[TheForge] OT school waste

[Andrew Vida]

ries wrote:
> I wonder if this is one of those things where the midwest is always
> ten years behind the coast- Here in Washington State (a high tax,
> left wing place, for sure) we have shop classes in all 3 of the high
> schools my kids have gone to, including wood, metal, cnc, and
> ag/machinery repair. CNC routers, mostly, but basic machining and
> welding still at the high schools as well.

Down in Vancouver it was the same.  Mountain View HS had full shop 
facilities - I almost fell over when I saw them, given my experience 
with NY state and the city.  The kids were learning to model designs in 
CAD and manufacture them using CNC equipment.  Public education may suck 
ditchwater, but some of the training the kids get is pretty good - even 
excellent.
> 
> And our county just got a brand new trades campus, which is a
> co-operative venture of the schools and the community college- they
> do this thing here called running start, where high school kids can
> take college classes, and we just built this new Marine trades
> campus, which is specifically to teach trades for local industry. In
> the next county up, we have a really good trades college that also
> takes a lot of high school kids, with a brand new multimillion dollar
> welding and metal shop, a separate cnc/technology program, and a
> waiting list. Its a community college, too, so very cheap.

None of this, of course, is new.  This sounds like a rediscovery of the 
old system.  I shudder to think what sort of cycle of destruction and 
waste may have lead to this renaissance.
> 
> What we see is that due to the high cost and technical nature of
> todays metal working, it makes sense to specialize at the community
> colleges, but run the high school kids thru there too. Its not
> uncommon around here for a high school senior to have half the
> credits needed for a two year AA degree in Auto body, or welding, or
> machining, by the time he graduates.
> 
> Maybe in ten years you guys will wake up, and start building these
> things.

	The midwest was where the whole "technology education" bullshit 
started, Michigan in particular as I recall... or maybe Wisconsin... 
been 30 years so I may have things mixed up a bit there.  They gutted 
their practical arts programs in favor of this horrific nonsense called 
technology education.  That disease of thought then spread to places 
like NY where I sat on a committee in Albany for 2+ years - what they 
called "Futuring".  Right.  It was a phony baloney excuse to gut the 
existing programs that schools saw as obsolete, which they were not. 
Even today they are not, for reasons with which I will not bore you. 
Bit by bit they wrote the blueprint for dismantling practical arts. 
THey even nonsensically complained of the cost, yet only the old timers 
stood up and pointed out that all the "labs" were going to cost 100x 
what it cost to maintain and stock the extant shops.  Guys like Herb 
Siegel, whose knowledge I really admired, were patronized and summarily 
ignored by the committee.  The fix was in and the changes were to be 
made by hook of crook... in theory.  The penultimate nonsense came when 
a man named Bob Barden, and EE and president of Broadband Systems on 
Long Island, proposed the "systems approach".  Weeping jesus...  It 
would take too long to explain this farcical idiocy - suffice to say 
that it was a repackaging of precisely what had been taught in shop 
classes for 70 years prior.  Bob was a good guy - I liked him a lot, but 
this old notion being repackaged and offered up as if it were some 
revolutionary idea... that was too much.  Of course, Bob wrote the text 
book that, AFAIK is still being used in NY state - so clearly there was 
no hidden motive there as the sale of a couple millions of such a text 
clearly held no profit potential for him.  Right?

The saddest thing was that I went along with the systems approach 
because I had somehow completely misunderstood to what it was to be 
applied.  I thought the closed feedback loop ideas was to be applied to 
school operations - that is, a mechanism and philosophy of constant 
improvement.  Wrong - it was just the basic model to be taught to the 
students.  When I realized my gross error, the horror of what I had been 
voting favorably for became apparent to me.  I'd been voting not to 
improve the administrative process of the schools such that they would 
remain relevant, but rather to nail the lid shut on the coffin of 
practical arts.  I was really upset about that.

Anyhow, now we're coming full circle.  In maybe another 40 years some 
band of idiots now in diapers will gut the system again, and so it goes.

Of course, at the rate at which we are heading into the economic wall, 
there may be no more schools in 40 years.  Woohoo!