Good for them.
UK perspective here: at high school age I went through the system when they had two ‘tracks’: Grammar school for those deemed to be university bound, and ‘secondary modern’ for the rest.
I was in grammar school, and we had a woodwork shop class, but no metalwork.
Consequently I was never taught to use a lathe or other machine tools.
Which I quite regret… to this day I’m a sort of fumbler when it comes to any kind of mechanical project…
Can’t say what things are like nowadays…
Are they dealing with people who never cook at home?
I think a course like that ought to be mandatory for everyone. How to minimally run a household – cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, how not to burn the place down. How to keep track of your finances and make a budget; how to apply for a job and negotiate a salary; basics of savings and investment. For people living anywhere where they’ll be likely to drive, basic car maintenance and what noises/lights mean you have to take it to the shop. Basics of caring for a baby, and how not to get one if you’re not ready to do all that.
I’d think great craftsmanship would be even more important for a boat. A kitchen’s not going to sink and drown you if you don’t get the doors hung right.
When I took metal, wood, and electronics classes back in the day, those were skills that were actually needed back then to keep all your stuff working or to make things to address unique situations. Now, there is a product easily available for almost any imaginable need and almost everything repairable now is done by just replacing parts. Anything else is thrown away and bought new. Shop skills are not invaluable skills anymore, they are craft (hobby) skills.
Those shop skills can save you a lot of money over the course of your life.
Or perhaps rather than going into a lot of debt for a college degree that doesn’t help you get a job, you enter a trade. As people already mentioned, you can make a living pretty easily that way. A lot better than a service industry job.
Not every student is cut out for college and our college system is kind of broken at the moment in the US. Far too many baristas out there with 4 year degrees and over 100k in debt.
But those trades aren’t going to require those old shop skills unless you are an artisan of some ilk. More often than not, it is cheaper to replace an item than have it repaired in a fashion that doesn’t just mean replacing a part.
Also, shop skills do not equal vocational skills anymore.
ETA - YouTube now does an infinitely better job at teaching those skills than my old 8 fingered shop teacher
Well, maybe. I’m a farmer. I really could have used a good shop class – though I was in high school in the 1960’s and I’m female, so I wouldn’t have gotten one even if I’d been in a high school that provided them to the boys. My nieces, a generation later, did get to take shop class; and did so.
And we need to stop throwing everything away and buying new. It’s
ecologically a very bad idea.
You appear to be assuming that a shop class in 2024 would use the same tools and techniques as one in 1950. I’m assuming it should use, if not absolutely up to date because what school can buy new stuff every year, at least tools and techniques from the current century.
But the intent wouldn’t be to train for a specific trade on its specific computers and robots, but to get students comfortable with tools they could plausibly use to work on their own household needs (many of which I do routinely see in use currently by professionals), and to allow them a chance to find out whether they like working with their hands.
You apparently had a terrible shop teacher. There are also terrible YouTube videos; and the person with no experience is unlikely to be able to tell those from the good ones.
There are excellent resources on YouTube, but on average they are pretty bad. A shop class would give people the introductory background to continue developing skills on their own, and to understand which videos are offering useful information and not just making money from clicks and sponsored products.
When I attended HS in the 70s, my school was one of only 2 public HSs with selective admissions. Yet it was a technical HS. I think everyone had to take at least 2 - if not 4 - semesters of shop, as well as 1 or 2 semesters of drafting. I took Electric, woodshop 1 and 2, and foundry. Kinda boggles my mind that in the middle of the school day as young kids we’d be pouding sand and pouring liquid metal. Still have a few of the things I made in woodshop and foundry.
When my kids were in school, in middle school there was some kinda “technical skills” class, where they were very superficially introduced to machining and some other similar things. In HS, they didn’t take anything resembling shop.
1970’s: boys only shop class, girls only home-ec. The upper class shop boys would build a (modest) house in senior year. There was also auto shop (also sex segregated). And kids could bring their hunting rifles to shop class for basic gunsmithery.
Looking back, after working in a mid-high tech industrial environment, there is no way a public high school could afford to keep up to date with that. But as a house owner, besides swapping out the motherboard in my washer, every repair could have been done using my 1977 shop class.
My kids, who graduated from high school in 2000 and 2005, had no shop classes I can remember, but the school day had been cut so much in junior high there was hardly time for the academic stuff.
In the mid-60s I had Woodworking in 7th grade, home ec and food in 8th and metal working in 9th. I don’t remember any really dangerous (or big) machines. Everyone took home ec and food, it was the boys favorite because we got to eat in it.
But I think the real reason it went away was most people stopping smoking. If you didn’t make ashtrays, what could you make?
I’m confused what this had to do with wood working?
I mean Metal Shop or Ceramics/Pottery would make sense.
My nieces made birdhouses. Other things, too, I think; but I remember the birdhouses.
There are lots of things one can make besides ashtrays, even in pottery. Even in the 50’s and even in grade school, sometimes we made bowls and cups. My sister made a flat tile with a horse’s head on it; I’ve still got that someplace, unless I gave it to her.
In Ohio, the whole state is divided up into public Career/Technical Districts. These are different from the regular school districts: The city of Cleveland, for instance, is all one school district, but has two CT districts, while the suburb I’m in is one of four (each with their own regular school district) in the same CT district. The public high school in my suburb is the largest of the four, and hosts the CT program, where they have courses on construction, auto repair, electronics, culinary arts, and I think a medical tech program.
Most schools also have what would be called “home economics” classes, too, just by a different name. Sewing and cooking are usually two different classes, and they’re open to all students. I’ve never seen the sewing classes up close, but the cooking classes seemed to have about an equal mix of boys and girls.
The private, all-girls high school I work for has an entire engineering department, and our makerspace includes 3D printers, laser cutters, a plasma cutter, a CNC mill, a vinyl cutter, a bandsaw, a circular saw, a drill press, assorted hand tools, a photography lightbox, and programmable sewing machines. Some of the girls are involved in a project where they’re rebuilding three motorcycles.
Shop classes, home economcs, and band/music are always the first programs on the chopping block when budget cutbacks come to schools.
But never football or basketball, Unless its the womens sports.
In the 80’s in one of my shop classes there were two girls. Girls could opt out of shop yet boys had to take home ec. I can thread a needle and sew on a button or whatever, yet if I had to operate a sewing machine I’d be on youtube for an hour first.
I could probably still do a passable oxy weld and a really messy arc weld. If I can still do anything reasonably well in the melting metal to attach things dept. it’d be soldering with a good size lighted magnifier.
I went to an all-academic HS that had no shop (or home ec, but then there were no girls either). But I had taken home ec in elementary school and learned to sew a button (which I have used often) or make a hem (I guess I used that once or twice) and make a tray of brownies (which I have never done, but I once made a chocolate birthday cake for my wife). But my daughter took a metal shop and made a screwdriver that was really good, but regrettably disappeared when we moved.
You can watch all the videos you want on you tube, but there is no alternative to hands-on, as I learned when I got into wood-working much later and made a few pieces of furniture that I still use.
We have two vocational high schools open to any student who lives in out county, but the local high schools want to hang on to their own programs.
The high school in my district has courses in woodworking and machining technology along with the high tech stuff like digital electronics and introduction to engineering. The woodworking and machining courses are hands-on and require mastery of common tools and a completed project.
The high school in the next district over has automotive maintenance and technology along with woodworking.
I don’t have a clue what goes on now.
Everybody my year had to take both shop and home economics in middle school. Shop meant making slightly crooked pieces of woodwork, mostly using basic hand tools. Home economics meant using a sewing machine, making mainly breakfasty stuff, and having the teacher don a white glove and chew us out when she rubbed it on the fridge and it showed what a half-assed job we did of cleaning the kitchen. A middle school teacher also formally taught us to type, using records and a room at a local high school.
I was in the more academic group in our high school. But I chose to take some auto mechanics, drafting and electronics - so acquired a basic understanding of some things. We did lots of soldering and etched circuit boards. Not many of my close friends took vocational courses. In university, one required engineering course involved using and understanding big machine shop tools and CNC. Others AutoCAD, MATLAB, LaTeX and finite element analyses.
How true. Oddly enough, today I was talking with someone and mentioned that I remembered the tube tester kiosk in Publix. It was a medium sized console much like an arcade game would be 10-15 years later.
I still recall the sacred ritual. You would bring in your tube, find the appropriate testing receptacle on the flat top, insert your tube, and then push the button. I’m unsure as to what would happen if the tube worked because it never worked, but when it didn’t, you cursed (this is apparently a critical part of the ritual as it was never skipped by either my father or anybody else I ever saw use the tube altar). Then you would dig through the little bins full of cardboard boxes and find the suitable replacement tube at which point your current tube was sacrificed into the bin of dead tubes. The final step was to go to the little service counter and pay tithe to the priest of the counter whilst complaining about how “nothing is made to last anymore even though we can put men on the moon and the country is going to hell anyway.” This represented the final words of the ritual and ensured that Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo would once again appear on the television the following morning.
I also remember learning that unplugging the tv before removing the tube was a necessary appeasement to the gods lest you get the holy shit shocked out of you.