I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district

I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district I attended, all the vocational and shop classes were eliminated in the mid-90s to make budget for the creation of Cisco networking certification classes that were canned less than 10 years later. This re-budgeting was going on in school districts across America. High school shop after high school shop sold machine tools that they had taught kids on since the 60s and 70s at pennies on the dollar. 10-20 years later when parents started demanding vocational classes back, the school districts realized that modern machine tools are too expensive to get back into schools unless they can pass multi-million dollar bonds. Generally, only the best funded schools in the best run districts have had good enough organization and motivation to make these bonds happen since. As a result, you get one or two specialty shop classes at a single magnet high school in well-funded school districts, but they are few and far between. This was just my n=1 experience and perspective in my particular corner of the world. I would love to hear if other students or faculty from those eras had similar or dissimilar experiences.