Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now that we've outsourced the making of things to China, there's no perceived need for learning how things are made anymore; they just get made, somewhere out of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.
This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who knew how things worked -- I knew how to break my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to fix them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.
Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D
But if you don't know how to weld, solder, hammer, or hot-glue something together yourself, how do you expect to teach a machine to?
When my dad was an engineer, engineers knew how to work the machines. Because a technical drawing isn't just an illustration, it's a set of instructions to someone on how to make that part. For example, the engineer was likely to know, through experience, what tolerances the machines in his shop are capable of, and adjust the tolerances specified on the drawing accordingly (or if the tolerances are bigger than what is required, say "we can't make that part with this equipment").
A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.
>>A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.
This happens because no matter what you learn and how much you know in general, that doesn't say anything about ability to deliver in practical areas of work in a small narrow fields.
You can learn everything general about programming. But pick up a new language and you will be hitting the manual very often even to do some very trivial tasks. Or you will like to read existing real world code in that language, to learn the idiomatic way of doing things.
When you spend time solving real world problems in any field using any tool. What you are basically doing is turning yourself into a 'human database' of problems and solutions to a wide variety of problems. And you get that only by practice and experience.
And, there are thousands of welders employed in many other industries - let us not forget that you can't sit around and stop production while you wait six months for the Chinese to make a replacement for a one-of-a-kind machine. On the street where I have my company (a niche-market hardware company), there are, I would take a guess at, at least 75 people employed primarily to do welding. The street is approximately 1 mile long. We also weld quite often - I wouldn't hire an employee whose answer to every question is "we can't do that process until I find someone to sell me the item I need to perform it." Why buy a $75 tool when I can make a functional one for $0.35 in materials and ten minutes of time?
My best-paid employees are those who can weld, drill, operate machines, and do all of the other things necessary to keep us in the business of making products - and also think creatively and logically.
Contrary to popular belief, China is not the manufacturing panacea - for most of us making small-market products (think a few hundred units a month), China is exorbitantly expensive. Most of my competitors either do their work in-house or out-source to other U.S. companies.
I couldn't agree with this more. What's more, I think you can take what you said about the manufacture of things and say it again about the manufacture of software. I don't mean outsourcing -- obviously, most software is still written in the US -- but rather that it is something modern users consume with infinite hygiene.
Gone are the days that you had to run things from the DOS prompt with the concomitant risk you might discover QBASIC. Or, on a Mac, the risk that you could run into Hyperstack.
There is plenty of demand for Geography graduates. From an IT perspective - understanding Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software is essential in many industries - land management, natural resource exploitation, environmental modeling, transportation planning etc.
A Geography degree usually involves a mixture of “hard” and “soft” science. While studying I did everything from climbing mountains to set off weather balloons to standing on a street corner interviewing people about their transportation behavior. I also spent far too long hacking away in Python and attended many classes that were essentially computer science/physics classes. Finding a job after graduation was not an issue at all and nearly everyone I graduated with walked into a well paying job that was often in an exotic location. Please don’t lump us in with historians! ;)
It's the attitude that we should stop shop class because nobody is going to work in metal bashing anymore - and of course there is no way that exposure to engineering in school is going to lead to somebody being an aerospace engineer.
This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who knew how things worked -- I knew how to break my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to fix them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.
Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D