5 ms·

Until I went to college I didn't realize not everyone learned wood and metalworking in school. Industrial Arts, it was called. We learned to make jewelry, forg

Until I went to college I didn't realize not everyone learned wood and metalworking in school. Industrial Arts, it was called. We learned to make jewelry, forge with iron, etc. Then in high school I did woodworking instead, and made furniture, which most of us sold as a side job. I just thought that was totally normal. I'm still not sure why it isn't.

vacri 14y ago
I think exactly the same thing of 'critical thinking'.
trhtrsh 14y ago
Budget cuts. You can't write a standardized test for woodworking, so schools stopped teaching it.
- r00fus 14y ago
  Schools were forced to stop teaching anything "arts", effectively, by NCLB (which is basically designed to destroy public schooling and give that to private industry). Many schools would love to get more arts back in their curriculum, but their funding goes away if they don't focus on those damn tests to the exclusion of all else.
  - SilasX 14y ago
    You mean, NCLB revealed how most schools were failing to teach the most basic things needed for success in the real world, which they somehow were able to convey to the "carpenter-track" students just decades ago? Seriously, I hear a lot of kvetching about schools burdened by having to "teach to the test". I never very little about which specific parts of the test are unfair or about things students shouldn't be expected to know.
    - r00fus 14y ago
      Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom? Test preparation takes a huge amount of the bandwidth. Student assignment to classes is apportioned so there is a good "balance" to testing averages. To dismiss NCLB as anything but an attempt to sabotage the entire public school system is nieve.
      - SilasX 14y ago
        >Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom? Actually, yes. I volunteered weekly in a 4th grade class at a public school for five years. But even if I didn't, and even if I were just now finding out the managementspeak::bandwidth allocated to passing the tests, it wouldn't matter. The fact that it's so hard to get the students to pass simply means the teaching is inefficient and using ineffective methods to teach students the most important, core skills that they need in the real world. Again, don't tell me the tests take up a lot of resources. Tell me why the tests are unjustifiably hard and why it's acceptable to graduate kids that aren't passing them. Show me, say, a test problem that you don't think an 8th grader or whatnot should be unable to answer and yet be tossed on to high school. (You'd be the first to try.)
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        'bandwidth' is a management term now?
        SilasX 14y ago
        It is used in different ways, in different contexts. I was namespacing it to clarify the context. You know namespaces, right?
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        Yes. What I'm saying is I didn't realize it had entered that namespace.
        14y ago
- bluedino 14y ago
  What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather? I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy, had a large amount of tools, and my mother always had him working on a project around the house. Building a deck, remodeling the kitchen, that kind of stuff. I hated being dragged away from friends and video games to help him out with random stuff but I learned quite a bit. I also had the fortune of learning from my birth father on how NOT to do certain things. He'd always take shortcuts that ended up hurting the end result, which to this day I point out as we work on things.
  - mauvehaus 14y ago
    What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather? I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy... Whether you meant to or not, you've answered your own question. Suppose you lived in the alternate universe where you didn't have a stepfather and learned everything from your birth father. Who would you have learned the skills from then? The problem with relying on passing handiness down from generation to generation is that once it fails to propagate for a generation, it's very hard to get back. It's hard to find a teacher for adults for handy skills, and a lot of being handy comes from having long term exposure to handiness anyway. Taking a weekend class (if one exists) or reading a book from the library on how to hang cabinets (for example) isn't going to cover all of the possible gotchas that could come up. Some of those gotchas are probably best solved by people with a lot of experience hanging cabinets, but there are probably others that you could probably solve if you've lived a generally handy life. If this sounds like institutional knowledge, that's probably a fair comparison. It's just that the family is a very small institution that doesn't necessarily have a lot of redundancy in who has the institutional knowledge. Once you lose it, it's pretty much lost, and that's the reason to have a shop class in school. It provides a mechanism to add that knowledge to families that don't have it from a (hopefully) experienced person who has enough time in contact with his or her students to impart more knowledge directly and pass on general handiness as a mindset rather that a specific skill.
  - mauvehaus 14y ago
    Too late to edit my previous post, but I'd like to add: When speaking in the general case, I think it's worth thinking about using gender-neutral language. The attitudes in the article that home improvement and all things handy are "manly" things are worth challenging, and using gender-neutral language is a simple step you can take. The sentence "What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?" tacitly reinforces the idea that handiness is a man's skill because it is in line with that norm. Phrasing it in gender neutral language makes it clash against the norm, and that clash encourages the reader to pause for a moment, consider the norm, and possibly conclude that there's no inherent reason that a mother or grandmother couldn't be the handy parent. Or that both parents could be handy. Why does this matter apart from political correctness (which I find obnoxious when it's for its own sake)? Getting over the idea that cooking is a woman's role or that repairing things is a man's role encourages people to pass on knowledge in ways that doesn't reinforce these traditional gender roles. If a person lives their life without ever having these challenged, and then passes knowledge on to his or her children in a way that reflects the roles, the cycle continues for another generation. Then we have another group of boys who can't cook or sew and another group of girls who can't hang a picture or replace the fill valve in their toilet. If you think those are worthwhile skills for all people to have, please think of how your choice of nouns and pronouns reinforces or challenges the attitudes that lead to people deciding what to teach their children. In case it matters to anybody, I'm a guy. I can cook, but my sewing skills are self-taught because (in my specific case) my mother didn't teach me. And obviously I didn't pick up on the gendered language before the edit window ran out. It isn't my intention to make you feel called out; rather, writing this was in part an exercise in figuring out for myself why it matters so that I might be more aware of my language in the future.
saraid216 14y ago
Budget cuts, yes, but remember that the materials you're using are basically one-shot and manufacturing isn't nearly as big as it used to be, so there's less justification against cutting it, unlike, say... biology and chemistry.
wfunction 14y ago
The farthest I ever went was metal shop in middle school and wood shop 1 in high school...
- hso9791 14y ago
  I had obligatory wood shop from age 10 to age 15 (late 80's - early 90's). Endless hours of sandpaper, shavers, and various old school tools. It was fantastic! Still today, if I really want something made right out of wood, I know I can do it. Only wish there had been obligatory metal working, too.
  - wfunction 14y ago
    Our middle school metal shop was amazing, we had a forge and everything! High school wood shop wasn't as awesome because, as luck would have it, we went in exactly 1 year after the old teacher left, and the new teacher knew nothing about wood shop (he was learning from the students). I learned a lot from a couple of the students but a teacher have taken us a lot farther.
johnchristopher 14y ago
Crawford is touching the subject in http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/0143117467 http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/... I enjoyed reading that book and it relates to the topic. I remember reading that 'industrial arts' were trashed in favour of computers and to prepare for the coming of the 'information era'.
- Jacob4u2 14y ago
  I also came to post a link to that book. I thought it was along the same lines as the OA, but at times I found Crawford bordering on being a Luddite (the remark about bathroom sink sensors IIRC). How'd you feel about it?
  - johnchristopher 14y ago
    (I don't remember the bathroom sink sensors.) He didn't strike me as a Luddite. I think that's because he spends a lot of pages glorifying manual labor for its spiritual and liberating side rather than mourning the jobs destroyed by assembly lines for economic reasons. I don't think he is as much a luddite as he is against mindless and seemingly pointless "work". Unfortunately he is walking that thin line along the whole book. He is not against the industrialization of the world or "the machines" although he does states that those events broke men. In the book, he complains more that skilled artisan were chained to assembly lines while Luddites were replaced by assembly lines. Again, it's a thin line. Assembly factory workers and data entry monkeys are one and the same for him. I think his main practical argument against white collar job is pretty weak because he takes it from his personal life and he was a qualified mechanic, not a skill-less minion. So he colors much of the "manual" experience. He is a mechanic, a masculine glorified profession (insert coke adv.), working alone for hours (and for himself) on something deeply engaging and getting some kind of meditating and enlightening and relaxing experience... he's not a wielder working on some tubes along the road with a chief supervising his every actions on the job. Also he's deep into philosophy so I hardly buy it he has the same experience as regular mechanic trained since his teens as an apprentice and whose definition of culture is the latest blockbuster. He isn't one of the typical manual worker he describes in the book. I wish he had shared his thoughts on software engineering and how it compares with 'code monkeys' and data entry clerks. What bothers me most is that he didn't expand much outside of the "life of a mechanic" and life of a "mindless encoding drone in the publishing industry". The essay falls short on that. Personally I read that book at a time of my life when I was fed up with webdesign/webdev and wanted to do something more real. I'm in the process of retraining myself to get a bachelor in industrial and electronic computer science and I am more than happy to deal with real wires and boards and huge factory machines now. I will revisit the book in the future. To make it short: I believe that industrialization is good because it frees men from mind-numbing jobs, not because it saves money. And that's certainly a naive white-collar opinion :( I am not sure I was really coherent, I'll clarify if I can and if needed.
PonyGumbo 14y ago
Our high school had a wood and metal shop (late 1980s), but the classes were positioned as a track for kids who weren't likely to attend college.

vacri 14y ago

I think exactly the same thing of 'critical thinking'.

trhtrsh 14y ago

Budget cuts. You can't write a standardized test for woodworking, so schools stopped teaching it.

r00fus 14y ago
Schools were forced to stop teaching anything "arts", effectively, by NCLB (which is basically designed to destroy public schooling and give that to private industry). Many schools would love to get more arts back in their curriculum, but their funding goes away if they don't focus on those damn tests to the exclusion of all else.
- SilasX 14y ago
  You mean, NCLB revealed how most schools were failing to teach the most basic things needed for success in the real world, which they somehow were able to convey to the "carpenter-track" students just decades ago? Seriously, I hear a lot of kvetching about schools burdened by having to "teach to the test". I never very little about which specific parts of the test are unfair or about things students shouldn't be expected to know.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom? Test preparation takes a huge amount of the bandwidth. Student assignment to classes is apportioned so there is a good "balance" to testing averages. To dismiss NCLB as anything but an attempt to sabotage the entire public school system is nieve.
    - SilasX 14y ago
      >Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom? Actually, yes. I volunteered weekly in a 4th grade class at a public school for five years. But even if I didn't, and even if I were just now finding out the managementspeak::bandwidth allocated to passing the tests, it wouldn't matter. The fact that it's so hard to get the students to pass simply means the teaching is inefficient and using ineffective methods to teach students the most important, core skills that they need in the real world. Again, don't tell me the tests take up a lot of resources. Tell me why the tests are unjustifiably hard and why it's acceptable to graduate kids that aren't passing them. Show me, say, a test problem that you don't think an 8th grader or whatnot should be unable to answer and yet be tossed on to high school. (You'd be the first to try.)
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        'bandwidth' is a management term now?
        SilasX 14y ago
        It is used in different ways, in different contexts. I was namespacing it to clarify the context. You know namespaces, right?
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        Yes. What I'm saying is I didn't realize it had entered that namespace.
        14y ago
bluedino 14y ago
What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather? I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy, had a large amount of tools, and my mother always had him working on a project around the house. Building a deck, remodeling the kitchen, that kind of stuff. I hated being dragged away from friends and video games to help him out with random stuff but I learned quite a bit. I also had the fortune of learning from my birth father on how NOT to do certain things. He'd always take shortcuts that ended up hurting the end result, which to this day I point out as we work on things.
- mauvehaus 14y ago
  What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather? I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy... Whether you meant to or not, you've answered your own question. Suppose you lived in the alternate universe where you didn't have a stepfather and learned everything from your birth father. Who would you have learned the skills from then? The problem with relying on passing handiness down from generation to generation is that once it fails to propagate for a generation, it's very hard to get back. It's hard to find a teacher for adults for handy skills, and a lot of being handy comes from having long term exposure to handiness anyway. Taking a weekend class (if one exists) or reading a book from the library on how to hang cabinets (for example) isn't going to cover all of the possible gotchas that could come up. Some of those gotchas are probably best solved by people with a lot of experience hanging cabinets, but there are probably others that you could probably solve if you've lived a generally handy life. If this sounds like institutional knowledge, that's probably a fair comparison. It's just that the family is a very small institution that doesn't necessarily have a lot of redundancy in who has the institutional knowledge. Once you lose it, it's pretty much lost, and that's the reason to have a shop class in school. It provides a mechanism to add that knowledge to families that don't have it from a (hopefully) experienced person who has enough time in contact with his or her students to impart more knowledge directly and pass on general handiness as a mindset rather that a specific skill.
- mauvehaus 14y ago
  Too late to edit my previous post, but I'd like to add: When speaking in the general case, I think it's worth thinking about using gender-neutral language. The attitudes in the article that home improvement and all things handy are "manly" things are worth challenging, and using gender-neutral language is a simple step you can take. The sentence "What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?" tacitly reinforces the idea that handiness is a man's skill because it is in line with that norm. Phrasing it in gender neutral language makes it clash against the norm, and that clash encourages the reader to pause for a moment, consider the norm, and possibly conclude that there's no inherent reason that a mother or grandmother couldn't be the handy parent. Or that both parents could be handy. Why does this matter apart from political correctness (which I find obnoxious when it's for its own sake)? Getting over the idea that cooking is a woman's role or that repairing things is a man's role encourages people to pass on knowledge in ways that doesn't reinforce these traditional gender roles. If a person lives their life without ever having these challenged, and then passes knowledge on to his or her children in a way that reflects the roles, the cycle continues for another generation. Then we have another group of boys who can't cook or sew and another group of girls who can't hang a picture or replace the fill valve in their toilet. If you think those are worthwhile skills for all people to have, please think of how your choice of nouns and pronouns reinforces or challenges the attitudes that lead to people deciding what to teach their children. In case it matters to anybody, I'm a guy. I can cook, but my sewing skills are self-taught because (in my specific case) my mother didn't teach me. And obviously I didn't pick up on the gendered language before the edit window ran out. It isn't my intention to make you feel called out; rather, writing this was in part an exercise in figuring out for myself why it matters so that I might be more aware of my language in the future.

saraid216 14y ago

Budget cuts, yes, but remember that the materials you're using are basically one-shot and manufacturing isn't nearly as big as it used to be, so there's less justification against cutting it, unlike, say... biology and chemistry.

wfunction 14y ago

The farthest I ever went was metal shop in middle school and wood shop 1 in high school...

hso9791 14y ago
I had obligatory wood shop from age 10 to age 15 (late 80's - early 90's). Endless hours of sandpaper, shavers, and various old school tools. It was fantastic! Still today, if I really want something made right out of wood, I know I can do it. Only wish there had been obligatory metal working, too.
- wfunction 14y ago
  Our middle school metal shop was amazing, we had a forge and everything! High school wood shop wasn't as awesome because, as luck would have it, we went in exactly 1 year after the old teacher left, and the new teacher knew nothing about wood shop (he was learning from the students). I learned a lot from a couple of the students but a teacher have taken us a lot farther.

johnchristopher 14y ago

Crawford is touching the subject in http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/0143117467 http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Soulcraft-Inquiry-Value/dp/... I enjoyed reading that book and it relates to the topic. I remember reading that 'industrial arts' were trashed in favour of computers and to prepare for the coming of the 'information era'.

Jacob4u2 14y ago
I also came to post a link to that book. I thought it was along the same lines as the OA, but at times I found Crawford bordering on being a Luddite (the remark about bathroom sink sensors IIRC). How'd you feel about it?
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  (I don't remember the bathroom sink sensors.) He didn't strike me as a Luddite. I think that's because he spends a lot of pages glorifying manual labor for its spiritual and liberating side rather than mourning the jobs destroyed by assembly lines for economic reasons. I don't think he is as much a luddite as he is against mindless and seemingly pointless "work". Unfortunately he is walking that thin line along the whole book. He is not against the industrialization of the world or "the machines" although he does states that those events broke men. In the book, he complains more that skilled artisan were chained to assembly lines while Luddites were replaced by assembly lines. Again, it's a thin line. Assembly factory workers and data entry monkeys are one and the same for him. I think his main practical argument against white collar job is pretty weak because he takes it from his personal life and he was a qualified mechanic, not a skill-less minion. So he colors much of the "manual" experience. He is a mechanic, a masculine glorified profession (insert coke adv.), working alone for hours (and for himself) on something deeply engaging and getting some kind of meditating and enlightening and relaxing experience... he's not a wielder working on some tubes along the road with a chief supervising his every actions on the job. Also he's deep into philosophy so I hardly buy it he has the same experience as regular mechanic trained since his teens as an apprentice and whose definition of culture is the latest blockbuster. He isn't one of the typical manual worker he describes in the book. I wish he had shared his thoughts on software engineering and how it compares with 'code monkeys' and data entry clerks. What bothers me most is that he didn't expand much outside of the "life of a mechanic" and life of a "mindless encoding drone in the publishing industry". The essay falls short on that. Personally I read that book at a time of my life when I was fed up with webdesign/webdev and wanted to do something more real. I'm in the process of retraining myself to get a bachelor in industrial and electronic computer science and I am more than happy to deal with real wires and boards and huge factory machines now. I will revisit the book in the future. To make it short: I believe that industrialization is good because it frees men from mind-numbing jobs, not because it saves money. And that's certainly a naive white-collar opinion :( I am not sure I was really coherent, I'll clarify if I can and if needed.

PonyGumbo 14y ago

Our high school had a wood and metal shop (late 1980s), but the classes were positioned as a track for kids who weren't likely to attend college.