I saw a discussion over on the Unix board where folks were mentioning their firs
t experiences with computers at school, and access to some other classes like ty
ping.
I was thinking about how lucky I was -- without realizing it at the time of cour
se -- to go to a public school that offered so many classes that weren't focused
on academics.
We had worthwhile home-ec (where you actually learned by doing for cooking, food
safety, balancing a budget, cleaning)... all manner of shop classes -- I took a
uto, metal and wood shop classes -- we had typing and programming classes too, a
nd teachers who'd stay after school for hours encouraging and helping you.
This was in the mid-1990s and it's still wild to me to think that they let 16 ye
ars old's drive their 20 year old 4500lb domestic beasts into a repair bay, put
them up on a 2-post lift, and do actual work in a semi-supervised environment (I
think we had a 10 kids and 1 instructor, there were two lifts, and if you weren
't working on a car you were working on a small engine).
In high school I spent hours after school working in the Mac lab which was fille
d with Centris 610's -- we were learning on Think Pascal and would travel around
to different HS programming competitions (most of the time it was a team of 4 s
elected and we'd pile into the teacher's LeSabre on a weekend and he'd drive us
an hour to a nearby college hosting the event). We'd also have what seemed like
epic Bolo matches with a dozen or so people playing.
I look at what the same school system offers now and it's pretty depressing -- t
he town has stayed socio-economically similar, but the classes now are focused a
lmost entirely on academic work, geared toward testing, and they don't have a si
ngle shop class left other than a solitary robotics offering.
I wonder what killed shop class? Focusing on ranking / test scores? Bubble-wrapp
ing kids' school lives? Sucking the joy/benefits out of transitioning from trade
s to education leaving the schools filled with only career educators who went fr
om college to teaching without gaining any real world experience?
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