The New Atlantis magazine has a long article by Matthew B. Crawford lamenting how shop class is being swept into the dustbin of our DIY history as we become increasingly concerned with preparing the next generation of "knowledge workers." Over at the O'Reilly Radar blog, BB pal and MAKE: editor/publisher Dale Dougherty gets to the heart of the matter. From Dale's post:
(In the article, Crawford) wonders if a decline in the use of tools has made us "more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them." Crawford adds: " So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world." At Make, we couldn't agree more.
Crawford, who left a job in a "think-tank" to become a bike mechnanic, traces the history of shop class in America back to the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which was meant to meet both vocational and general education requirements. Even from the outset, it seemed designed to create a path from school to the assembly line for the lower class, creating an artificial divide between "white collar" and "blue collar" that separated thinking from doing, which is just wrong.
Link to O'Reilly Radar, Link to The New Atlantis article
