They could. The bureaucrats didn't, and moreover didn't care. I took a hands on physics class in high school (elective at a magnet school) called power and en

They could. The bureaucrats didn't, and moreover didn't care. I took a hands on physics class in high school (elective at a magnet school) called power and energy, in which we took apart, cleaned, and put back together an engine as our semester project, as well as learning all the math and physics behind the way in which they operated, how to calculate pretty much everything they did, etc. It was an enormously valuable class in learning, fairly early on in my proper STEM education, how a system could be made up of many moving parts and subsystems - an obvious boon to my work today in software.