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I can disagree with it all day. #1… I took three years off woodworking shop #2… my neighbor just retired as a full time woodshop teacher and said he was lucky they didn’t end the class while he was teaching..
#3….cabinet guys don’t make much. Commercial guys don’t make much. If you own it you can do well . Furniture guys/gal…. Only if you the MAIN furniture make and not the helper..
if I had to do it over…. I’d get into Heating and cooling.
Last edited by jack duren; 02-21-2024 at 3:05 PM.
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While I certainly agree that America needs trade schools and education in the trades, this is a very complicated issue. Here are some points often missed in these discussions.
- Many young people heard a lot of negatives from parents who worked in the trades as it became more and more difficult to earn a good living. For example:
* "My boss is some twenty-something clown with a business degree. He doesn't know a condensor from an evaporator, but he overrules everything I say on every HVAC install I do. He has also frozen all wages and keeps cutting our hours. Go to college, Junior. That's where the money is."
* "Every year we get more and more immigrants on the job site. They live in old, run down houses and apartments with 20 other people. They work for peanuts. So why should they pay me more? Go to college. There's no way to make a good living in framing/roofing/concrete/landscaping anymore."
* "Ever since NAFTA, I can't compete with foreign truck drivers. They come over the border in dilapidated trucks with bald tires. I can't get away with that on my rig. Go to college, Lester. There's no money in truck driving anymore."
And so all those young people avoided blue collar, trades jobs and went to college. They were saddled with a lot of debt and now they are finding all their peers did the same thing. So, now there's a shortage of blue collar, trades workers and all the kids with degrees don't know how to use a clutch and can't tell which end of screwdriver does what.
- We have been cutting taxes in the US since the early 1980s. All that missing revenue had to result in cuts somewhere. Public education took a major hit from primary schools to public universities. Trades education costs money for work spaces and machines. Those workspaces must be heated and cooled. Those machines must be updated, maintained and, eventually, replaced with more modern examples to stay relevant. Not enough funding? "No more shop classes, people. We can't afford it." Public universities kept losing more and more public funding. So they kept raising tuition and fees more and more. And the government kept increasing the amount of money students could borrow more and more. And now, here we are with so many young people saddled with oppressive school debt.
- Unfortunately, primary schools didn't make a whole lot of effort to help kids who didn't do well in school on their own. Instead of testing them for ADHD or other learning disabilities, it was easier to just stick them in shop class. It was the same for kids with behavior issues. Thus, shop classes tended to have a lot of poor academic performers with learning disabilities and trouble makers. I never took wood shop in high school, but my brother did. He told me many stories about all the delinquents and bullies in the class who never accomplished anything. They would simply walk around terrorizing other students, breaking the machines and vandalizing the projects other kids made. The teacher had no time or desire to do anything about it. Since shop classes became synonymous with "dumb kids" and delinquents, who would want their kids to take shop?
- Through the 1980s, manufacturing took a GIGANTIC hit in North America. The vast majority of the places where high school graduates could get good jobs that paid a living wage simply went away. When I graduated high school near Stillwater Oklahoma, I could have applied at the Swan hose factory, National Standard wire machining, Overland Color Press printing, Mercury Marine boat motor factory, a vinyl flooring factory or multiple machine shops. Stillwater is a pretty small town, but all those places offered good pay and benefits for almost any high school graduate. I chose to enlist in the Navy and it's a good thing I did. One by one, all those places closed. Literally every one of those employers are now gone and nothing replaced them. Many of the people who got laid off went to school at Oklahoma State University, also in Stillwater, and got a degree. They had learned there were no opportunities without a degree. Their children learned the same lesson and also went to college.
And now we have a lot of openings for trades positions. It's interesting how I often see memes and hear talk show commentators talk about all the high paying jobs available in the trades. But when I talk to people who actually work in those trades, they tell me almost nobody actually makes that much money. Corporations and business owners do everything possible to keep wages low and benefits minimal. And no matter how many openings they have, they close their wallets with a torque wrench. My brother still lives in Stillwater. Many times he has told me about a new company coming to town and everybody being all excited about all the high paying jobs coming with it. My brother is always skeptical and he's always right. The only reason companies come to Stillwater is because they're looking for low-cost labor so they pay extremely low wages. The most absurd was all the hype about a Google data center. Wow, lots of tech jobs, right? Think again. Google built the data center and a wind farm to power it. They brought in a manager from out of state and hired a guy to mop the floors. That was it. Everything else is automated or done remotely over the network. Maybe there are a few jobs for people who work on wind turbines?
Months ago Dave Ramsey was going on and on about all the good job openings going unfilled because, "Nobody wants to work anymore!". On YouTube, his videos had many comments arguing why Ramsey was full of it. People pointed out they had applied for those jobs at Target, for example, and found out they were all part time for minimum wage or slightly above, nights, weekends, holidays and unpredictable schedules. Many people wrote, "I already have a job like that and it sucks. Why would I want another job that sucks at a different company?".
Last edited by Pat Germain; 02-21-2024 at 4:10 PM.
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Dave seems to be stuck in the mid90s to the 2008 collapse.
~mike
happy in my mud hut
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I drive by a local high school periodically. They had a small house in a fenced area of the parking lot that presumably students were working on. I never saw any work actually going on, and all of the materials must have been stored in the shipping container sitting nearby. At some point recently the house disappeared and now it appears there is large shed being built. I don't know if the house got moved to a lot, or what. The area around the school is fully developed so no idea where there would be land to put the house. It would definitely be a starter home as it was probably under 1,000 square feet.
I assume it is high school students, but it could be continuing education. High school students most likely since it would be dark for continuing education at night.
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You guys seem to be talking about two different trades here..
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As mentioned earlier in this thread, the local Technical (trade) school near me has been doing a modular house every year going back a very long time. The structure is sold upon completion to a private party who presumably has a property to put it on. The students work on the structure throughout the year until it has "all the things" that are necessary as they learn to do their particular trade.Originally Posted by Brian Elfert
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
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I couldn’t agree more with the OP. I have a masters in business from UT, but I’m also an alum of the BOCES program in NY. You attend 1/2 days for the last 2 years of high school.
Really great program. I took computer science, but they have programs for welding, plumbing, HVAC, heavy equipment, electricians, cosmetology, food services, etc.
https://www.tstboces.org/
Every state could use a program like this. Lots of kids find a lifelong career there. Great use of taxpayer dollars IMO.
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All very important issues to consider when discussing school change and improvements.
School funding is another tough nut to crack.
The drive to privatize American education through such things as charter schools and voucher programs and home schooling has produced an educational landscape that is far different from the public school system that many of us experienced back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when shop classes may have been more plentiful. In Wisconsin, families can sign up for a voucher that covers $8,000 to $9,000 in private school tuition costs for a student exiting the public school system. Their home district then sees a cut in state aid equivalent to the cost of the student’s private school voucher. State law also prohibits districts from levying taxpayers to cover those losses. Per pupil funding in Wisconsin was increased for school choice programs, but remained flat for the traditional system despite the inflation that occurred. It is tough to maintain class sizes, pay teachers, preserve programs, much less create new shop programs, when new funding is consistently less than the rate of inflation and choice options have the effect of siphoning off limited monies.
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I'm just surprised they are doing this at a regular high school that is not a technical high school.
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I graduated high school in 1990. Certainly, the best and brightest weren't taking wood shop because those students wanted to take classes that would help polish their resume for college. There were less than stellar students in wood shop, but the vast majority were just middle of the road students like me. One semester there were two "super" seniors who didn't graduate who were just taking wood shop hoping it would be an easy class to get a grade above an F to graduate.
I don't recall anyone intentionally damaging anything in the shop. The shop was full of Northfield tools that would take real effort to break.
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It's no coincidence that the shop bullies my brother told me about didn't graduate high school. I expect you are correct that it would take effort to break old, American iron tools. But my brother and his classmate both told me it was typical for the shop bullies to cram a 4/4 board into a planer set at 1/8". That or they would steel some kid's textbook and run it through the planer. That can't be good for a machine.
My brother built a very nice cedar chest when he was in wood shop. My mom still has it. My brother said he was lucky to get it home before some shop bully smashed it to pieces. Yeah, not a good environment.
I'm recalling one of my classmates telling me when he was in wood shop, he turned a "Billy Club" on the lathe. The shop teacher wouldn't let him take it home because it was a "weapon". So my classmate found a cue ball, drilled a hole it and attached it to the Billy Club. It then became twice as lethal, but my classmate told the shop teacher is was a "walking stick" and he was allowed to take it home.
Last edited by Pat Germain; 02-22-2024 at 12:15 PM.
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Stillwater, Oklahoma had a pretty good "Vo-Tech" system when I was in high school. In my junior and senior years, I would go to my school in the AM then ride a bus to Vo Tech for afternoon classes. I took Electricity/Electronics my first year. The kids who didn't do so well in the first year were encouraged to take Electricity the next year. The kids who did better the first year were encouraged to take Advanced Electronics the second year. For some reason, I was able to understand electronics and did well. Thus, I took Advanced Electronics my second year.
Ironically, everything I learned about electronics is now completely obsolete. Nobody messes with semiconductors anymore. Had I taken Electricity my second year and learned how to be an Electrician's apprentice, I would have been much better off. All that stuff is still relevant.
My brother took Auto Body at Vo-Tech. He quickly learned there was NO money working at an auto body shop. He worked his tail off for a few years at part time, minimum wage with no benefits jobs. There was never any opportunity for full time work, advancement or pay raises.
My wife took Secretarial Training. When we lived in Washington DC, she actually got a really good job at a corporate headquarters as a receptionist/mail clerk. She was good at it and made much more money than I did as an active duty sailor. When I got transferred, the company couldn't find anyone to replace her. She spent two mornings trying to train two different young women. When they saw how much work was involved, they went to lunch and never came back.
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What was your rating in the Navy?
I signed up with a guaranteed "A" school for electronics. Then went to two "C" schools.
In 6 years total. Once I was discharged I found work in electronics and eventually in Aerospace in Calibration, Electronics lab, but also helped out in the Dimensional, Optical, and Physical Labs.
I'm sure I would have made more as an electrician, but I had no desire to move around to job sites or be a lineman for the public electric companies.
I eventually went to university on both the GI Bill and the "Aerospace nickel" (McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing) and got a BA History. That was just for my own satisfaction.
Boeing wanted me to move into management. "Thanks, but no thanks." Happy as a tech, Salaried, Non-Exempt.
My NAvy electronics training served me very well for 40 years.
"What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.
It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
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Traditional schools send students to the tech/trade school for half a day. This counts as credits towards graduation.
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The house under construction was at the regular high school, not at a tech/trade school.
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