A few years ago, I interviewed a married couple for an article, who, although only in their mid-20s, already owned a thriving business. This couple had met in a high school welding class – a fact which prompted the husband to joke that “sparks flew.”

Humor aside, I was intrigued to hear that a welding class still existed in public high school. Given the business this young couple had started, the welding they learned in school was likely an asset they used regularly, but frankly, hands-on, work experience classes like welding often seem as dated as orange shag carpet.

Whoops, I just checked, and it seems orange shag is a thing again. Apparently, everything really does come around!

So, too, do hands-on classes like welding and shop.

Mike Rowe, the famed host of “Dirty Jobs,” recently discussed the decline of shop class in American schools at an Energy & Innovation Summit. The rise of AI is showing what a fallacy the “learn to code” mantra was, Rowe says, and people are overwhelmingly looking to the trades for future work stability.

Yet how do we get kids into the mindset of accepting these so-called “dirty jobs”? One way is to bring back shop class, Rowe implies:

I mentioned in passing the decision to take shop class out of high school. I think when we look back it’d be hard to find a more harebrained decision in the history of modern education than to do that. We have sent such a clear, unintended, invisible hand-type message to a whole generation of kids. Not just kids who might have entered the trades as a result of a vibrant, robust shop program in high school, but kids like me who just would look wandering from math to English and might stick their head in to a metal shop just to see what was going on, just to see what work looked like in the 9th or 10th grade. That was important.

Rowe goes on to say how he realized how his “Dirty Jobs” show is replicating that absent shop class to some extent, because “it gave people a chance to see what work looked like.”

The next generation needs to have that chance again, otherwise we will only see more zombie-like individuals walk out of our schools, uninterested in really tackling life, improving it, and passing those improvements on to others.

Former teacher and author John Taylor Gatto said something similar. Although not a fan of shop class per se, Gatto recognized the need for students to have freedom to learn by doing rather than simply being spoon-fed information in a classroom for six hours a day.

“Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual,” Gatto wrote in “The Underground History of American Education.” He goes on to say that opportunities to do the hands-on learning – such as that which happens in shop class – gives students experience, which in turn raises questions in their minds. Those questions then spur young people on to thinking and problem-solving – traits which the school system always pretends to instill in its students, but often fails to do so successfully.

The fact is, today’s schools often kill interest in life. But as Rowe testifies, shop class inspires interest and shows students what is possible beyond the four walls of the school.

It’s absolutely true that our schools need reform and improvement in basic academic instruction – and we should certainly continue aiming higher in this area – but is it possible that we would see some of that academic improvement come if we simply incorporated classes like shop into the curriculum once again?

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Picryl