Recently I came across an article published eight years ago in Forbes that seems even more timely today than when it was written.
Titled “The Death Of Shop Class And America’s Skilled Workforce,” the article, written by Tara Brown, bemoans a decision by California education officials to do away with shop class once and for all. Those decisions were driven by the state’s university systems, which listed seven subject-area requirements high school students need to fulfill to be ready to enter public colleges.
No surprise here: shop and home economics were not among the required subjects. Since “high school administrators are graded on their effectiveness to administer those (required) classes through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation,” extraneous subjects were axed.
While Career and Technical Education has made something of a comeback, even since 2012 when the Forbes piece was written, at least in parts of the country, it still lags woefully behind demand for training for skilled, well-paying jobs.
One evangelist for bringing back shop class is Mike Rowe, host of the “Dirty Jobs” series on the Discovery Channel. Here’s what Rowe had to say in a 2019 interview about shop class and other hands-on learning experiences, and the reasons for their demise:
“He said that the country’s leaders told students if they didn’t get a degree, then they would “wind up turning a wrench.”
“That attitude led to the removal of shop classes across the country, and the removal of shop classes completely obliterated from view the optical and visual proof of opportunity for a whole generation of kids,” Rowe said. “The skills gap today, in my opinion, is a result of the removal of shop class and the repeated message that the best path for most people happens to be the most expensive path. This is why, in my opinion, we have $1.6 trillion of student loans on the books, and 7.3 million open positions, most of which don’t require a four-year degree.”
“We’re just disconnected. We’re rewarding behavior we should be discouraging. We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who are never going to be able to pay it back to train them for jobs that don’t exist anymore. That’s nuts,” Rowe concluded.”
At the Untapped Potential Project, we are committed to bringing back the 21st Century equivalent of shop class, but on a much grander scale. We will match kids in need of sustainable careers with the jobs most in demand, and we will make sure they are prepared to succeed in those jobs.