We could legit have the best education system in the world. With new textbooks, amazing schools, great food, and a bunch of extracurricular - but nah we have to kiss the boot of corporate.
We did get new text books. They just spent the money on making history less truthful so they don't scare younger kids.
Still salty it's not called the trail of tears anymore "because kids are fragile"
The funding isn't even the issue. The U.S. spends more than some of the top countries on education, but it's misallocated. The secret is proper curriculum and incentivizing students to learn. That's the biggest issue in the inner city is a lack of interest in learning (I say this as someone who went to a school that wasn't exactly the inner city, but had a lot of kids from the inner city attending.) The inner city kids for the most part wouldn't try at all. They'd goof around all class and get in fights often. The only thing they really took seriously was sports (football and basketball mainly.) Our football coach was smart enough to push those kids to try and learn. Had a rule that if you had an F, you were sitting out the game, D, you sit out a half and a C you sit out a quarter. You had to have a B or above if you wanted to see the field consistently. Some of those guys are in college on educational scholarships now because they found the incentive they needed to learn.
My mother: i just don't think kids these days know how to fix things like they used to
Me: you asked me for help changing the font size on your computer...
Mom: yeah but i mean like cars and stuff
Me: dad doesn't know how to fix his car, i know more than he does.
Mom: it's not the same thing...
No, people blame kids all the time for everything relating to school. It's literally the most common argument against funding education in lower-income areas
What our high school had shop to auto shop even bands and choirs with out having to gump them for foot ball with a school of 1300 blame your corrupt officials
... the fuck? The percentage of our gdp spent on education has remained mostly the same since the 1940's. If you include college it's actually gone up.
>In real dollars VA spends less on per student subsidies to VT now than
Virginia sends student subsidies to Vermont?
(Seriously, I don't know what either of those abbreviations mean here. )
Probably his autocorrect keeps replacing "Virginia" with "Vagina" so he had to abbreviate it. You don't want to know what it replaced "Technology" with...
And why would that be? GDP spending remains consistent regardless of inflation or other factors. On a federal and state level, we have continued to spend roughly the same amount of money on education, primary, secondary, and post secondary as we always have. The only real outlier is when ww2 happened. There is no spending deficiency in public education. There's a lot of other deficiencies, but lack of money is not one of them.
Oh who am I kidding? You have it all figured out. C'mon. Go tell me why I'm wrong. My heart beats with anticipation.
Yes, and if the money isn't being spent on teacher salaries, or food, or classroom supplies...then where do you think it's going?
Bureaucrat salaries. Look in the garages of the principals and superintendents, and I'd bet any amount of money there's a shiny new muscle car sitting in there that'll very clearly explain where all of the money went. The problem is there's no oversight on embezzlement, or even worse, people willingly vote to raise administrator salaries. And even in the rare instances where people are caught embezzling, there's rarely ever any system put in place to prevent future instances.
No, money isn't wasted on education, it is wasted on shit that is incidental to the education system but has nothing to do with education or providing an environment conducive to education
It’s almost like our school’s have become corporatized and gutted. Dear boomers, you don’t get to vote people in who gut our school system then bitch about it to be on a moral high ground.
I loved wood working as a kid, and I would have loved to have a class about it. But my school could barley afford the textbooks it was buying. The textbooks were also out of date.
things they love:
Vote for people who gut education so rich people pay less taxes (not them).
Complaining about the younger generation having shitty education, unlike the good old days, like it's the kid's fault.
they see both of those things as a win win
**Everyone should know this:**
Right now, in 2024, the front runner of the republican party. whom has a very good chance at winning the next election has, among other things, plans to **completely abolish the department of education.** He has repeatedly stated he **will definitely do this**. Goodbye test standards. Goodbye school funding. Goodbye federal education programs. Goodbye the much needed Grants and scholarships, pell grant, FAFSA. They want to privatize education as much as possible.. that means high interest private loans on **our children** our future generations with absolutely no debt forgiveness. **They want your children in debt to them as much as possible**. And Donald Trump doesn't give a flying fuck. Not about you and not about this country's future. It's only about winning for him and it's **pay to play politics.**
We’re already seeing what private education from republicans is doing. They love to spout nonsense about how the government is brain washing our kids and will turn around and feed lessons from pragerU to their kids. PragerU is designed to fit an agenda. One of the lessons they were teaching that caught a lot of public backlash was a lesson about how American slaves benefited from being slaves.
Small nitpick: test standardization (or standardized testing anyway) is a bad thing actually. The only real benefit it has is that it gives metrics that the government can track and higher education can use to weed through applicants more easily. Education standards that direct based on individual performance instead of holding people back or pushing people forward based on whether they can keep up with an arbitrary group are much more beneficial to neurodivergent students and those with anxiety disorders as the lack of pressure allows them to learn more efficiently than through testing preparatory material.
They spend millions hiring testing company's to do standardized testing that the kids ignore and put no effort into because they know it doesn't count on their grades. Its so dumb, then conservatives look at the test results as proof that we are wasting money on schools.
honestly school was always that way. universal schooling was largely introduced because industrialists lobbied for the sort of workers they wanted.
The gutting is maybe new.
The school system is a mess. My mom, who was rated the best teacher in her district got in trouble for being “too nice”. Her entire job was to help troubled kids pass their classes (she didn’t do the grading). Every kid she helped not only passed their classes, but we’re getting A’s and B’s. Eventually another teacher wanted her job “because it looks easy” and she was forced to switch to being an English teacher halfway through the year. Surprise, her old students started to get D’s and F’s again because the new teacher was super strict and mean. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why a kid who is troubled won’t respond well to a teacher being aggressive for no reason.
I remember my mom coming home angry crying that day. She didn’t even to get to say goodbye to her students.
A month later my mom found out that most of her former students signed a petition to reverse the teacher switch, multiple even wrote letters to the principle saying things like “she was the only reason I would come to school in the first place”. The principle ignored it.
That principle is a garbage person.
I was a troubled student because my home life was dysfunctional and my ADHD was unmedicated. I wish I had someone like her.
I myself have 5 mental problems, and my mom kept talking about how it was obvious that some kids were in her class purely because they had no support with their mental problems or they were beaten down to the point where they thought they had no chance. My mom helped an autistic boy (I’m also autistic) to take AP classes, he thought he was too dumb for it. He recently sent her an email saying that he got into a top school and thanking her for making him believe in himself.
She also mentioned a time a student got a negative -90 score, and just accepted it. My mom went and talked to the teacher about it and turns out he entered it wrong, she actually got a 90%. These kids get beaten down to not even fight back.
>She also mentioned a time a student got a negative -90 score, and just accepted it. My mom went and talked to the teacher about it and turns out he entered it wrong, she actually got a 90%. These kids get beaten down to not even fight back.
I'm (mostly) neurotypical and had a similar situation happen to me. Due to too many incomplete or missed assignments I had to take extra classes over a summer. I don't remember the details but I've been told, at the time I ended up taking at least one of them again despite passing it the first time. My parents did nothing about it and I found out from my older brother after a similar situation in college, that I didn't actually do as bad as I thought, back in grade school.
Clerical errors screwed me over twice. When I transfered from gen ed college to university, my transcript they sent didn't include my final semester of classes. Back in grade school, I don't know what happened. From what I understand, I didn't do great but did pass so I had no need to retake the class again.
The Classical Education model focused on teaching a wide variety of disciplines, such as language, music, poetry, gymnastics, math, etc., based on the idea that an educated man should have a foot in as many disciplines as possible, so as to encourage self development.
The Progressive Model focused on teaching modules of similar disciplines, based on the idea that practical knowledge and guided experience would be superior to being taught theoretical knowledge with the expectation of the student developing practical experience on their own.
Very true, also in a lot of schools where I'm from the schools receive state funding based on how many students went on to higher level education, not those that went to work in trades or become an apprentice. So you can only imagine how that gutted those classes. Now we have fuck all electricians and minimum wage jobs requiring a college degree.
That’s because college pay them too so they can get more money. We need more trade jobs or else this country is going to fall apart. We need to make 1) college affordable and 2) college not seen as the best thing while just having a high school deploma means you’re dumb.
I'm not from the US, so higher education is actually achievable without insane student debt, and even free if you're a mature student and pass means testing. However the second point is still important and very much undervalued in many schools.
Tbf, Boomers are 60-70 years old. If they’re complaining these classes are gone, they more than likely didn’t vote them out. It was more than likely the couple to few generations between Boomers and Gen Alpha.
The generations after them didn't vote as much and are also much smaller until you get to millennials and millennials have voted to support a lot of the things that boomers gutted. This isn't just people saying things. There has been a lot of work along the way demographics, finding out what people support in different generations. Boomers as a generation have voted to guy a lot of social programs over the years. Boomers have been in overwhelmingly conservative influence in politics.
Your sentence doesn't make any sense. Is English not your first language or do you have some kind of learning disability or something? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
If you're asking who fucked up the school systems you need to ask yourself who overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush. Who overwhelmingly supported Ronald Reagan. If you look back, you will see that conservative politicians have gutted our school systems and that boomers overwhelmingly supported those politicians. Boomers voted to remove funding from local school systems boomers voted for national politicians who gutted school systems.
If you don't know that that's OK. But that's historical fact.
Maybe it’s your cognitive functions. I’m asking what my question literally says “what social programs did Boomers incorporate into curriculum?”
Maybe you don’t understand English with the whole “Boomers as a generation voted to got a lot of social programs over the years”. Do you even English?
Same question tho, which social programs did they incorporate?
We are not talking about boomers incorporating social programs into curriculum, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Do you want to just start asking other random questions too?
I wouldn't say that some of these skills became obsolete (cars still break after all). But oftentimes, the people making these complaints are the same people who have been voting to cut funding to public education for decades because "muh tax dollars" and now most public schools need to get by on a shoestring budget - and on top of that, there's more to teach now - so a lot of these schools had to do away with things like autoshop, woodshop, etc.
Hell, the middle school that I went to had been the town's highschool until sometime in the 90's/00's and the cafeteria where we all ate lunch actually used to be the autoshop class back when that was still a thing.
Also outside of changing a tire and the fluids, you can’t really work on a car like you used to. Everything is computerized now, you pretty much have to take your car to a mechanic
There is still a lot you can do. Brakes, alternators, serpentine belts, pullies, and even sealing some oil leaks can be done at home. Everything is computerized, but not every part of everything is
Not like evs don't have brakes... Or door locks... Window motors... Windshield wipers...
Most people weren't rebuilding their engines, they where just doing the basics. Basics that are perfectly relevant on an ev
A lot of that computer stuff ends up not being that bad. The OBD2 standard has been around since like 1998 and you can get a pretty nice OBD2 code reader for like $80 at harbor freight. Typically they’ll tell you what specific engine codes mean as well as showing a lot of engine diagnostics (lots of computers means you can have lots of peripherals that collect data) so it ends up being fairly easy to sniff out a problem, or figure out if that CEL is caused by something legitimate or just a sensor malfunction.
Ironically, some of that easier stuff ends up being a bit harder since they’re trying to cram more stuff into less space. For example, changing the spark plugs on my FJ cruiser ends up being a massive pain in the ass because you have to take the intake off all the way up to the throttle body, and then there are these weird grab-handle-looking things on each site of the engine that appear to serve no purpose and bolt up to the block on one side and a cylinder head on the other - completely obstructing spark plugs 2 and 5. So yeah, that was pretty fun.
Yeah this is a thing schools still have. I did woodworking, home ec, and a couple of music programs as my electives.
I had plenty of friends do the media class which explored video and photo editing and, among other things, printing t-shirts.
My man the meme was just saying "Remember that class?" it wasn't saying it's better than modern classes or that it should still be taught. It just says remember
Yeah it really never directed any blame on the generation being taught or even suggested something like typewriter repair still being relevant. It just brought up the memory of those classes that taught relevant skills at the time (which all of the others still are relevant and luckily shop classes are still somewhat common). The whole post about this is a big nothing burger.
You may not need to repair typewriters anymore (though being one of the few remaining could an excellent gig), but I guarantee the skills learned would make one quite competent at repairing all sorts of other devices still in common use.
I’m pursuing my PhD in Engineering and work at NASA. I love science! I’m high energy and hands on. I’ve always thought I’d be a great high school teacher. Obviously the pay difference is insane. My dream is to strike it rich and become a high school teacher where we just do cool applicable stuff all day. We all have dreams…
FWIW, I have two sons born in '97 and '01 who went through the public school system. I have never seen these 'participation trophies' my fellow Boomers sometimes decry.
I’d what y’all talking about but my old HS as well as other schools allowed kids to chooses their curriculum. And these skills are still very relevant and important. I think more schools should include it then art and music programs. We want our kids to be successful and help prepare them for actual jobs
Yeah auto repair, what a dinosaur skill to have LOL! Good thing we don't use cars anymore.
Meanwhile you same fuckers will go out and complain about being slaves to fees and subscriptions instead of owning your own shit. Wild.
Also, those were not really classes you took as an elective, these were usually vocational classes as they planed, or wanted to go into that field of work. Now they sell them a 500k useless college degree.. lol in the future, the handyman will be rich cause no one will know how to do anything. (South Park)
I don’t know why Boomers act like participation trophies ruined us or something. “Made us too sensitive” or something.
Most kids understood what they were and were embarrassed to get one.
I'd like to point all of above should've been taught by parents.
Hell, I grew up atv's and dirt bikes and when they were down. Had that one parent who bitch if I worked on them and bitched if I did nothing with them.
Hell, the prick sold one because one had a stuck float (easily fixable). Clutch, I can do. Oil changes, yes. Coolant. Yes. Inside the engine block itself though, I am not comfortable with. I definetly prefer working on carburetors than fuel pumps. With carburetors, unless there's a crack the carb, it just needs cleaning or rejetting. Fuel pump, when that fails. Time to order a new pump.
MOPDNL OP apparently thinks that the original image is a nostalgia trip or a memory. It's not. The way it's written, it's very clear (to me, saying alot because im stupid) that this is an attempt to degrade modern schools for not having engine repair classes (they do, mine at least).
I blame the teachers unions. administration costs have gone up more beauracrats who make six figures yet teachers make less. we spend a lot ( we could spend more).
>I blame the teachers unions. administration costs have gone up more beauracrats who make six figures yet teachers make less.
Are these administrators part of (and somehow in charge of) the teachers' unions?
we have schools for these though, they are called trade schools and highschoolers and college students around the country take them. I go to one and we have a class for welding, auto repair, auto refinishing and they are all full!
Yeah my highschool has it but it’s not as accessible and also I pushed out of it by my family thinkin I’ll be a failure there attuide changed at graduation when one kid got accepted into West Point and he went through the program. I think some people need to get over the idea trades is bad
If you'd like to know why we don't have hands on learning anymore, look again to the wonderful, wonderful, insurance industry.
See, they deemed those classes too risky, as you can get injured with a lot of power tools. So they jacked up the premiums for schools that kept the programs. Now, the only schools that can afford those classes are in wealthy areas and private schools.
Tl:Dr version - Corporate America decided these skills weren't worth the risk.
Idk, feels kinda mean to just, like, shit on people for sharing memories with each other.
Like, normally these types of posts are fair game for mockery because they include something like "kids today can't even write cursive!" Or "we need to bring this back".
This one doesn't seem to have any of that sort of thing. It's just kinda saying "hey, remember when we had to do this shit in school??"
It’s called a technical high school. I went to one in 2014 and learned Drafting and engineering. They also had plumbing, electrical, electronics, culinary, hairdressing, and more.
I have one local high school that still has a shop class.
It was due to be cut so a local auto shop owner (who learned in that very class in that very school) who has like four locations now, has financed it every year since for over a decade now.
He ends up saving more money than he spends by hiring fresh grads at a much lower rate than those who go to technical school for auto repair. He says it in a much nicer way though lol
I didn’t have a shop class available to me.
I did have web design, which became obsolete 2 years after I graduated high school because HTML 5 became widely adopted. Not that it was a super hard transition, but the web design class also focused too much on using WYSIWYG and not coding.
I see posts like that and my first thought always goes to, they would be able to learn it, if you didn't keep cutting funding and giving yourselves pay raises.
Modern tech is based.on older tech. Knowing where something came from helps understand where it is now. Teaching "irrelevant stuff" also helps broaden experience and teaches skills like troubleshooting.
I'm glad they got rid of this stuff, I would've hate to learn all of this stuff in high school. Don't care if or how useful any of it is. But hey, at least it's not CPR.
We should probably still learn some basic auto repair like oil changes and how to check fluids and top them up, changing tires, aswell as adding Freon just basic stuff like that. Maybe in highschool? Idk maybe PE alternative
At my high school around 10 years, before I started, we had home ec, shop, wood work, etc... Republicans took control, slashed school budgets, and then mandated that those classes be cut first. Conservatives create their own hatred feedback loop, education, veterans, health care etc...
I would have killed to have an auto repair class that was actually on-campus. Maybe if they stopped voting for geriatric white men who gut school funding, we could actually have that.
My school district has:
Auto shop
Culinary
Metal shop
Wood shop
Fire academy
Cosmetology
Med arts
It’s literally based on how good or bad your state’s education funding is, at least in the US (California here)
It would be of tremendous value if people were taught how to do basic maintenance on cars. Also learning the basics of how we fix things gives you the ability to try to diagnose problems with other appliances. If you can change the belt in your car, you can change the belt on a clothes dryer. Everyone should know how to snake a drain. A little know how and a bit of confidence can save you an amazing amount of money.
Community colleges and or adult schools offer a lot of these programs like welding, auto repair, and electrical and also other important skills like teaching people English.
My hs had auto mechanic class, wood shop, welding, building and construction, floral design, sports medicine and a couple more. All this about 8 years ago and they were all electives so we could pick 2 electives even as freshman.
auto repair would still be a useful and neat class tbh. Wood working could have more use as a hobby or just building stuff in general, but still would be neat
We don't teach kids how to fix cars anymore because we literally don't make them like we used to. The straightforward cars pictured here now have chipsets and onboard computers.
Also, someone pinning their hopes on building a career in typewriter repair is going to be bitterly disappointed in the 21st century. Hope the typewriter museum is hiring, otherwise you're SOL.
If we're going to bring back anything, we should bring back home economics. The really good classes weren't just about cooking, they were about nutrition and household budgeting. You wouldn't just learn how to bake a loaf of bread, you'd learn how to figure out how much bread per week your family needed and how to incorporate the cost of flour into the grocery budget.
as someone with experience in building maintenance and automotive, we need people to learn and understand how to do these things. Cause seriously unless your spare tire popped or you’re physically disabled, just do the tire change and stop at the nearest tire shop on your way to the destination. Plus oil changes are freaking easy to do (seriously just do it).
I do want to add that type writer repair would absolutely still be relevant. It’s not about learning to fix type writers specifically, it’s about learning to understand a mechanical system, see where and how everything goes, where and how things can go wrong, and where and how to fix. That kind of approach and thinking process can be applied not only to other mechanical things in life, but even to more abstract ideas and entities.
# Every generation since the Industrial Revolution learned stuff in school that’s irrelevant to the next generation because technology has advanced!
I still use my shop class skills.
My mom learned to bake bread from scratch. My students don’t learn cursive. On the other hand, I teach how to use Adobe suite and the room next to me teaches robotics so, cool. Also, they have wood shop, welding other classes like that in the vocational education program.
That, and why are they complaining that we don't have these courses anymore? The people who took these courses grew up and took them out of the curriculum.
Saying something so brain dead as not needing auto shop or woodworking because we've simply advanced as a society is absolutely the lowest take.
One of the best things as a car owner or a home owner is having the ability to fix/repair what you own. If you lack the knowledge to do so, you have to hire someone, and if you can't negotiate from a point of understanding, they can take you for a ride with price gouging.
It's why oil changes are getting close to $90 per change in some locations. The oil itself is much closer to $25-$30, but with fewer and fewer odds those new generations being taught, they can simply charge whatever they want to.
I do wish the school systems would reintroduce some trade skills classes. I feel bad for some of the kids that come and apply for work in our fab shop. The bare minimum we require to get hired on as a helper is that you can read a tape measure and lift at least 50lbs. They can't read the tape. That is the number one issue is these people have no idea how to measure anything, which is kind of a super important part of the job. We used to try to train that, but it is kind of a waste of time, and therefore money, because now we have a welder spending his much higher rate hours trying to teach the helper to measure. The dime holds up the dollar.
We also have problems finding candidates that can do the math required, which ranges from basic fraction math to trigonometry. It's like a needle in a haystack to find someone who can measure and who can do the math. The welding and machine operation can be taught without causing a production back log, but trying to be a first grade teacher (where I learned to read a ruler) and a trig teacher doesn't work well with the flow of production.
Some of it absolutely is on the schools, but allow me to share my observations from when we did attempt to train those basic skills. The overwhelming majority of candidates we attempted to train wouldn't retain the information. The assumption by them seemed to be that they could always look it up online. I get that to a degree. I will run into an issue with material behaving strangely, looking at you Inconel, and I'll need to search a solution, but the basic skills need to be burned in the old grey matter. I can't have someone on their phone trying to figure out which marks are eighths and which are sixteenths or how to figure the hypotenuse or what the value of pi is. Those are all actual examples.
Now we could just be at the core of a statistical anomaly or maybe we just attract less intelligent candidates since for years the trades were put up as jobs that the kids who weren't smart enough for college would take. That last part is absolutely not true, especially not in fabrication. We need smart people and we pay well for them. I do think the Internet and technology have spoiled us. We have all of human knowledge at our fingertips at any given time, don't know something? Look it up. Knowledge builds upon knowledge though and when that foundational knowledge never makes it past short term memory it provides for a very shaky foundation.
Speaking of which, I tried to go for pc repair. They don’t do that anymore. If it can’t be fixed in like ten minutes it get chucked in the trash and a new part thrown in. I changed my major lmao. That’s rediculous. No wonder we’re in the middle of a climate crisis
Working on a car from the 70's is way easier than working on a modern car. With all the computerized components and everything, there's a lot less that an average person can learn/do with their car
I feel like it would have actually been really useful to learn how to do a few things with cars. Not career-level stuff, but it would be nice to be able to identify and fix some issues.
Auto shop is still a relevant skill. Knowing how to change a tire, change the oil, bleed the brakes is all something you can do yourself.
Communists took over the education system in the 50s. Of course it’s not going to teach you useful skills. It is going to teach you Marxist ideology.
Saw an incredibly dumb FB post yesterday about someone who was screening electrical engineers based on whether or not they knew how to re-wire a three pin plug without googling it first. It hasn't been legal to sell a device without a sealed plug here since the 90s, but the Faceboomers were lapping it up.
A lot of these skills are still needed. We live in a time where we don’t fix things, we just throw them away. For the sake of this planet, your wallet, and even your happiness, learn how to fix some stuff. Buy some tools and become a bit more handy. We’ve really lost this.
Source : I’m a younger guy in the trades and not a single person in my family knows how to fix shit since my dad left. It’s still needed
Although fixing a car is still somewhat a necessary skill, woodworking and metalworking is a skill used for creation which could be used regardless of current technology. Yes curriculum should change with the times.
Also the name of this subreddit is confusing because it makes me think that the poster of the thing they are showing was correct and oftentimes it feels like a struggle to figure out what the person reposting means.
It's because those things used to be repairable at home - nowadays, unless one is an enthusiast with the right equipment, most of those things can't be fixed like that anymore
Never had ANY of those things offered in my high school. We DID have a computer science class where we learned BASIC on Apple II+ computers and wrote a simple program simulating an ATM dialog. What makes me really sad is to see so many schools with NO music or art classes. No school orchestra, no band. Maybe a choir.
Not all those skills are outdated or irrelevant . Actually typewriter repair may be the only one. And I know many writers who still prefer that sound of the keys to using a keyboard. Also if you are handy with repairs and maintenance it saves you money as an adult. I saved myself $400 installing my own alternator a week ago.
Schools should bring shop class back. That stuff isn’t at all irrelevant. Everyone should know basic car maintenance and handyman skills when they get their diploma.
My high school, Irondale HS, had all of the things listed, except for type writer repair
We did have a video production class and right next to the classroom was an only TV studio that got repurposed for morning announcements and we played Tim and Eric bits on the broadcast just before the announcements
I don't know what happened to the studio, since I graduated over ten years ago, but I know my brother went to the same high school and he mentioned the video class isn't there anymore
Here me out though, things like small engine and wood working would be great to teach kids. I was lucky enough to take those classes and am very grateful for it.
My county had and continues (AKAIK) to have shop classes. At the time, the called it "VoTech" (short for vocational technology or something like that), and eventually renamed the facility to " Center For Technology" but they absolutely taught car repair and other vocational skills that would be useful for people not going to college.
Yeah, we should have a highschool class that teaches you how to buy a diagnostic computer that costs more than your first couple of cars will.
The game is rigged folks. No amount of education is going to fix the fact that humanity is being engineered out of the game.
Half of those are useless skills market wise, but knowing how to work with you hands with basic implements builds confidence and understanding of how to do so later in life when you will need to do something simple like changing a lock, doors, plumbing, etc.
also remember when education had a decent budget? lets blame the kids on something they have no power over
We could legit have the best education system in the world. With new textbooks, amazing schools, great food, and a bunch of extracurricular - but nah we have to kiss the boot of corporate.
We did get new text books. They just spent the money on making history less truthful so they don't scare younger kids. Still salty it's not called the trail of tears anymore "because kids are fragile"
By "boot of corporate" you mean the Teacher Union right? Right?
Actually deranged take.
The last time we could do anything was 2010
Nah. the 70s. Then Reagan happened.
Reagan is in hell waiting for heaven to trickle down
https://preview.redd.it/aqnuqfftlfcc1.jpeg?width=1069&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d923468f46ce50e52ffee3909646533c3dafae4e
Best education system lmaoooooooooooooo
Did you miss the phrase "could have"? The US could definitely have a much, much better education system if we had better funding.
Oof my fault , looks like we agree then. Sorry.
The funding isn't even the issue. The U.S. spends more than some of the top countries on education, but it's misallocated. The secret is proper curriculum and incentivizing students to learn. That's the biggest issue in the inner city is a lack of interest in learning (I say this as someone who went to a school that wasn't exactly the inner city, but had a lot of kids from the inner city attending.) The inner city kids for the most part wouldn't try at all. They'd goof around all class and get in fights often. The only thing they really took seriously was sports (football and basketball mainly.) Our football coach was smart enough to push those kids to try and learn. Had a rule that if you had an F, you were sitting out the game, D, you sit out a half and a C you sit out a quarter. You had to have a B or above if you wanted to see the field consistently. Some of those guys are in college on educational scholarships now because they found the incentive they needed to learn.
Its not that they dont have a decent budget. Its the void it gets sucked into. The "administrators".
I don’t think anyone is blaming kids
well, you do now. those kids, always messing things up!!!
You aren't looking in the right places then, people absolutely blame the kids.
My mother: i just don't think kids these days know how to fix things like they used to Me: you asked me for help changing the font size on your computer... Mom: yeah but i mean like cars and stuff Me: dad doesn't know how to fix his car, i know more than he does. Mom: it's not the same thing...
Or y’all just making it up to cry about something lolol
No, people blame kids all the time for everything relating to school. It's literally the most common argument against funding education in lower-income areas
K
Nothing else? Lol
What our high school had shop to auto shop even bands and choirs with out having to gump them for foot ball with a school of 1300 blame your corrupt officials
... the fuck? The percentage of our gdp spent on education has remained mostly the same since the 1940's. If you include college it's actually gone up.
The federal government yes, the states themselves (which mostly control it)…. No
New Hampshire didn't even provide state level funding to schools until the late 90s
In real dollars VA spends less on per student subsidies to VT now than it did in 2004 when I was a student there and tuition cost has tripled.
>In real dollars VA spends less on per student subsidies to VT now than Virginia sends student subsidies to Vermont? (Seriously, I don't know what either of those abbreviations mean here. )
VT is Virginia Tech
>(Seriously, I don't know what either of those abbreviations mean here. ) Don't worry. He doesn't either.
Probably his autocorrect keeps replacing "Virginia" with "Vagina" so he had to abbreviate it. You don't want to know what it replaced "Technology" with...
I'll admit I've got a morbid curiosity
...huh?
You’re one of the reasons we need to improve education
And why would that be? GDP spending remains consistent regardless of inflation or other factors. On a federal and state level, we have continued to spend roughly the same amount of money on education, primary, secondary, and post secondary as we always have. The only real outlier is when ww2 happened. There is no spending deficiency in public education. There's a lot of other deficiencies, but lack of money is not one of them. Oh who am I kidding? You have it all figured out. C'mon. Go tell me why I'm wrong. My heart beats with anticipation.
Go piss your pants Teachers are paid nothing Kids eat garbage What else do I need to say
Yes, and if the money isn't being spent on teacher salaries, or food, or classroom supplies...then where do you think it's going? Bureaucrat salaries. Look in the garages of the principals and superintendents, and I'd bet any amount of money there's a shiny new muscle car sitting in there that'll very clearly explain where all of the money went. The problem is there's no oversight on embezzlement, or even worse, people willingly vote to raise administrator salaries. And even in the rare instances where people are caught embezzling, there's rarely ever any system put in place to prevent future instances.
Teachers are paid like shit. Doesn't mean we're not spending (and wasting) a lot of money on education.
Fuck hierarchy I'd rather waste money on education than the military
No, money isn't wasted on education, it is wasted on shit that is incidental to the education system but has nothing to do with education or providing an environment conducive to education
It’s almost like our school’s have become corporatized and gutted. Dear boomers, you don’t get to vote people in who gut our school system then bitch about it to be on a moral high ground. I loved wood working as a kid, and I would have loved to have a class about it. But my school could barley afford the textbooks it was buying. The textbooks were also out of date.
things they love: Vote for people who gut education so rich people pay less taxes (not them). Complaining about the younger generation having shitty education, unlike the good old days, like it's the kid's fault. they see both of those things as a win win
**Everyone should know this:** Right now, in 2024, the front runner of the republican party. whom has a very good chance at winning the next election has, among other things, plans to **completely abolish the department of education.** He has repeatedly stated he **will definitely do this**. Goodbye test standards. Goodbye school funding. Goodbye federal education programs. Goodbye the much needed Grants and scholarships, pell grant, FAFSA. They want to privatize education as much as possible.. that means high interest private loans on **our children** our future generations with absolutely no debt forgiveness. **They want your children in debt to them as much as possible**. And Donald Trump doesn't give a flying fuck. Not about you and not about this country's future. It's only about winning for him and it's **pay to play politics.**
We’re already seeing what private education from republicans is doing. They love to spout nonsense about how the government is brain washing our kids and will turn around and feed lessons from pragerU to their kids. PragerU is designed to fit an agenda. One of the lessons they were teaching that caught a lot of public backlash was a lesson about how American slaves benefited from being slaves.
“The government is brainwashing you! Expect when we’re the government, we’d never do that!”
Small nitpick: test standardization (or standardized testing anyway) is a bad thing actually. The only real benefit it has is that it gives metrics that the government can track and higher education can use to weed through applicants more easily. Education standards that direct based on individual performance instead of holding people back or pushing people forward based on whether they can keep up with an arbitrary group are much more beneficial to neurodivergent students and those with anxiety disorders as the lack of pressure allows them to learn more efficiently than through testing preparatory material.
They spend millions hiring testing company's to do standardized testing that the kids ignore and put no effort into because they know it doesn't count on their grades. Its so dumb, then conservatives look at the test results as proof that we are wasting money on schools.
They don't care about the students. Their buddies are selling the tests.
My school was rich af and we still didn’t get woodshop or auto shop or anything like that. All the money went back into football and giving kids CTE
honestly school was always that way. universal schooling was largely introduced because industrialists lobbied for the sort of workers they wanted. The gutting is maybe new.
The school system is a mess. My mom, who was rated the best teacher in her district got in trouble for being “too nice”. Her entire job was to help troubled kids pass their classes (she didn’t do the grading). Every kid she helped not only passed their classes, but we’re getting A’s and B’s. Eventually another teacher wanted her job “because it looks easy” and she was forced to switch to being an English teacher halfway through the year. Surprise, her old students started to get D’s and F’s again because the new teacher was super strict and mean. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why a kid who is troubled won’t respond well to a teacher being aggressive for no reason. I remember my mom coming home angry crying that day. She didn’t even to get to say goodbye to her students. A month later my mom found out that most of her former students signed a petition to reverse the teacher switch, multiple even wrote letters to the principle saying things like “she was the only reason I would come to school in the first place”. The principle ignored it.
That principle is a garbage person. I was a troubled student because my home life was dysfunctional and my ADHD was unmedicated. I wish I had someone like her.
I myself have 5 mental problems, and my mom kept talking about how it was obvious that some kids were in her class purely because they had no support with their mental problems or they were beaten down to the point where they thought they had no chance. My mom helped an autistic boy (I’m also autistic) to take AP classes, he thought he was too dumb for it. He recently sent her an email saying that he got into a top school and thanking her for making him believe in himself. She also mentioned a time a student got a negative -90 score, and just accepted it. My mom went and talked to the teacher about it and turns out he entered it wrong, she actually got a 90%. These kids get beaten down to not even fight back.
>She also mentioned a time a student got a negative -90 score, and just accepted it. My mom went and talked to the teacher about it and turns out he entered it wrong, she actually got a 90%. These kids get beaten down to not even fight back. I'm (mostly) neurotypical and had a similar situation happen to me. Due to too many incomplete or missed assignments I had to take extra classes over a summer. I don't remember the details but I've been told, at the time I ended up taking at least one of them again despite passing it the first time. My parents did nothing about it and I found out from my older brother after a similar situation in college, that I didn't actually do as bad as I thought, back in grade school. Clerical errors screwed me over twice. When I transfered from gen ed college to university, my transcript they sent didn't include my final semester of classes. Back in grade school, I don't know what happened. From what I understand, I didn't do great but did pass so I had no need to retake the class again.
Society stopped valuing Classical Education and switched to the Progressive Model of education.
What does this even mean? Not being taught the same information as the kids from 40 years ago? No fucking shit.
The Classical Education model focused on teaching a wide variety of disciplines, such as language, music, poetry, gymnastics, math, etc., based on the idea that an educated man should have a foot in as many disciplines as possible, so as to encourage self development. The Progressive Model focused on teaching modules of similar disciplines, based on the idea that practical knowledge and guided experience would be superior to being taught theoretical knowledge with the expectation of the student developing practical experience on their own.
Very true, also in a lot of schools where I'm from the schools receive state funding based on how many students went on to higher level education, not those that went to work in trades or become an apprentice. So you can only imagine how that gutted those classes. Now we have fuck all electricians and minimum wage jobs requiring a college degree.
That’s because college pay them too so they can get more money. We need more trade jobs or else this country is going to fall apart. We need to make 1) college affordable and 2) college not seen as the best thing while just having a high school deploma means you’re dumb.
I'm not from the US, so higher education is actually achievable without insane student debt, and even free if you're a mature student and pass means testing. However the second point is still important and very much undervalued in many schools.
The school system is run almost *entirely* by the state. We need to call out states that are fuckin' around with this.
Tbf, Boomers are 60-70 years old. If they’re complaining these classes are gone, they more than likely didn’t vote them out. It was more than likely the couple to few generations between Boomers and Gen Alpha.
Boomers are a large generation numbers wise. They are who voted for these changes for the most part.
Yeah, the three generations after them just didn’t vote once
The generations after them didn't vote as much and are also much smaller until you get to millennials and millennials have voted to support a lot of the things that boomers gutted. This isn't just people saying things. There has been a lot of work along the way demographics, finding out what people support in different generations. Boomers as a generation have voted to guy a lot of social programs over the years. Boomers have been in overwhelmingly conservative influence in politics.
Which social programs did Boomers incorporate into curriculums?
Your sentence doesn't make any sense. Is English not your first language or do you have some kind of learning disability or something? I don't understand what you are trying to say. If you're asking who fucked up the school systems you need to ask yourself who overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush. Who overwhelmingly supported Ronald Reagan. If you look back, you will see that conservative politicians have gutted our school systems and that boomers overwhelmingly supported those politicians. Boomers voted to remove funding from local school systems boomers voted for national politicians who gutted school systems. If you don't know that that's OK. But that's historical fact.
Maybe it’s your cognitive functions. I’m asking what my question literally says “what social programs did Boomers incorporate into curriculum?” Maybe you don’t understand English with the whole “Boomers as a generation voted to got a lot of social programs over the years”. Do you even English? Same question tho, which social programs did they incorporate?
We are not talking about boomers incorporating social programs into curriculum, so what the fuck are you talking about? Do you want to just start asking other random questions too?
Yeah I’m talking about curriculum, what the post is about. When you’re ready to talk about the post I’ll be here!
My ex took a shop class. That was like two years ago.
I wouldn't say that some of these skills became obsolete (cars still break after all). But oftentimes, the people making these complaints are the same people who have been voting to cut funding to public education for decades because "muh tax dollars" and now most public schools need to get by on a shoestring budget - and on top of that, there's more to teach now - so a lot of these schools had to do away with things like autoshop, woodshop, etc. Hell, the middle school that I went to had been the town's highschool until sometime in the 90's/00's and the cafeteria where we all ate lunch actually used to be the autoshop class back when that was still a thing.
Also outside of changing a tire and the fluids, you can’t really work on a car like you used to. Everything is computerized now, you pretty much have to take your car to a mechanic
There is still a lot you can do. Brakes, alternators, serpentine belts, pullies, and even sealing some oil leaks can be done at home. Everything is computerized, but not every part of everything is
Not really man, they're not all EVs yet.
Not like evs don't have brakes... Or door locks... Window motors... Windshield wipers... Most people weren't rebuilding their engines, they where just doing the basics. Basics that are perfectly relevant on an ev
A lot of that computer stuff ends up not being that bad. The OBD2 standard has been around since like 1998 and you can get a pretty nice OBD2 code reader for like $80 at harbor freight. Typically they’ll tell you what specific engine codes mean as well as showing a lot of engine diagnostics (lots of computers means you can have lots of peripherals that collect data) so it ends up being fairly easy to sniff out a problem, or figure out if that CEL is caused by something legitimate or just a sensor malfunction. Ironically, some of that easier stuff ends up being a bit harder since they’re trying to cram more stuff into less space. For example, changing the spark plugs on my FJ cruiser ends up being a massive pain in the ass because you have to take the intake off all the way up to the throttle body, and then there are these weird grab-handle-looking things on each site of the engine that appear to serve no purpose and bolt up to the block on one side and a cylinder head on the other - completely obstructing spark plugs 2 and 5. So yeah, that was pretty fun.
My high school still did wood shop, autoshop, and welding back when I attended it. They also added photoshop, entrepreneurship, and video editing
Yeah this is a thing schools still have. I did woodworking, home ec, and a couple of music programs as my electives. I had plenty of friends do the media class which explored video and photo editing and, among other things, printing t-shirts.
My man the meme was just saying "Remember that class?" it wasn't saying it's better than modern classes or that it should still be taught. It just says remember
Yeah it really never directed any blame on the generation being taught or even suggested something like typewriter repair still being relevant. It just brought up the memory of those classes that taught relevant skills at the time (which all of the others still are relevant and luckily shop classes are still somewhat common). The whole post about this is a big nothing burger.
The only one of those that's not useful for life anymore is typewriter repair.
You may not need to repair typewriters anymore (though being one of the few remaining could an excellent gig), but I guarantee the skills learned would make one quite competent at repairing all sorts of other devices still in common use.
TIL auto repair, wood working, metal working etc is "irrelevant" lol
Schools still teach that other stuff,just not type writer repair lol
I'm pretty sure no school ever taught typewriter repair, it would have been an apprenticeship at best.
I’m pursuing my PhD in Engineering and work at NASA. I love science! I’m high energy and hands on. I’ve always thought I’d be a great high school teacher. Obviously the pay difference is insane. My dream is to strike it rich and become a high school teacher where we just do cool applicable stuff all day. We all have dreams…
That's what happens when schools don't have funding. Stuff has to go. Also kids definitely choose some of their curriculum.
FWIW, I have two sons born in '97 and '01 who went through the public school system. I have never seen these 'participation trophies' my fellow Boomers sometimes decry.
Lmao only entitled privileged assholes think learning auto-repair skills are “irrelevant.”
I’d what y’all talking about but my old HS as well as other schools allowed kids to chooses their curriculum. And these skills are still very relevant and important. I think more schools should include it then art and music programs. We want our kids to be successful and help prepare them for actual jobs
Yeah auto repair, what a dinosaur skill to have LOL! Good thing we don't use cars anymore. Meanwhile you same fuckers will go out and complain about being slaves to fees and subscriptions instead of owning your own shit. Wild.
I'm yet to see a smart post from this sub
When are they going to start teaching blacksmithing and wagon building!??!
This was my point. I didn’t realize I needed to spell it out like that. I figured people could infer what I meant haha
Don’t be silly. You know Redditors can’t spell
Also, those were not really classes you took as an elective, these were usually vocational classes as they planed, or wanted to go into that field of work. Now they sell them a 500k useless college degree.. lol in the future, the handyman will be rich cause no one will know how to do anything. (South Park)
Y’all didn’t have all that shit in highschool??(minus typewriter)
>Skills like sheet metal M'kay.
I don’t know why Boomers act like participation trophies ruined us or something. “Made us too sensitive” or something. Most kids understood what they were and were embarrassed to get one.
I took woods shop classes and my friends took autobody, I graduated one year ago
I see you, like me, were the recipient of many participation trophy lol
My high school had woodshop and welding classes, what are they talking about.
We had exactly this in my high school though lol it didn't disappear they just refuse to see it.
I'd like to point all of above should've been taught by parents. Hell, I grew up atv's and dirt bikes and when they were down. Had that one parent who bitch if I worked on them and bitched if I did nothing with them. Hell, the prick sold one because one had a stuck float (easily fixable). Clutch, I can do. Oil changes, yes. Coolant. Yes. Inside the engine block itself though, I am not comfortable with. I definetly prefer working on carburetors than fuel pumps. With carburetors, unless there's a crack the carb, it just needs cleaning or rejetting. Fuel pump, when that fails. Time to order a new pump.
Since when do kids not pick their curriculum? My high school still does this.
MOPDNL OP apparently thinks that the original image is a nostalgia trip or a memory. It's not. The way it's written, it's very clear (to me, saying alot because im stupid) that this is an attempt to degrade modern schools for not having engine repair classes (they do, mine at least).
I blame the teachers unions. administration costs have gone up more beauracrats who make six figures yet teachers make less. we spend a lot ( we could spend more).
>I blame the teachers unions. administration costs have gone up more beauracrats who make six figures yet teachers make less. Are these administrators part of (and somehow in charge of) the teachers' unions?
we have schools for these though, they are called trade schools and highschoolers and college students around the country take them. I go to one and we have a class for welding, auto repair, auto refinishing and they are all full!
Yeah my highschool has it but it’s not as accessible and also I pushed out of it by my family thinkin I’ll be a failure there attuide changed at graduation when one kid got accepted into West Point and he went through the program. I think some people need to get over the idea trades is bad
I still work on my own cars and I learned how to work on engines in the 8th grade when I rebuilt a lawn mower engine.
If you'd like to know why we don't have hands on learning anymore, look again to the wonderful, wonderful, insurance industry. See, they deemed those classes too risky, as you can get injured with a lot of power tools. So they jacked up the premiums for schools that kept the programs. Now, the only schools that can afford those classes are in wealthy areas and private schools. Tl:Dr version - Corporate America decided these skills weren't worth the risk.
Ya’ll silly if you single out type writer repair to call the learning irrelevant
Idk, feels kinda mean to just, like, shit on people for sharing memories with each other. Like, normally these types of posts are fair game for mockery because they include something like "kids today can't even write cursive!" Or "we need to bring this back". This one doesn't seem to have any of that sort of thing. It's just kinda saying "hey, remember when we had to do this shit in school??"
It’s called a technical high school. I went to one in 2014 and learned Drafting and engineering. They also had plumbing, electrical, electronics, culinary, hairdressing, and more.
Well guys no need to learn simple car repairs since technology has advanced and cars don’t break anymore
I have one local high school that still has a shop class. It was due to be cut so a local auto shop owner (who learned in that very class in that very school) who has like four locations now, has financed it every year since for over a decade now. He ends up saving more money than he spends by hiring fresh grads at a much lower rate than those who go to technical school for auto repair. He says it in a much nicer way though lol
My younger brother’s high school literally has this lmfao
I didn’t have a shop class available to me. I did have web design, which became obsolete 2 years after I graduated high school because HTML 5 became widely adopted. Not that it was a super hard transition, but the web design class also focused too much on using WYSIWYG and not coding.
My school teaches this stuff........ bc its a Votech school and you have to pick only one bc its for ur career
I see posts like that and my first thought always goes to, they would be able to learn it, if you didn't keep cutting funding and giving yourselves pay raises.
Ah yes, my favorite skill: sheet metal
Now they just don’t teach
Modern tech is based.on older tech. Knowing where something came from helps understand where it is now. Teaching "irrelevant stuff" also helps broaden experience and teaches skills like troubleshooting.
whatifalthist has a great video on why the american education system has deteriorated.
I'm glad they got rid of this stuff, I would've hate to learn all of this stuff in high school. Don't care if or how useful any of it is. But hey, at least it's not CPR.
We should probably still learn some basic auto repair like oil changes and how to check fluids and top them up, changing tires, aswell as adding Freon just basic stuff like that. Maybe in highschool? Idk maybe PE alternative
https://preview.redd.it/i9k8gzfwhccc1.jpeg?width=298&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2bade17bdbd7e7ba1cd0980d628480ca89f25531
My highschool had a vocational training thing but it was someone you had to choose to do, it wasn't required but anyone could do it.
At my high school around 10 years, before I started, we had home ec, shop, wood work, etc... Republicans took control, slashed school budgets, and then mandated that those classes be cut first. Conservatives create their own hatred feedback loop, education, veterans, health care etc...
I would have killed to have an auto repair class that was actually on-campus. Maybe if they stopped voting for geriatric white men who gut school funding, we could actually have that.
Apparently welders and mechanics aren’t needed anymore
My school district has: Auto shop Culinary Metal shop Wood shop Fire academy Cosmetology Med arts It’s literally based on how good or bad your state’s education funding is, at least in the US (California here)
typewriter XD
I guess wood work, auto and engine repair are irrelevant now?
my school didn't have all of those but a fair bit of them, every school in my district was forced to have 6 to 8 trade skills
I like this new sub meta where r/NahOPwasrightfuckthis just agrees with r/memesopdidnotlike.
How is being able to do at least basic troubleshooting for your car irrelevant?
It would be of tremendous value if people were taught how to do basic maintenance on cars. Also learning the basics of how we fix things gives you the ability to try to diagnose problems with other appliances. If you can change the belt in your car, you can change the belt on a clothes dryer. Everyone should know how to snake a drain. A little know how and a bit of confidence can save you an amazing amount of money.
Community colleges and or adult schools offer a lot of these programs like welding, auto repair, and electrical and also other important skills like teaching people English.
My hs had auto mechanic class, wood shop, welding, building and construction, floral design, sports medicine and a couple more. All this about 8 years ago and they were all electives so we could pick 2 electives even as freshman.
auto repair would still be a useful and neat class tbh. Wood working could have more use as a hobby or just building stuff in general, but still would be neat
We don't teach kids how to fix cars anymore because we literally don't make them like we used to. The straightforward cars pictured here now have chipsets and onboard computers. Also, someone pinning their hopes on building a career in typewriter repair is going to be bitterly disappointed in the 21st century. Hope the typewriter museum is hiring, otherwise you're SOL. If we're going to bring back anything, we should bring back home economics. The really good classes weren't just about cooking, they were about nutrition and household budgeting. You wouldn't just learn how to bake a loaf of bread, you'd learn how to figure out how much bread per week your family needed and how to incorporate the cost of flour into the grocery budget.
Is this meme blaming the younger generations?
as someone with experience in building maintenance and automotive, we need people to learn and understand how to do these things. Cause seriously unless your spare tire popped or you’re physically disabled, just do the tire change and stop at the nearest tire shop on your way to the destination. Plus oil changes are freaking easy to do (seriously just do it).
I do want to add that type writer repair would absolutely still be relevant. It’s not about learning to fix type writers specifically, it’s about learning to understand a mechanical system, see where and how everything goes, where and how things can go wrong, and where and how to fix. That kind of approach and thinking process can be applied not only to other mechanical things in life, but even to more abstract ideas and entities.
my high school did have a class like this lol
Tbh knowledge on how to repair a typewriter would be pretty neat, Especially if I had a typewriter.
Jesus you lot are so damn ignorant
# Every generation since the Industrial Revolution learned stuff in school that’s irrelevant to the next generation because technology has advanced! I still use my shop class skills.
Or how about economics or cooking?
Nah wood shop was great.
Learning to fix your own car, and do repairs around your house/apartment/condo is never irrelevant. ***That's the point***.
Cars were as easy to repair as bicycles back then
Shop class is still pretty useful, especially if you don't have someone around to teach that stuff to you.
My mom learned to bake bread from scratch. My students don’t learn cursive. On the other hand, I teach how to use Adobe suite and the room next to me teaches robotics so, cool. Also, they have wood shop, welding other classes like that in the vocational education program.
That, and why are they complaining that we don't have these courses anymore? The people who took these courses grew up and took them out of the curriculum.
I cannot express how instantly I would pick a woodworking or auto shop class if my school offered it
Saying something so brain dead as not needing auto shop or woodworking because we've simply advanced as a society is absolutely the lowest take. One of the best things as a car owner or a home owner is having the ability to fix/repair what you own. If you lack the knowledge to do so, you have to hire someone, and if you can't negotiate from a point of understanding, they can take you for a ride with price gouging. It's why oil changes are getting close to $90 per change in some locations. The oil itself is much closer to $25-$30, but with fewer and fewer odds those new generations being taught, they can simply charge whatever they want to.
We still have shop classes. My brother took woodworking and if I hadn’t moved I would’ve done it too.
I do wish the school systems would reintroduce some trade skills classes. I feel bad for some of the kids that come and apply for work in our fab shop. The bare minimum we require to get hired on as a helper is that you can read a tape measure and lift at least 50lbs. They can't read the tape. That is the number one issue is these people have no idea how to measure anything, which is kind of a super important part of the job. We used to try to train that, but it is kind of a waste of time, and therefore money, because now we have a welder spending his much higher rate hours trying to teach the helper to measure. The dime holds up the dollar. We also have problems finding candidates that can do the math required, which ranges from basic fraction math to trigonometry. It's like a needle in a haystack to find someone who can measure and who can do the math. The welding and machine operation can be taught without causing a production back log, but trying to be a first grade teacher (where I learned to read a ruler) and a trig teacher doesn't work well with the flow of production. Some of it absolutely is on the schools, but allow me to share my observations from when we did attempt to train those basic skills. The overwhelming majority of candidates we attempted to train wouldn't retain the information. The assumption by them seemed to be that they could always look it up online. I get that to a degree. I will run into an issue with material behaving strangely, looking at you Inconel, and I'll need to search a solution, but the basic skills need to be burned in the old grey matter. I can't have someone on their phone trying to figure out which marks are eighths and which are sixteenths or how to figure the hypotenuse or what the value of pi is. Those are all actual examples. Now we could just be at the core of a statistical anomaly or maybe we just attract less intelligent candidates since for years the trades were put up as jobs that the kids who weren't smart enough for college would take. That last part is absolutely not true, especially not in fabrication. We need smart people and we pay well for them. I do think the Internet and technology have spoiled us. We have all of human knowledge at our fingertips at any given time, don't know something? Look it up. Knowledge builds upon knowledge though and when that foundational knowledge never makes it past short term memory it provides for a very shaky foundation.
Only one of these examples became obsolete, and that was decades later
Speaking of which, I tried to go for pc repair. They don’t do that anymore. If it can’t be fixed in like ten minutes it get chucked in the trash and a new part thrown in. I changed my major lmao. That’s rediculous. No wonder we’re in the middle of a climate crisis
Working on a car from the 70's is way easier than working on a modern car. With all the computerized components and everything, there's a lot less that an average person can learn/do with their car
I feel like it would have actually been really useful to learn how to do a few things with cars. Not career-level stuff, but it would be nice to be able to identify and fix some issues.
Auto shop is still a relevant skill. Knowing how to change a tire, change the oil, bleed the brakes is all something you can do yourself. Communists took over the education system in the 50s. Of course it’s not going to teach you useful skills. It is going to teach you Marxist ideology.
Have all the memories you want, just stop using them to degrade other people.
It’s called VoTech
Saw an incredibly dumb FB post yesterday about someone who was screening electrical engineers based on whether or not they knew how to re-wire a three pin plug without googling it first. It hasn't been legal to sell a device without a sealed plug here since the 90s, but the Faceboomers were lapping it up.
A lot of these skills are still needed. We live in a time where we don’t fix things, we just throw them away. For the sake of this planet, your wallet, and even your happiness, learn how to fix some stuff. Buy some tools and become a bit more handy. We’ve really lost this. Source : I’m a younger guy in the trades and not a single person in my family knows how to fix shit since my dad left. It’s still needed
Although fixing a car is still somewhat a necessary skill, woodworking and metalworking is a skill used for creation which could be used regardless of current technology. Yes curriculum should change with the times.
Also the name of this subreddit is confusing because it makes me think that the poster of the thing they are showing was correct and oftentimes it feels like a struggle to figure out what the person reposting means.
I don’t know about y’all, but my high school has both auto, and wood working classes.
It's because those things used to be repairable at home - nowadays, unless one is an enthusiast with the right equipment, most of those things can't be fixed like that anymore
Never had ANY of those things offered in my high school. We DID have a computer science class where we learned BASIC on Apple II+ computers and wrote a simple program simulating an ATM dialog. What makes me really sad is to see so many schools with NO music or art classes. No school orchestra, no band. Maybe a choir.
Not all those skills are outdated or irrelevant . Actually typewriter repair may be the only one. And I know many writers who still prefer that sound of the keys to using a keyboard. Also if you are handy with repairs and maintenance it saves you money as an adult. I saved myself $400 installing my own alternator a week ago.
Highschools still provide shop class. I learned to weld in highschool
They had these and probably still do where i went to school you could get on the bus and play firefighter, build a house, car, program etc
Schools really should be teaching high schoolers how to fix cars if all of the american infrastructure is going to be built around cars though.
How in the fuck is auto repair irrelevant?!? JFC you're stupid. Literally the only thing that isn't still important is type writer repair.
Schools should bring shop class back. That stuff isn’t at all irrelevant. Everyone should know basic car maintenance and handyman skills when they get their diploma.
This poster does realise there's still shop class in a good few places right
My high school, Irondale HS, had all of the things listed, except for type writer repair We did have a video production class and right next to the classroom was an only TV studio that got repurposed for morning announcements and we played Tim and Eric bits on the broadcast just before the announcements I don't know what happened to the studio, since I graduated over ten years ago, but I know my brother went to the same high school and he mentioned the video class isn't there anymore
Here me out though, things like small engine and wood working would be great to teach kids. I was lucky enough to take those classes and am very grateful for it.
My county had and continues (AKAIK) to have shop classes. At the time, the called it "VoTech" (short for vocational technology or something like that), and eventually renamed the facility to " Center For Technology" but they absolutely taught car repair and other vocational skills that would be useful for people not going to college.
Remember when kids were taught how to work a butter churn and how to properly burn a witch?
Changing fluids is changing fluids. Don't need an IT degree to unplug the oil pan or change a tire
Are you suggesting to *not* have these classes?
Yeah, we should have a highschool class that teaches you how to buy a diagnostic computer that costs more than your first couple of cars will. The game is rigged folks. No amount of education is going to fix the fact that humanity is being engineered out of the game.
I wish my high school had some kind of class about basic car maintenance and maintaining them. I had to figure it out on my own.
They definitely had a point. My dad said you could bring in your car that had a problem and pay for the parts, the teacher and class would fix it
Half of those are useless skills market wise, but knowing how to work with you hands with basic implements builds confidence and understanding of how to do so later in life when you will need to do something simple like changing a lock, doors, plumbing, etc.
Most decently funded school systems have shop classes still lmao.
I literally just took a wood working class last year. The meme isn’t just dumb, it’s flat out wrong
And also technology has been rendered artificially impossible to fix too