many feature lifetime warranties in any case.
Was going to say. I graduated high school 33 years ago. Was one of the last cohorts that had wood shop and metal shop. It was fun, but even back then the tools and presses we used hadn't been relevant to industry for awhile. If you want shop to be relevant to modern industry you would need to teach robotics, CAD/CAM, CNC, 3D printing, etc.
> If you want shop to be relevant to modern industry you would need to teach robotics, CAD/CAM, CNC, 3D printing, etc.
Uhh.. what? A CNC mill is, fundamentally, a mill. A CNC lathe is a lathe. You're not absolved from knowing how to use a manual lathe or a manual mill even if you use CNC machines all day long. Where do you develop an intuition for feeds, speeds, finishes, tolerances, etc if not by spending hours and hours doing it by hand?
A classic machinist apprentice task is to take a rough steel cube and make the sides flat and smooth using a hand file. That teaches you how steel behaves and can be worked. Life was slower a century ago.
High school students can learn CNC with smaller machine tools. There are little desktop CNC machines in the US$1000 range. You can cut aluminum, brass, and plastics, but not steel.
They talk the same G-code as the big machines. You design jobs for them the same way you do for the big machines. At that scale you can usually avoid coolant, oily rags, oily chip disposal, and the general mess of a real machine shop.
Taking that lesson to its extreme you realize there's a rounding effect where seemingly no matter how carefully you hold the file, the edges of the face are cut down more than the center. To combat this you might discover you can use the end of the file (like the last tooth) as a scraper. You can use a gauge block and some blue ink to discover the high spots and repeatedly work them until it's flat. Congratulations! You've just discovered how to make a lathe bed.
I tried to learn machining on a CNC mill. it went ok, I guess. but I ruined a lot of tools, had to do a lot of polishing passes, and didn't really understand why my tolerances were so off. things like the flycutter mystified me, and using the boring head was deeply frustrating since it didn't have a tiny little servo. aligning the vice was something I dreaded, took me a good hour for some reason. 4 jaw chuck? maybe you use that if you need to drill off center or work on square stock.
couple of decades later I only use manual machines (with power feeds and DROs), and I'm really a lot faster and more consistent.
CNC is cool, and you can do some pretty amazing things e.g. with a 4 or 5 axis machine, but ultimately the value is in repeatably churning out the same part over and over again. The industrial utility is obvious, but there's not a lot of pedagogical utility and to a hobbyist or prototyper it's generally just not worth the overhead.
That's a good idea. Schools should give an "overview" of potential career paths and teach some basic skills.
I don't think it makes sense to teach students how to use metalworking lathes, but giving people basic proficiency with hand tools and less dangerous power tools would be great.
It can also be used to teach about power tool safety. I can't believe some of the dangerous stuff people do with angle grinders.
I've been a mentor for the FRC robotics competition team at our local high school for a number of years. This is as close as any of the schools in the area get to shop class these days. And by that I mean that the schools do not teach any of it. They simply provide a space for the team to conduct their activities and we, the mentors, take-in any kid who might want to join and teach them how to design and build competition robots as well as other areas (business, marketing, graphic design, etc.).
It has been very difficult over the years, including a time when we thought about pulling the team out of the schools and running a smaller team out of our home. The bureaucracy and ebbs and flows of support made is painful at times, almost terminal. Thankfully the team survived. Many of our team members went on to nice careers in science and engineering.
I've also had the experience of trying to start an RC model airplane club at our local schools. I was going to fully fund it myself, donate all tools and equipment and teach the course once a week. I was also going to have other engineers and acquaintances join in from time to time, including people who worked at SpaceX, designed the F117 stealth fighter, built cameras for space and the moon, designed a lunar lander, etc.
I met with the principals from five of our schools. They all said they were enthusiastic about it and wanted to do it. So, I got going with planning and got a curriculum and some demonstrations ready for the next meeting.
Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again. My kids are out of the system and I have zero interest in enduring that kind of torture again.
So, yeah, our system of education is broken beyond recognition at many levels. Not sure what it will take to fix it.
> Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again.
You just needed someone familiar with how this sort of bureaucracy works (I'm not agreeing with it, just pointing out that this is pretty standard). It really isn't hard and it is just box checking. They weren't asking you for $2-million in bonds, they were asking you to be insured or bonded for that amount of liability. I would be surprised if it cost more ~$200/year. Basically if you injure a kid when they stick their finger in an RC plane prop, they want to know that you are capable of making it right financially.
As far as principles ghosting you: yeah, they have a million issues that they are dealing with. They get a lot of people reaching out about various opportunities and programs, many of which will require more effort or time than they have available. People who do this work regularly understand that you have to be ready to show up with a turnkey program or do the admin work yourself, because admin is already under-resourced, and they don't really have time to explain to someone why they need to be insured or bonded, and why that is a pretty standard ask in today's world.
It sucks, but it is the nature of large scale organizations. Those organizations are organized around trying to meet their legal obligations to provide a basic education (based on criteria they have little input on) to every child in an area on a limited budget. They have precisely no organizational motive for an RC airplane club taught by an outsider. So when someone shows up and says that they want to teach an extracurricular course once a week, and then can't get his ducks in a row to get insurance, they rightfully deprioritise it. At then end of the day, the principal is balancing a fun extracurricular for 10-30 students against the needs of hundreds or thousands of students and dozens of staff.
Decentralization will solve it. The current heavily centralized scheme has just created a system where everybody's optimizing for the lowest common denominator's test scores. Anything that doesn't improve that is heavily deprioritized, especially if it could entail any sort of liability or risk. Infantilization follows naturally.
Yeah, I'm not sure why it's a hedge against AI. How about a hedge against the fact that we still need to build stuff, cool spaces, plumb buildings, provide electricity and fewer people are being trained for this stuff.
I was very fortunate to be in middle school (ages 11 - 13) in the late 60s when shop classes were still going strong. Here's what I recall of our curriculum:
6th grade: industrial drawing, hand tools, shop safety, home maintenance: replacing windows, wiring bulbs, switches and outlets, faucet installations. Basic fabrication with plastic, hammered metal forming and band sawing wood.
7th & 8th grade: Metal: forge, lathe, welding (electric arc & acetylene), sheet metal (cutting, bending, punching, riveting, soldering) Wood: turning on lathe, table sawing, planing, routing, laminating, veneering, clamping, etc
In high school, all of the above plus architectural drawing, project management, metal machining, and fiberglass (mold design, making and part-making). Student projects included dune buggy car bodies, boats, water skis, furniture and all the usual (cutting boards, knife blocks, spice racks, etc.)
In today's world, parents (and lawyers) might find it unsafe for boys (very few girls elected to take these classes) but in seven years of shop, I only recall one serious accident involving the loss of a finger tip.
I went on to college major in Industrial Design and business then spent a career designing and producing projects for major consumer product company clients.
The best advice I ever got (after my Kindergarten teacher telling me, "Now young man, you should _never_ pass up the chance to go to the bathroom.") was my shop teacher advising:
>Before hitting the switch on a power tool, slowly count to 10 under your breath to yourself on your fingers, visualizing all the forces involved and planning out the entirety of your movement and how you will be moving the stock/tool, and considering what might go wrong and the results thereof and what will protect you (all guards should be in place and all suitable PPE worn) or where you should be positioned so as to avoid any potential projectile, reminding yourself that you want to be able to repeat that count in the same way when the tool is switched off.
Sawstop wouldn't have a business model if all tablesaw accidents were tried by a jury of shop teachers.
I have a similar habit: Before applying power, I manually turn the blade (or workpiece on the lathe) through one full rotation. I also think my way through the entire cut, including where my body and hands will be, and what I'll do if something goes wrong.
I've also mentored younger colleagues. I think there's a problem with shop safety, which is related to computer programming: Some people are able to learn it, and others just aren't. There's a certain situational awareness that you have to develop -- a sixth sense for when something is unsafe, that goes beyond just remembering all of the rules. There's also an intuition that you develop, like in programming, of being able to "think like the machine."
Like it or not, there are people who shouldn't be in the shop.
Pattern recognition. Some people have and some don't. It's also situational for some people.
I had a friend who could immediately see patterns in fighting games, after a few plays they'd immediately know how the CPU would react in certain situations. I could never.
I can see patterns in code, how it relates to other code and in the processes surrounding it, especially when I'm not taking my ADD meds. It's a superpower when shit's on fire and needs to be handled fast.
Similarly some people form this "sixth sense" situational awareness for physical tools and safety. They'll just look at a worksite and "feel" something is off. Or they pick up a tool and immediately know something is off - something in the balance or how it feels in the hand, or maybe it made a noise it's not supposed to.
I ran a small light plastic assembly factory years ago and within 20 minutes of a new person starting I could tell if they could, what I call, “think in 3D” if they couldn’t they would never meet the standard we needed and I’d sadly have to fail their trial at the end of the first day - about 30% of people fell in to this category.
Can you go into detail on this with an example or two? It sounds interesting.
A little bit of a ramble here:
Different mental models is kind of a fascinating thing for me. I don't always pick up on something as quickly as my peers when it comes to things like math and pattern recognition, but I've tended to make up for that with a hard work ethic and what I think of as rabid curiosity and a strong desire to constantly grow my work skill set and knowledge. I've grown a lot during my career as a result when colleagues who had much higher GPAs stagnated. It's interesting how wide and varied our brains are. Again, when doing any pattern recognition games (e.g. speed, set...etc) with my wife...I don't think I'm bad, but she is grasping things at a rate of 3-6x what I can and it was the same in any hard STEM classes that we took together. It's the opposite for things like history where she can't pick up as much of what is going on in a lecture or documentary or whatever. Physically speaking I'm not sure how the brain works differently between us, but I'm guessing the weights are just different if it's anything like the NN in computer science. We were playing dominoes the other day and I had to pause to check which had already been played and she got a little frustrated that I was taking too much time - like what do you mean you don't already know which ones have been played? So I guess it's a greater ability to recognize and retain patterns quickly.
In your case of the worker, I wonder if they were just dangerously clueless or just needed a little more time to build that mental model to grasp how the pieces all fit together. I also wonder how I would have faired.
Sure, difficult to really explain it as I don't think I have the correct physiological knowledge/vocabulary but I can try to paint a picture.
We assembled a plastic product with about 20 components of different shapes and sizes. There were slots to align and friction fit, there were things to click, wires to route, glue to dab etc.
The far extreme of "can think in 3D" were the people who could be shown the finished item, the kit of parts and pretty much just assemble it. They would miss some "trick" or "knack" we had developed and they might not quite get the alignment or placement of a part perfectly but the product would work.
The opposite end were the people who unless I was stood with them and helping to move the components in to alignment just simply couldn't "get" it. It was as if they didn't have a the ability to retain the finished view and movement through 3D space required to complete the movement. Could also have been a coordination, dexterity or proprioception issue.
Of course this was a spectrum and we had to make a judgement call (often in discussion with them) about how they would improve/get up to speed or if it was a lost cause. We built jigs and tools to help remove the finesse required in the assembly which helped a lot BUT, when you got someone who could just see it no amount of training or jigs could get everyone to that speed.
On quiet days we would have little competitions on certain stations to see if people could get a new record and it was those days when you could really see the people who just got it. The best example I can give was making the final cardboard packing boxes, this was an 8 movement process from flat box to assembled with lid open, the record was 2.7 sections, a sustainable pace (so the time that actually mattered) was around 7 seconds, people who just couldn't get it were over 30 seconds and usually with many quality issues as at those people were often fighting the box and material.
The best math professor I ever had was a fantastic instructor because he had in head a catalog of wrong mental models and could nearly immediately grasp where a student might have taken a wrong turn and try to get them on the right path.
(It was a graduate level real analysis course, and people who had been calculus whizzes were struggling with point set topology proofs.)
I’ll notice things that might be off on my car, but I am far from a mechanic.
When then there is indeed something wrong, I have a hard time convincing mechanics and techs that there is an actual issue.
It’s a heck of a lot easier when it’s your professional domain, and you carry the acumen to back up your findings.
I touched what I thought was a stationary wheel on a lathe as a child. it was of course under flouro tube lighting: it was synced to the tube, the strobe effect made it look stationary. I've never forgotten it.
The guy owning the lathe made some short, sharp observations. But I also suspect he sweated blood later on. Explaining his role in this had I lost a finger or worse would have been nasty
My high school woodshop teacher simply showed us his short finger. Lost in a table saw. We got the message.
There are enough shop teachers out there with missing digits to prove this statement is not true.
How many of them sued someone else with the assistance of a personal injury lawyer?
I don't get that advice from the kindergarten teacher. Can you explain please?
A lot of young children will have accidents because they forget, or don't want, to go to the washroom. That's true even if it is urgent. (They either don't know what their body is telling them, or they are fearful of washrooms, or they are simply having too much fun to be bothered by what their body is telling them.)
Its simpler than you think:
No one really regrets going to the bathroom when it isn't urgent.
Plenty of people regret waiting until it gets urgent.
Reminds me of when I interned as a medic. My instructor gave me a list of rules:
Walk, don't run.
Never trust the public in a vehicle.
Always check the rigging yourself before rapelling down the embankment.
Sleep when you're tired.
Eat when you're hungry.
And never, I repeat, NEVER wait to pee.
When you live in a world where you may have to scramble at any moment, and you work 72 hour shifts, you can't take simple things for granted. We might go from chilling on base to not being back for 15+ hours.
If something unexpected happens and your saw kicks a board back at you, you don't want to piss yourself as well as screaming
Think before you act.
Take your by own advice ;)
Don’t pass up a chance to pee is the advice in question.
Which I’d equate to; Better safe than sorry
While I was lucky to have shop classes in my school, this curriculum makes me extremely jealous, to be honest. We didn't have neither welding, nor forging, nor working with fiberglass composites nor "big" projects, had to learn it all by myself. Still, those classes taught me the basics of actually doing something with my own hands, which is pretty important.
I also remember that we were trusted to behave like adults in front of heavy machinery like routers, circular saws and lathes. No incidents whatsoever aside from minor cuts, which is normal. We were genuinely interested and behaved accordingly, nobody wanted to get hurt and / or get kicked out of the class
P.S. Not sure of how it works in the US, but we also had "shop classes for girls". The curriculum for those consisted of the basics of cooking, baking and working with fabrics (starting from sewing two pieces together in grade 5 and gradually evolving to designing and sewing clothing for yourself by grade 9). Though, in my opinion, those things shall be taught to everyone, not just girls
I had “agtech” in HS. Learning how to use a cutting torch and weld was the most memorable. Heh our welding unit was pretty much all about working on our teacher’s horse trailer. We also did hunter’s education which spent a lot of time on gun safety and was very useful. (Yes, I went to HS out in the sticks)
The latter class would have been called "Home Economics" ("HomeEc") back in the day.
Both these (sløyd /woodworking, heimekunnskap/cooking and home economics) were mandatory for everyone in Norway back in the nineties(although to be fair shop time was limited to wood, we weren't allowed to use metal lathes etc anymore), as was sewing (both with hand and machines).
I'm still thankful because of all the stuff I can relatively easy cook, fix or make thanks to those few hours in school.
(I'd also say they made for extremely welcome breaks between boring stuff in other subjects and being bullied during breaks.)
Still mandatory in Finland.
They have "soft materials" (fabric, sewing, knitting) and "hard materials" (wood, metal working, 3d-printing etc).
In upper classes they have cooking and more of the same.
I entered junior-high school (as it was then called) in Pasadena, California, in 1969. In seventh grade, all of the boys took four 10-week modules: electricity (make an electric motor), print shop (typesetting by hand and printing with a platen press), wood shop, and drafting (pencils and straightedges). The girls took a year of home economics; my two older sisters learned how to sew in those classes, and one made most of her own clothes when she was in high school.
The next year, the classes were made co-educational, with students choosing which stream to take, but at least in that first year the gender divide remained sharp. I chose to take drafting for all of eighth grade; there was only one girl in the class.
I can’t say that what I learned in those classes paid off for me directly, but I did pick up knowledge and skills that I applied indirectly in my later careers: from printshop for writing and editing work, and from drafting for learning how to use drawing and graphics software.
It would been nice if I had learned how to sew and cook then, too.
I had to take either home ec or shop in high school. I’d already done all the shop stuff I’d wanted to while growing up helping my dad make things, so I took home ec instead. I was one of two boys in the class. It was awesome. We baked. We sewed. We hung out with a roomful of girls. It was one of my better high school decisions.
In middle school we could take Industrial Arts, Home Economics, and Art. Seventh graders took all three, so they were each 2/3 of a semester, with one of them broken across the semester break.
In eighth grade we got to select two of the three, and they were each one semester. I took Industrial Arts and Home Economics because the Art teacher was a complete wacko who in the seventh grade class destroyed any interest I had in the subject.
I am pretty sure seventh grade Industrial Arts was co-ed and everyone took it. But maybe girls had another option, I don't quite remember. In eighth grade since it was an elective, it self-selected to almost entirely boys.
A basic education should include a lot of stuff you never use. If you're not exposed to things that don't interest you, how are you going to find the ones that do?
My shop classes paid off handsomely for me. I recommend taking them.
Wow, I wish I'd had this.
Closest I got was building theatre sets. But they were some awesome sets, with huge moving parts counterweighted via airline cable and sandbags, and we conceived and designed it all from scratch under very little supervision. Come to think of it I'm sure it wouldn't fly these days (I remember a substitute teacher walking into the gym flabbergasted at one point when I was climbing in the rafters drilling anchor holes for pulleys... the regular guy knew well enough when to be present and when to stay away).
Did a lot of the same in middle school in the late 1970s. Less of the home repair stuff, and no welding or machining.
We used hand tools and small power tools (hand-held drills and sanders), and drill press and scroll saws. Only the teacher could use the table saw, planer, and jointer.
One kid made a muzzle-loading rifle as his project. Can only imagine the hue and cry that would cause today.
I was in middle school in the 1990's, in Canada so the legal bit wouldn't be all that different from the US. We had welding, machining, and all sorts of power tools. That said, the teacher used their discretion while deciding who could use the more dangerous tools and supervised their use carefully.
i went to middle school starting in ‘98 (7th grade). I used a hand saw, glass cutter, sandblaster, and drill press. That was just a quarter. The second quarter we had home-ec. Stitched and baked and maybe something else. In shop I made a book shelf thing and a nameplate (sandblasted mirror)
In 9th grade I used a jointer and a band saw, built deep bookshelf out of poplar. In 10th grade I built a night stand (used shaper, Joiner, jointer, etc..)
The table saw was off limits in every class I remember, but most the other things were usable. With saw stops available, I think that reduces liability quite a bit.
Also in high school I did drafting and cad (2D and 3D).
Anyway, that was across 3 school districts in two states, and was as recent as 2003 - so it’s not like shop/industrial arts stopped being a thing 40 years ago.
> it’s not like shop/industrial arts stopped being a thing 40 years ago.
Unfortunately, I live near two school districts - one in a major metropolitan area in the US - which have closed down shop classes in the name of preparing students for college instead of work in the trades. It is hard to undo those decisions.
Fortunately some local “industrial arts” departments continue to thrive.
I didn't have access to heavy machinery or welders until high school (14-18), but I was very fortunate to go to a high-school that taught most of the above while I was there in the late 2000s.
The "product design" class (which was really either woodworking or metalworking depending on which stream you ended up in) was definitely my favourite class, and I think the most useful for later life too.
> In today's world, parents (and lawyers) might find it unsafe for boys (very few girls elected to take these classes) but in seven years of shop, I only recall one serious accident involving the loss of a finger tip.
A lot of the danger can be ameliorated by using CNC machines instead of circular saws and hand lathes. Standing 3-6 feet away from the machine when something goes wrong is way better than being 3-6 inches away.
Gantry CNC machines are superior to table saws for almost all sheet goods, anyway.
Sure, the jointer is still kind of dangerous. However, it has a very specialized function and normally you can keep your hands safely away from the blades with various push mechanisms.
[dead]
I think the return on investment is underplayed, it's not just what skills you graduate with, it's whether you find going to school at all rewarding. I was bored stiff in most of my classes, but having marching band to look forward to and the reward of traveling to different cities on the band bus kept me from completely checking out of school.
Maybe another aspect missing from schools lacking shop is the sense that you're trustworthy enough to put in front of a potentially lethal machine, a little bit of self worth goes a long way.
> Maybe another aspect missing from schools lacking shop is the sense that you're trustworthy enough to put in front of a potentially lethal machine, a little bit of self worth goes a long way.
I have the distinct memory of this thought crossing my mind during orientation in shop classes. The instructor gave us the rundown of how to be safe and then he actually let us use cool machines without hovering around us every second of the period! The trust involved in that exercise was immense, and even kids who were the class clowns in other classes rose to the occasion and were responsible in shop class.
I can only imagine how important this kind of experience would be for today's kids of the helicopter generation, many of whom would be receiving this type of trust to handle danger like an adult for perhaps the first time in their lives.
We had to watch a movie on day one (or very early in the class) with pretty graphic scenes of shop injuries. Blood, fingers getting cut off, a guy speared in the stomach by a scrap of wood binding and then thrown from the table saw blade.
I also got the scare treatment. 25 years later and I still refuse to buy a table saw despite being characterized as risk-tolerant is many other dimensions.
I use a table saw, but am extremely slow and careful with it. It's a terrifying tool.
The router also terrifies me, because in shop class I hadn't tightened the chuck enough, and the bit came out and ate through the work and fell on the floor, then zinged off at high speed. It missed me completely.
The other thing I do not like are the oxy and acetelyne cylinders. The metal shop teacher showed how to blow the dust off by cracking the valves. OMG, 2000 psi. Nope nope nope nope.
This is why Sloyd woodworking is taught in northern European countries:
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
A slightly different angle could be whether it needs to be school and can't be handled by the town in a different setting for instance.
I grew up in a town that had a community center where kids of my age played in bands, learned crocheting etc. School was boring, but it was short, and it was easy to meet with other kids from other schools, including other towns. Kids doing classical music have the same experience in general I think.
Maybe - but if it's not handled by the school, then there's going to be some sort of access problem for some kids. Transportation, time to do it, financial for the parents, etc.
Yes, depending on the city it can be more or less complex. It comes down to how kids are viewed, and a good indicator could be how libraries are handled.
How much does the local library cost ? is it easy for kids to access ? is there a library in the first place ?
If the local library is thriving, a community center can be an extension of that. If it's dead, that city is in a pretty bad place from the start.
As someone who was shoved and occasionally bullied while operating machines like belt saws... I'm not sure it was worth it.
Perhaps with stop-saw like inventions it could be safer, if the patents ever expire so schools could actually afford them.
All it takes is installing cameras and if anyone is caught up doing stupid shit the shoptime is over for them, permanently if it's anything serious.
I remember one clown kid in my class back in the days put a hottish drillbit to another's kid neck acting like a cool spy or something like that (we were 14 years old, luckily got only a mild burn which healed quickly). The teacher punched him in the face, probably not with full force but it was not a soft slap either, and banned him from the shop for some time. No incidents after that.
> The teacher punched him in the face […] and banned him from the shop
Incredible story for another generation.
Thank you for sharing!
> As someone who was shoved and occasionally bullied while operating machines like belt saws... I'm not sure it was worth it.
This. It's all fun and games until one of your classmates shoots you in the face with an air compressor while you're using a bandsaw. I still have all my fingers but did end up in trouble because everybody only saw the immediate aftermath of me making it abundantly clear how much I didn't appreciate his antics (only verbally, of course).
We had a metal lathe in our high school shop class. I still can’t believe someone didn’t kill themselves on that. I think wood lathes are fine, but honestly that should be kept out.
Wood lathes are much more dangerous than metal lathes IMO!
They run at high speeds, the workpiece is typically less secure, the material has a grain structure prone to catching the tool and digging into it, ventilation is required, and most importantly, the cutting tool is gripped in the operator's hands instead of being secured on a toolpost.
In metal shop, one kid left the key in the chuck and turned the lathe on. It punched a hole in the wall opposite it. It would have killed anyone in its path.
I'm not real comfortable around lathes.
These things aren't actually as dangerous as Reddit and the white collar internet make them out to be. The "being dumb" to near miss conversion ratio isn't that high and the near miss to someone gets hurt conversion ratio is abysmal.
Wood lathes, and generally woodworking tools like saws and routers are substantially more dangerous. Especially at the scale of machinery you have in vocational classes.
A metal lathe is the fundamental machine tool. You learn how to calculate feeds and speeds, plan depth of cut, thread cutting, parting, etc. You learn about surface finish, chatter, cutter shape... Why rob students of this? Should nobody learn basic machinist skills? It's no more or less dangerous than any other shop tool.
wood lathes + long hair = very risky business
Yep.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/nyregion/yale-student-die...
yeah the wood shop instructor told us about this story when I was at RISD :-( really sad
My dad (AF pilot) eschewed long hair. He said it was a convenient handle for your enemy to pull your head back and slit your throat.
I generally agree, young people respond well to responsibility. And whilst it doesn't help me day to day, knowing how the make dovetail joints is one of the things I cherish most from year 10.
Are shop classes mandated by states anywhere? No schools I know offer it. I am not sure if it’s a good or bad thing. I’ve heard of children having accidents in those classes - sometimes not just an accident but the result of other children intentionally harming them. On the other hand, I feel like our society has lost the ability to DIY and do things that are … less online. Maybe shop classes can help with that.
I have not been paying attention. I had no idea they were gone.
It is not one of my favorite classes when I took it, but what I learned, has been useful in a lot of situations, and still is.
So please bring it back.
They should also revive or create classes that teach other important, basic, life skills - budgeting, banking, getting a loan, investing, hiring a contractor, buying appliances, tiling, roofing, drywalling, etc, etc.
I would create a modern version of Home Economics to teach things the average person should be able to do.
1. Basic cookery. Including how to use the stove top, induction range, microwave, air fryer, stand mixer, and oven. How to choose a refrigerator, dishwasher, and other big ticket appliances.
2. Basic economics and finance. What is taken out of your paycheck e.g., state and federal taxes, social security and Medicare taxes, health insurance premiums, and contributions to 401k etc. How do credit cards work, how do car loans work, and how do mortgages work. Understand the different interest rates they charge. How do medical, auto, and home insurance work. How to file a tax return.
3. Elementary engineering. Basic concepts of how things work and how not to get injured. How electric circuits work (avoid touching the hot wire to something other than the terminal). How the house electrical circuits work. What is the purpose of the breaker panel and the GFCI mini breaker. How fires start and how to put out an oil fire vs regular fire. How to start a wood fire including feather sticks, fire steel, and steel wool & a nine volt battery. How house plumbing work including where does the pee and poo go. How the HVAC, furnace, and mini split work.
4. Basic technology. How to stay safe online. What to do if your credit card or identity is stolen. Password managers, MFA, and passkeys. How to shop for a mobile phone and understand all the fees the carrier will charge. How to use a LLM and ChatGPT.
#2 there reminds me of all those "got a first paycheck" teenager reaction videos, when having to pay taxes and everything else sinks in for the first time because nobody bothered to tell them about that stuff earlier.
We called that "Home Ec" (as in "Home Economics") when I was a kid. (I'm an elder millennial.) To be honest, I didn't find it particularly useful, and I think many of the calls for "practical" classes in primary or secondary education miss the mark.
Oddly, "Home Ec" for me was all about baking and knitting. It was basically "home ec" is for girls, shop is for guys.
We had something similar, our home ec classes had some household management, but the focus was largely on cooking and making/repairing clothing. This further split into seperate elective classes in the last few years of high school. That said some aspects of homekeeping were absorbed by other classes (math module on balancing a budget, social studies modules on how you'd start a business, etc.).
> It was basically "home ec" is for girls, shop is for guys.
We didn't have too many girls in the shop classes, but we had a surprisingly large numbers of guys taking the clothing and textiles classes. It was regarded as one of the most relaxed and enjoyable electives, and there was an unofficial exemption to the uniform policy that you could wear things you'd produced in class, so it was nice to see the schoolyard brightened by students wearing strange and colorful clothing.
Did you by chance receive supplementary lessons at home? I didn't take a home ec class, but my mother made it a priority to teach me budgeting and such.
Something like 25% of high school students can’t do basic arithmetic and you want them to budgets and retirement planning? I’m not saying “home ec” (as it was called through the 90s - no idea what happened to it) isn’t potentially useful, only that we might have bigger fish to fry.
As for trade skills, sure, no issue with that.
Those students might do better if they are taught practical uses of math, rather than STEM-focused abstractions.
(I was one of those kids going "why the hell are we learning this" until I got to grad school and was able to put it together).
Except they're not practical uses. Every well meaning civilian attempt to propose these topics is rebutted by educators who report back that these concepts are totally alien and abstract to teenagers until they actually own and are responsible for their own money.
The retention rate for these classes are abysmal, which is why you have people propose they should be taught, despite they themselves actually sitting through these classes, simply because any memory of these classes have been erased from their memory.
Exactly. In my case, Calcilus didn’t really “click” until undergraduate economics. Before that “why the heck do I care about the area under the curve?!?!”
Of course, I then went into software and haven’t used calculus since.
If we taught kids the basics of compound interest then maybe we’d have fewer people struggling under the load of some extremely heavy debt burdens. Good for usurious banks, I guess, but probably not society as a whole.
You can’t do compound interest without basic arithmetic.
It is mind-boggling to me that one of the most important numbers in life - the 2% inflation rate target - is not taught to everyone.
It's the financial equivalent of not teaching what temperature water freezes at.
Civics, ethics, and cooking too. :)
When I was a kid, cooking was part of the "Home Economics" class, which also included budgeting, shopping, basic repairs (home, clothing, etc), and some other useful "adulting" skills they apparently don't teach in school anymore.
It's shocking how recently this all seems to have been removed. I'm in my early 30s and learned most of this in public school.
Late 40s here. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to take home ec - the school considered it beneath me. Latin was elective as a senior. And I still can’t bake a souflee to save myself.
It's at least partly because, starting with NCLB in 2001, schools got defunded if students didn't do well on standardized tests. That resulted in curricula being redesigned around those standardized tests, and in an even more exaggerated way for obvious reasons in poor schools.
I found that in ethics classes, a lot of it was holier than thou and virtue signaling instructors preaching but not necessarily practicing. I am not saying all of the instructors and people who teach ethics are bad, this is what I have observed.
This is interesting to me, none of the ethics classes I've ever taken even had room for a holier-than-thou instructor; they were taught as "here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time".
A professor saying "And I'm great at doing the right thing" would be as out of place as them bragging about their fitness or wealth.
I remember my equivalent (they called it "Commerce" but it was basically law/politics/ethics) spent some significant time navel gazing at legislation that had directly influenced the private school system we were in.
"here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time" would have been vastly preferable to "heres how private schools with private funding successfully managed to extort the government for even more funding"
Maybe you can consider the teacher to be good because I remember the (many, many) lessons on the topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulburn_School_Strike
I must have gotten downvoted by a diehard goulburn toilet seat strike patrician.
That was my experience as well. OTOH I don’t think ethics classes will magically make the students “more ethical” or something. Might as well let students have a choice of philosophy electives if possible, I don’t think making everyone take ethics is better than making everyone take aesthetics.
Although if you were going to have something more concrete, like Engineering Ethics except somehow for high schoolers without a particular career chosen, a few weeks of philosophy would probably be good background.
Media (and now social media) awareness and understanding (I was lucky enough to take a course in this, back in... 1989/90)
Half of those are things that parents should learn them, and the other half are things most won't ever actually do. Buying an appliance is not a thing you need class for, your parents can take you with them when they're buying one and show you the process... and roofing.. well, let's be fair, most people won't be doing that themselves.
In my small country we have a website where random people can post suggestions for the government, and if it gets enough votes, some PR representative has to look at the suggestion and write a answer.... every few weeks there is a suggestion about how schools should teach kids stuff that their parents should teach them at home... even cooking, cleaning, etc. Have the parents really "failed in life" so much, that they can't even teach the kids to cook and clean and wash, etc.?
Shop class... somewhat understandable, power tools are not realy a thing parents living in apartments in large cities have, so yes, that's beneficial to kids... but other stuff?
Half of those are things that parents should learn them
I think the goal is to help boost the kids whose parents don't know some of the basics, like budgeting, balancing a checkbook, buying an appliance, typing, etc... The people who aren't doing well in modern society lack these skills, and teaching their kids is an opportunity to boost them out of potential poverty.
If you start teaching all the kids this, then the vast majority of parents will stop teaching their kids, because "school will teach you". This is fundamental human nature. So society ends up in a degraded state where instead of most kids learning these things well from parents and few not at all, you have all kids learning it a lower average rate.
This is not the way. If some kids have lacking home life, intervene directly for those students. Don't take away responsibility from parents.
I don’t think that’s true. Parents read to their kids, play sports with them, show them how to make art, etc. even if it’s taught in school.
I do wonder though if some personal finance, consumer research, etc. skills won’t be taught as readily thanks to the smartphone, though. Having paper forms or a checkbook out makes it easier to start a conversation
How many parents actually teach their school age kids eg. math, physics, biology, etc.? (ie. the subjects they have at school)?
It doesn't take responsibility from parents. If parents stop teaching their kids they making the choice.
The reality is, in places this matters, parents already are failing to teach their kids, and where there are successful families, parents continue to teach their kids.
The parents' job is to understand what is being taught in school and to fill the gaps. Either by teaching directly or by influencing the direction that the school is taking.
There's no reason to make a list of school topics and keep it separate from parent topics (except perhaps in particularly sensitive cases, but that's now what's being discussed here).
Even kids with access to power tools usually don't have access to shop tools.
> and roofing.. well, let's be fair, most people won't be doing that themselves
Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a roofer out to fix your roof? In my area if the job is less than $50k you can't find anyone who is interested. Not doing it yourself is an incredibly expensive luxury. Best know how to do it properly and safely.
drywalling is so far from basic. that shit is so hard
Dry walling is easy. Good drywalling is moderately difficult.
Best advice is to go with a slower set time so you can go at the pace you feel comfortable.
Loss of trying, drying, and sanding off your failures
In many ways like coding, the worse you are at drywall the harder it is, the messier you are, and the longer it takes.
The more you're ok with good enough, the quicker you can be done. :p
Drywalling is easy. Good drywalling is not that difficult if you are patient.
Now good and fast that's the hard part.
these are high schoolers we’re talking about, sure people have used the excuse of the classes not being given but if they were, nearly no one would be interested.
also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage
> nearly no one would be interested.
I went to a public US high school with a nursing magnet program and an automotive program.
Both saw you with a phlebotomist license or a technician certification respectively.
These were wildly popular programs despite having academic requirements (for the nursing track)
I think high schoolers care about practicality, actually.
> also you need to keep budget in mind and the teacher shortage
crazy thought, though.
Maybe pay teachers more? Make it a more attractive career? Vote in superintendents with more education experience than corporate.
Idk… anything but throw your hands up and say “well nobody wants to teach so idk”
Vote in superintendents with more education experience than corporate.
I'm sure there are some corporate superintendents, but I've never seen one. It is almost always a teacher's union endorsed ex-teacher who was recently a principal in the district, or a superintendent from another district in the state.
Around here it's typically somebody who is using involvement in local education as a stepping stone towards a heavier hitting political career.
I think things would be much better if they had been teachers, but the teachers are all either burnt out or still teaching.
> I'm sure there are some corporate superintendents, but I've never seen one
Live near a big school district (major metropolitan area), then you will see the corporate and career political types in the CEO office.
Good point, I was looking up LA and Chicago (NY has many small districts), and oddly both Superintendents have just been fired. Chicago was indeed a "CEO Type", and LA was the teacher principal type.
The cooking class at my middle school was insanely popular, same with shop. A surprisingly large number of students also signed up for “consumer math” which was all about taxes, budgeting and such.
I think consumer math and statistics should be required alternatives to precalc and calc. Maybe even algebra 2.
100% agree. I took it and it was the best class. Also taught me how to use excel at a pretty advanced level.
Looks like you're being downvoted but you're right. A tiny fraction of high school students would actually care about these classes -- high school me wouldn't
I didn't care about English or Geometry either, but I still wish somebody had taught me about quarterly tax estimates for independent contractors.
Baking cookies and learning to sew was at least a nice break from studying books.
It’s not just about acquiring “basic skills” or “marketable skills”. Shop enables practical, skill-appreciating minds to use geometry, physics, and science in concert to solve problems. You learn about symmetry and measurement, force and torque, and materials and chemistry simultaneously.
Many learn better at a workbench than at a chalkboard. And even those that don’t often appreciate the chalkboard more when they can relate what they’re learning to what they are doing.
Hah, I’m currently enrolled in machinist classes and one of the big NOs is no ties! Funny to see one at the top of the article.
2 of my big safety lessons from elders when I was growing up:
- my Nana always wore her hair up when in the kitchen, she had worked somewhere she saw a woman get scalped by having her long hair pulled into a mixer
- my Dad was wary of synthetic clothing after having seen people in fires have synthetics melt onto their skin (not sure if this was in the Army or growing up in St. Louis)
It's very interesting how many "non-trivial" things can go wrong with power tools. Kickbacks for example. They sound very trivial when you know about them. But to the layman that does a one off cut with a table saw, circular saw, chain saw, angle grinder, ... it's not so intuitive.
One might say and be very careful but then a kickback shows up and causes brown pants at best, a life changing injury or death at worst.
See also: "degloving" (note: if you are squeamish, DO NOT SEARCH)
Long overdue, in my opinion. I grew up desperately looking forward to wood, metal, and automotive shop classes to compliment my computer electives; by the time I reached High School, all but wood shop had been replaced by more weight rooms for the football team to use.
Primary education should always include basic skills in craftsmanship, inclusive of at least shop class and cooking/home economics. Hopefully this marks a more general rebound of these long-neglected skillsets.
https://archive.ph/iGeZf
I had a shop class in middle school (mid-to-late 80s) and I learned a ton of useful skills even though i went on to software engineering. Got experience welding, etching, knew what a "tap and die" was, did drafting (and got exposed to AutoCAD). I also had "home ec" which taught how to cook, clean, and sew. A few others that I would have liked to see: basic plumbing repairs,working with hand tools (plane, chisel, etc), building structures from framing lumber.
It really seems like having a good non-academic curriculum for life skills is broadly useful beyond folks who are going into the trades.
the cover photo wearing a tie is uhh an interesting choice for literally any kind of shop. same reason women have to keep their hair out of the way.
I remember wearing ties but tucking it into the shirt (in between the buttons) and also wearing an apron. Incredibly unsafe to just have a tie on normally around machinery so imagine that is just for the photo op.
Might be a clip on tie.
hard agree, that might be the end of him if it wasn’t just for a photo op
I know in Sweden it's required to do both sewing and woodwork in school upwards to secondary high school.
I think that's a wonderful because both genders are forced to learn skills that can be helpful in life.
I hated shop class. It was an enormous waste of time I could have invested in learning more about computers, or to reduce hours in school. It should be completely abolished and people with an intense desire for carpentry and similar activities can learn about it after school without tormenting all children with this nonsense.
Even in the rural midwest in the early nineties you didn't get a big shop education in middle school, and I was on the academic track in high school. But we did a lot of woodworking in Scouts. Pretty much everyone grew up in families that worked with their hands. Some of us came factory work, the farm kids all learned how to use tools. And even the "rich" kids families owned small companies who worked in these areas.
Fast forward to the beginning of architecture school and we all had to draft by hand (which I had been doing in some capacity since 7th grade) and learn to and use the shop. We didn't learn to draft because it was a necessary skill anymore, but to learn 1. spatial thinking and in turn 2. how to turn ideas into real things you could communicate. Same with the making of physical models (even if you didn't use the shop).
These require the attention to detail and understanding of process necessary to break a sophisticated design idea down into individual actions (single lines, cuts, etc), and are of immense value even if you never touch a wood shop after undergraduate.
Even today, 25 years later and a time when we don't even necessarily teach 2d -CAD- drafting anymore we still require shop work, physical modeling, and hand drafting of ALL our students. So much that in a lot of places the first year of a 5 year professional Bachelor of Architecture doesn't even touch digital modeling of any sort.
If you want a foundational read that touches on deeper meanings around workmanship let me recommend David Pye's The Nature and Art of Workmanship[0].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319901.The_Nature_and_Ar...
Recently learned that US school students typically get ~20 minutes of outdoor time per day… is that true?
I can find some legislated minimums/guidelines around that… what’s the actual practice?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/n75w63/recess...
Got 60 minutes/day in Ontario Canada in elementary school, and I felt like it wasn’t enough but I guess I liked to run a lot. And that was in addition to 1-2x/week physical education “classes”.
Lunch, walking between classes, one P.E. period for about an hour.
Structured recess in elementary school and such is usually around 30 mins a day. You'd also have gym class that might meet outdoors on the athletic facilities if the weather is good for it, that would be a full class period maybe 50 mins with some time banked in to change in an out of your gymwear in the locker rooms. In highschool your schedule might look a little more "collegiate" where you might elect to take certain classes (even local community college classes potentially that you could count for college credit in undergrad), and might end up with some free periods during your day if schedule permits. When I went to school people would use those free periods either to do homework, slack off, go home early, or smoke weed in the woods. In college on the other hand you might only have a class or two a day depending on your schedule.
Just recently my mind went back to shop class actually. In the middle of southern sweden in the 90s we had annual theme days and one of them was candle making. Probably went there because of all the "stearin" that is thrown out with modern disposable candles.
Going to middle school and high school in the 90s, I never got to take shop class, and I still wish I had been able to. I was told those classes aren't for people who are wanted to go to college. (I was told the same thing about taking weight lifting for someone who wasn't an athlete, but I took it anyway.) What a bunch of bullshit. But I did get to take computer science (in Turbo Pascal!) with the guy who was the shop teacher, and he was of the best teachers I had.
I still use a steel toolbox I made at school. Did the lot: cutting, folding, welding, painting and got an A+ which is fair because it's now almost 40 years old.
My kids didn't get to do any of that which is a shame. There are obvious downsides like having the tools to make throwing stars from the metal off-cuts.
All the kids had knives and throwing stars when I was that age. The boys anyway. I carried a pocketknife all through middle and high school.
I took every shop class. Drafting, wood shop, metal shop, auto shop. I still have the desk I made.
I tried to build a steam engine in metal shop, but failed. I was able to build a working one in the metal shop in college.
Impressive. What kind of valves? Including the boiler?
I had no shop class in my middle school years 99-2002 but technical theater is the closest thing that may still sneakily exist in many schools. I learned basic carpentry and electrical, including lighting design and sound, all in the service of making sets for the yearly plays.
In my suburban middle school in Northern NJ, everyone (boys & girls) was required to take:
* Wood shop
* Metal shop
* Cooking
* Sewing
* Typing
I never saw an injury.
Learning to work with our hands safely was quite valuable.
First day of metalwork I managed to catch my hand on a sharp edge and got a cut that was bleeding juuuust enough to warrant a bandaid. I went to the teacher to ask for one. The look of confusion on his face is emblazoned on my memory. After a few minutes of scratching his head and thinking about the situation, he found some packing tape and covered the cut with that. And that was the last injury in that class!
Real reason shop was ended: cost and safety.
Materials are expensive, tools are expensive. $0 for a math class, $100 for a shop class. PER CLASS.
The danger of kids with tools getting stabby (and cutty).
Those remain unsolved. Shop will not be revived until they are.
What changed between when shop class was common and now to cause those issues?
Woodworking was terrifying. But there are so many other things one could make or fix in a shop class.
Tangentially related, Jony Ive of Apple fame recently did an interview on BBC's desart island disks where he discussed his father's involvement in bringing Design Technology to UK schools: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00289vf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_and_Technology
The confidence I gained from my middle school wood and metal shop classes in the late 80s came in handy 30ish years later when I remodeled significant portions of my own house in the 2020s, from the building fabric in to the floors and finishings. My white collar peers were surprised I could do such a thing, to say nothing of my South Asian professional immigrant family.
I feel like I got the best what those classes were meant for: teaching people how to build many of the things they need in their lives rather than be dependent on the consumerist systems. Self reliance taught through a socialist public education system in the Rust Belt. Go figure.
I'm so lucky I had it because most such classes were cut in the following years as public school funding was cut back.
I still have one of the industrial art pieces I made back in 8th grade shop class - a cast aluminum Great Seal of America, mounted on a wooden plaque.
I think there's another really important set of lessons available from basic tool use which translates directly to the software industry--intuitive understanding of what makes a tool good. Tools (as opposed to appliances) scale with the user's ability. A good lathe in good condition does better and better work as you learn its behavior and capabilities. You could spend 5 decades with one hammer incrementally improving your forging technique day by day and week by week. Your dishwasher, however, just always does the same thing.
Knowing the difference between a dishwasher and a hammer is something it seems like many of the engineers, designers, and product managers in the software business are completely incapable of.
This is an excellent subject to teach in schools. I'm a software developer and I felt like I benefited from woodwork and metalwork lessons at school. I think if the future generation is to automate systems, they will need to understand the manual processes.
Another thing that's needed through is to make it easier for young people to buy land in remote areas and/or to access funding to start companies. It's insane how difficult it is to obtain funding for any venture dealing in the word of atoms. I hear stories of young people moving to China to access opportunities; in the west, it feels like entrepreneurship in the space has been regulated out of existence.
It's bad enough that you have to compete with China on price and quality, but regulations make it essentially impossible.
[US schools]
(Never went anywhere afaik over here.)
Over where? I see you're working at an agtech company. Are you perchance in Uttar Pradesh? Brazil?
this wont have much effect, as the origins of "shop class" was to introduce kids to power tools and modern equipment, who were living with all kinds of basic hand tools and work shops as the basic backgound of a world with a large percentage of hand made things. That background is gone, and with it the ability to tinker and practice, scrounge, and build stuff. Out in the country, you might still find plenty of that, but they dont need shop class, as there is any amount of tools, for free, or cheap, cheap ,cheap, building cars or anything from parts. bumper sticker says "built not bought" old timer told me that you used to have to watch your tools, and put them away, lest they go missing, now they are perfectly safe anywhere, presumably because tools have a negative conotation
Using tools is a skill. Wood lathes, for instance, are extremely simple pieces of equipment - they hold a piece of wood and spin it. You can see and understand how they work in about 30 seconds. But even with years of practice you'll generally find yourself far less capable than a master lathe worker who seem to have this ability to take any piece of wood and chisel it into seemingly anything imaginable with a few strokes. Shop class is about teaching these skills, which are also highly transferrable.
And everything, at some fundamental level, is hand built. Think about the building you're in right now, or the road you're driving on. Or whatever else. Even for things where processes can have some high degree of automation when they break or need customization - it's back to a guy and his tools. For that matter on the factory line those machines need regular maintenance and repair once again from a guy and his tools.
And no, tool boxes are prime time theft targets in highly urban areas - probably more so than rural. Thieves don't usually steal things to use them (with such skills they wouldn't be thieves in the first place!), they steal them to sell them. And tools, especially high quality, are relatively expensive and one of the most resellable things in existence because good tools last practically forever - many feature lifetime warranties in any case.
Was going to say. I graduated high school 33 years ago. Was one of the last cohorts that had wood shop and metal shop. It was fun, but even back then the tools and presses we used hadn't been relevant to industry for awhile. If you want shop to be relevant to modern industry you would need to teach robotics, CAD/CAM, CNC, 3D printing, etc.
> If you want shop to be relevant to modern industry you would need to teach robotics, CAD/CAM, CNC, 3D printing, etc.
Uhh.. what? A CNC mill is, fundamentally, a mill. A CNC lathe is a lathe. You're not absolved from knowing how to use a manual lathe or a manual mill even if you use CNC machines all day long. Where do you develop an intuition for feeds, speeds, finishes, tolerances, etc if not by spending hours and hours doing it by hand?
A classic machinist apprentice task is to take a rough steel cube and make the sides flat and smooth using a hand file. That teaches you how steel behaves and can be worked. Life was slower a century ago.
High school students can learn CNC with smaller machine tools. There are little desktop CNC machines in the US$1000 range. You can cut aluminum, brass, and plastics, but not steel. They talk the same G-code as the big machines. You design jobs for them the same way you do for the big machines. At that scale you can usually avoid coolant, oily rags, oily chip disposal, and the general mess of a real machine shop.
Taking that lesson to its extreme you realize there's a rounding effect where seemingly no matter how carefully you hold the file, the edges of the face are cut down more than the center. To combat this you might discover you can use the end of the file (like the last tooth) as a scraper. You can use a gauge block and some blue ink to discover the high spots and repeatedly work them until it's flat. Congratulations! You've just discovered how to make a lathe bed.
I tried to learn machining on a CNC mill. it went ok, I guess. but I ruined a lot of tools, had to do a lot of polishing passes, and didn't really understand why my tolerances were so off. things like the flycutter mystified me, and using the boring head was deeply frustrating since it didn't have a tiny little servo. aligning the vice was something I dreaded, took me a good hour for some reason. 4 jaw chuck? maybe you use that if you need to drill off center or work on square stock.
couple of decades later I only use manual machines (with power feeds and DROs), and I'm really a lot faster and more consistent.
CNC is cool, and you can do some pretty amazing things e.g. with a 4 or 5 axis machine, but ultimately the value is in repeatably churning out the same part over and over again. The industrial utility is obvious, but there's not a lot of pedagogical utility and to a hobbyist or prototyper it's generally just not worth the overhead.
I learned CNC by hand writing G code. I think it was valuable.
Nothing stressed me out more than working with a band saw hoping I didn't cut my fingers off
That's a good idea. Schools should give an "overview" of potential career paths and teach some basic skills.
I don't think it makes sense to teach students how to use metalworking lathes, but giving people basic proficiency with hand tools and less dangerous power tools would be great.
It can also be used to teach about power tool safety. I can't believe some of the dangerous stuff people do with angle grinders.
in order to
> Hedge Against the AI Future
So robots are not going to do it?:)
This is a game of whackamole, there is no real hedge aside from demanding a policy change.
I've been a mentor for the FRC robotics competition team at our local high school for a number of years. This is as close as any of the schools in the area get to shop class these days. And by that I mean that the schools do not teach any of it. They simply provide a space for the team to conduct their activities and we, the mentors, take-in any kid who might want to join and teach them how to design and build competition robots as well as other areas (business, marketing, graphic design, etc.).
It has been very difficult over the years, including a time when we thought about pulling the team out of the schools and running a smaller team out of our home. The bureaucracy and ebbs and flows of support made is painful at times, almost terminal. Thankfully the team survived. Many of our team members went on to nice careers in science and engineering.
I've also had the experience of trying to start an RC model airplane club at our local schools. I was going to fully fund it myself, donate all tools and equipment and teach the course once a week. I was also going to have other engineers and acquaintances join in from time to time, including people who worked at SpaceX, designed the F117 stealth fighter, built cameras for space and the moon, designed a lunar lander, etc.
I met with the principals from five of our schools. They all said they were enthusiastic about it and wanted to do it. So, I got going with planning and got a curriculum and some demonstrations ready for the next meeting.
Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again. My kids are out of the system and I have zero interest in enduring that kind of torture again.
So, yeah, our system of education is broken beyond recognition at many levels. Not sure what it will take to fix it.
> Long story short, they all ghosted me. And, on top of that, Los Angeles County demanded a $2 million dollar bond (or whatever it was) as a precondition. Just f-ing crazy. I walked away and never spoke to anyone at the school district about this or any other STEM ideas again.
You just needed someone familiar with how this sort of bureaucracy works (I'm not agreeing with it, just pointing out that this is pretty standard). It really isn't hard and it is just box checking. They weren't asking you for $2-million in bonds, they were asking you to be insured or bonded for that amount of liability. I would be surprised if it cost more ~$200/year. Basically if you injure a kid when they stick their finger in an RC plane prop, they want to know that you are capable of making it right financially.
As far as principles ghosting you: yeah, they have a million issues that they are dealing with. They get a lot of people reaching out about various opportunities and programs, many of which will require more effort or time than they have available. People who do this work regularly understand that you have to be ready to show up with a turnkey program or do the admin work yourself, because admin is already under-resourced, and they don't really have time to explain to someone why they need to be insured or bonded, and why that is a pretty standard ask in today's world.
It sucks, but it is the nature of large scale organizations. Those organizations are organized around trying to meet their legal obligations to provide a basic education (based on criteria they have little input on) to every child in an area on a limited budget. They have precisely no organizational motive for an RC airplane club taught by an outsider. So when someone shows up and says that they want to teach an extracurricular course once a week, and then can't get his ducks in a row to get insurance, they rightfully deprioritise it. At then end of the day, the principal is balancing a fun extracurricular for 10-30 students against the needs of hundreds or thousands of students and dozens of staff.
Thank you for telling us about this dismaying situation.
Decentralization will solve it. The current heavily centralized scheme has just created a system where everybody's optimizing for the lowest common denominator's test scores. Anything that doesn't improve that is heavily deprioritized, especially if it could entail any sort of liability or risk. Infantilization follows naturally.
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Me: Great, an article Not about about AI. clicks_link
Me: Oh FFS
Building an AI in shop class, what a prospect. I'd choose "giant mecha robot with laser attachment on each shoulder" as my assignment!
Yeah, I'm not sure why it's a hedge against AI. How about a hedge against the fact that we still need to build stuff, cool spaces, plumb buildings, provide electricity and fewer people are being trained for this stuff.
Someone’s gotta keep the old things working when the average person can’t afford to buy things from the Chinese World Hegemony.
I don’t know. When you are living in a Chinese owned factory dormitory you don’t need lots.