Subj : Old School
To   : All
From : Dux
Date : Thu Jan 02 2025 23:42:16

I saw a discussion over on the Unix board where folks were mentioning their first experiences with computers at school, and access to some other classes like typing.

I was thinking about how lucky I was -- without realizing it at the time of course -- 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 auto, metal and wood shop classes -- we had typing and programming classes too, and 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 years 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 filled 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 selected 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 -- the town has stayed socio-economically similar, but the classes now are focused almost entirely on academic work, geared toward testing, and they don't have a single shop class left other than a solitary robotics offering.

I wonder what killed shop class? Focusing on ranking / test scores? Bubble-wrapping kids' school lives? Sucking the joy/benefits out of transitioning from trades to education leaving the schools filled with only career educators who went from college to teaching without gaining any real world experience?

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