The handwriting on the wall

[Luthier]

I do admit this is an indirect thread but does affect us all. I was told by my "county coordinator" at a meeting last week that when the people that are teaching Tech-Ed (or what most of us remember as shop) retire or decide to leave, the programs will be terminated in the schools. I guess what I am telling you is, in the not so distant future what we do will be considered a valuable vocation since "hands on woodworking" skills will be tough to come by. I dare say, I hope not to many fingers will be lost from self induced learning. It is sad that it is expected all students will go to college when the reality of the situation is that those that do not will not even have a chance to experience or be introduced to woodworking and the satisfaction it brings.

With that said, I shall do my best with the time I have left to share what I have and know "wit da yout of Amerca" in hopes of turning out one or two more craftsman.

Don

[Scotti Adams]

Well.Im happy to say that this isnt the case in the district I work in....the woodshop is going strong...Thats a travesty where you are at. I know in our Ohio state the schools are struggling very badly with money issues and a lot of things have been cut. We were one of the lucky few to get our levy passed the last time around.

[Bill Snyder]

In some of the school districts in my area (Central Texas) the building trades programs were phased out several years ago. An attempt to resurrect them has occurred at the urging of the local builder's association. Unfortunately what has happened at one of the high schools is the councelors have been dumping some of the special education students into the classes because some of theses classes could be counted as "math" and these students had to have a minimum of "Mainstream" courses. I am not meaning to imply that some of these students could not be taught, but most of them are not in these classes because of their own interest, but rather because they where told to take the classes.
This (and perhaps the wrong choice of instructor) has caused the program to be somewhat less than successful and it is being cut back this year and re-evaluated to determine what changes need to take place next year. One of the possible changes would of course be it's elimination.

[John Zimm]

This is a travesty. I don't know anything that has been more valuable to me over the past year as trying to learn how to be a woodworker. I really wish I had taken seriously the industrial arts classes I took in high school. In fact, I just spent about four hours this weekend practicing carcing an arched-top mandolin from an old piece of pine (I didn't want to screw up good wood) and had athe most peaceful day I've experienced in a long time. Think of all the things you have to know to do woodworking-types of wood, math, trying to envision the final product emerging from a block of wood. Woodworking is really a multi-disciplined task that taxes the critical thinking skills continually. Too bad the administrators in your area can't understand that.

-John.

[Luthier]

Sad but true, John. Those that make policy are not always in the trenches to see what is going on.

Don

[twombo]

School administrators are by definition, academes (SP). They all seem to be pretty much of the mindset that we should all be knowledge workers of some sort or another. Secondary schools are not alone in this phenomena. Junior/community colleges are going in much the same direction. Most of the administrators I have met or interacted with are pushing the Bachelors degree track for virtually everyone.

Think about it!!! Many are simply looking out for themselves and their friends, since the more college students that are created, the more jobs for instructors and professors. Even to the point of directing students that are academicaly unprepared or unsuited for undergradiuate studies... both now or in the future. There is a certain intellectual predation in this if you ask me.

Learning a craft or trade is clearly not in the best interest of many of the people who have made college education into a very, very, big business. compare the money to be made from an apprentice learning a craft or trade to the profit stream generated by a student navigating the educational system to the PHD level. Look at the many hundreds of mouths that get fed from the latter.

I am not anti-intellectual by any means. I have a BS majoring in Information Systems and a minor in History... of all the odd possibilities.

That is my rant on this issue.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

Oddly enough, after getting degrees in Applied Math and Computer Science I find myself thinking "The more time I spend writing software the more I want to build guitars for a living".

The tech revolution has been wonderful. It's created a lot of high paying jobs and a lot of wealth (and unfortunatly a lot of inflation as well). But one of the side effects of that revolution is the thought that vocational skills are somehow less important, less "good". And yet, as I learn to build instruments and I make all the mistakes that I've made and I learn the skills it takes to NOT make those mistakes I realize that being a top level luthier takes as much work, study, and dedication as becoming a top level computer programmer.

[thistle3585]

I'm with you on this Don, as I struggle finding anyone competent enough to leave alone on one of my machines.

To be the devil's advocate, todays woodworking industry doesn't need the kind of people that a high school woodshop put out ten years ago. Today, woodworking companies want a machine operator, a programmer and a supervisor. Even the small shops have CNC machines, automated panel saws and the like. Most local custom cabinet shops are buying knockdowns then assembling them at their shop. I only know one cabinet shop that actually builds cabinets from scratch, so a "tradesman" isn't necessary. The only place to get the training that the industry is looking for is through colleges or professional trade organizations.

I think that a lot of people see high school woodshop as teaching a hobby and not a career. They don't see the value in it even though a lot of those same administrators seek refuge in their own shops every chance they get. For the program to work on a high school level, the schools need to invest in the "technology" and they aren't willing to do it. I can understand their stance, but I don't agree with it. I wonder if you introduced an historical or cultural element into the shop that it would help revive the program? Maybe make it a cultural studies class instead of an industrial arts class. It would also free you up to build things like instruments.
I also think woodworking would be a great after school or summer program. I thought about organizing a father/son boat building class in my area. I also have given consideration to doing woodworking classes in my shop. My insurance agent isn't too wild about either of those ideas at all.

Andrew

[mad dawg]

Per the most recent census, only 27.2% of the US population over the age of 25 holds at least a Bachelor's degree, so it seems to me that the remaining figure of 72.8% suggests a fairly large market would still exist for vocational and technical training. If high school vocational education systems are on the decline, has there been a corresponding increase in enrollment in tuition-based trade schools to fill the gap?

[John Bertotti]

I don't know the #s but the trade schools in my area are doing better than the collages. I went to a vo tech school but if I had it to do again I would have went to a four year school. Votech is great for getting a job but the promotions come with the higher degrees. Regardless of what you know. That is the way it works in my company anyway. In the last seven years only one person was hired in my department with less than a bachelors and that was a person that had the same military electronics I had. We do get paid well but it really is a dead end job if you don't go to sales and have at least an mba. Actually this is good advice for those who want to market there instruments. You need to know some business skills. John

[Jim Rowland]

I'm sorry that I ignored shop skills until relatively late in life. My high school had a relatively weak shop program even way back when. I'm sure that if I had had a taste of it back in the forties,I would have continued to develop an appreciation for woodwork throughout my life. The current trend may have something to do with the overselling of highly technical degrees. My daughter,who has been a successful medical doctor for years,recently abandoned her practice to work in horticulture.
Jim

[Luthier]

It is nice to get all of your feedback. I thank you. My soapbox was real handy when I started this thread. You have made some excellent observations to this issue. I was in the 7th grade shop class making a spice rack when I was smitten by the bug. I knew then what I wanted to do but the student advisors and counselors would not hear of an honor student taking "shop" classes and "working with their hands."
It took a couple years of soul searching and a few years of switching majors before I finally listened to the inner voice. How rewarding the journey has been. I just have reservations about the future for some of our youth.
I'll never forget how my professor in college let me have free reign in the wood lab to experiment and teach myself how to build instruments. and I still hear him saying to me ".....and what you have in your head, your heart, and your hands, noone can ever take away from you."
Keep building my friends and try to pass on the craft.
(OK...I'll put the soap box away now)

Don

[thistle3585]

By the way Don, did you build your own soapbox or was that a student project?

[Bandersnatch Reverb]

When my stint with IBM was over (a short lived career in robotics), I was handed a job that had great potential (I'm there 20 years!) but at first paid very very little. To suppliment my income, I worked nights at a local millshop. At first - sanding, then routing, then finishing, then resaw and planing, then knife grinding... I stayed there about 4 years, and ended up night foreman! Its satisfying to see mahogany doors I built with my own hands and sweat still standing in doorways on downtown buildings in Boca Raton, now 20 years later. Not gonna go on and brag too much, but I can go from place to place, and still see my craftmanship. You cant buy the feeling of satisfaction that creates. Used to be there was an apprenticeship mentality in this country. Dunno if there still is.

[Luthier]

By the way Don, did you build your own soapbox or was that a student project?

With my own two hands. Inlaid it too and I didn't use any power tools. I can teach you how to build your own soap box so we can pass the craft on...LOL Hmmmmmmm. Or maybe we could just send the wood over to China, have them make it and then send it back here for sale in the USA. (sarcasm is good, right?)

Don

[Dolamon]

Interesting - the craft arts seem to be a loosing proposition for the bottom line in school administrators. Several Luthier friends of mine attended the 2 (and four) year programs at the London School of Industrial Arts. After two years learning Cabinet work and joinery, THEN they started to apply the learned hand skills to building Guitars, mandolins, fiddles etc.

It seemed like a good program and many of the new British and Australian Luthiers went through this program. Is anyone aware of an Industrial Arts program in the US or Canada? Learning what can be done how it's achieved is a big step in any craft program. I've met tons of graduate students in various fields who can't tie a knot in a rope ... what are we creating here? Narrow field specialists with no hope of survival in wrapping a package?

Support your local Industrial Arts Program! That seems to be the key ...

[Bob DeVellis]

Lots of good points. I learned valuable skills in both woodworking and sheet metal shops back in junior high that I still occasionally draw upon. When I made a replacement tailpiece cover for a vintage Martin bowlback mandolin [note mandolin content], I kept flashing back to stuff my sheet metal instructor had taught us. And many of my classmates developed very nice careers from their vocational training. One of the smartest kids in the class chose to be an electrician. He could have been anything he chose. I bet he's a great electrician and I'd sure like someone like him to do my electrical work.

But I suspect tht the school districts don't particularly relish the idea of having to cut back these programs. In most areas, we live in a time of hard choices. Art programs, vocational programs, sports programs, and parts of the academic programs are all being reduced and eliminated in lots of places -- not necessarily in the order I'd prefer. I'm sure there are some people who want to dump something like wood shop feel that way because they consider it frivolous, but I bet more often than not, it's a matter of having to decide which valued activity has to go.

Also, I respectfully disagree with the idea that generating students is a way for colleges and universities to keep themselves in business. For major universities, teaching is a money loser. It's research that brings in the money. As a college professor, I generate at a minimum 80% of my salary and more typically 90%-95% of my salary from external funds. The state of North Carolina pays around 10% of my salary (depending on my level of grant support). In addition, those grants fund many other employees and pay overhead to the university as a whole. From a strictly financial standpoint, having no students would actually put the university in a better position, although it would obviously be disasterous in every other respect. Oh, and the grants are awarded to the institution, not the individual. If I land a million dollar grant, I don't get a million bucks, just my usual salary. The rest pays for expenses associated with the research. Most major universities are revenue sources for their states, bringing in more dollars than they cost to the state. Tuition is a small portion of that revenue stream. It's perfectly reasonable that people think otherwise, because unless you work at a university, it would be hard to know that this is the case.

Meanwhile, like the rest of you, I'm really sorry to hear that the shop classes are on their way out and personally think that it's a bad call on the school district's part. I hope that those valuable skills, handed down over the generations, aren't lost and applaud Don's commitment to perpetuating them.

Local school districts continually have to make tough choices. No doubt, they make bad ones some of the time -- maybe even most of the time in some places. I think eliminating shop is shortsighted. But then, I don't know what the other options were. I'll say one thing, there aren't too many people who were junior high athletes that have gone on to professional careers in sports, but a whole bunch of the kids in the vocational classes have gone on to a lifetime of productive work in the trades.

[Bill James]

In the major metro area where I live, most of the public school industrial arts programs are long gone. I remember years ago when I started my shop, every few months another school would auction their stuff and I would go to the auction and purchase a few things. That's where I aquired my first metal lathe which we still use on a daily basis (it still has "Robbinsdale High School" stenciled on the casting). It sure was sad though, watching those programs hit the dust one by one especially since it was where I got my start.

When I was a senior in high school, my shop teacher was hospitalized for six month's and somehow he convinced the school to let me teach the beginning machine shop course until he returned. He also got me my first job in a die shop, and bought me beer on the weekends. #

Just rambling but yes, it's sad and in the machining industry we've been dealing with the shortage of competent machinists and toolmakers for quite some time now.

[grsnovi]

I'm 50 years old. Art and music were both taught on a weekly basis when I was a public school student all those years ago. I believe that most "arts" programs are in danger if they exist at all in public schools.

In high school, we were offered several shop courses: wood, metal, auto, etc... and for students not acedemically inclined, there was the county vocational/technical school.

I'm not sure that high school shop class or vo-tech are really the place where an individual would decide to "take up" a trade. It is unlikely that the exposure one would get in high school shop class would suggest to a young person that they wanted to enter the wooden furniture business, let alone the wooden instrument business. Each of these callings would likely be inspired by a mentor of sorts.

The public schools in the USA seem to be struggling. Students aren't even taught to read and write with any proficiency. One would be hard pressed to argue that the USA is competitive in many manually skilled trades and comparing the life choices made by an artisan to the life choices of a manual tradesman isn't really comparing apples to apples.

[Bill James]

What is sad is that our school just built a three million dollar indoor hockey facility but scrapped the industrial arts programs because they were too expensive. The high school in the neighboring community looks more like a sports complex than a high school. Eight indoor basketball courts and closed circuit monitors throughout the school but again, couldn't afford the industrial arts program. That wood must be expensive. #

[Dave Cohen]

What Bobd said. Having been in the academic science game for 30+ yrs, I can attest to the fact that academia is not undoing the teaching of vocational skills because of some thinly veiled agenda. In fact, Academia is in some ways hanging on just as the skilled trades are. It is getting pressure from private diploma mills, and is losing ground to a disinterested public, just as the skilled trades are losing ground to offshore manufacturers and tech positions are being 'outsourced' to faraway places where the labor costs are microscopic. I saw introductory college chemistry enrollment increase to a maximum around 1985, then drop to half of the 1985 numbers by 2000.

Musical acoustics in academia is also in decline. Many of the top musical acousticians are reaching retirement age, and physics departments are not replacing them. Musical acoustics is "tabletop science", and is great for involving undergraduates in research. But the physics departments are opting for particle physics - "big science" - because that is what brings in the money. Tom Rossing tried to get NIU to hire an acoustician in preparation for his retirement, but they just wouldn't do it. It is not only their loss, but also ours. We wouldn't know anything about the way mandolins and guitars work were it not for Tom Rossing and others like him.

[onlyagibsonisgoodenuff]

Maybe it would be better just to phase out the handwriting on the wall.

[otterly2k]

Lots of interesting reflections here...

I think it's a mistake to create or amplify the already existing dichotomy that would divide kids (and later adults) into those who can to think and those who can make things. IMHO, all kids (and adults) need opportunities to do BOTH, and the two activities are not really as separate as all that.

Given budget cuts, and the trimming of anything that can be portrayed as "extra" (arts, music, shop), one is hard pressed to see clear pathways to any of the skilled trades or artisan crafts....whether it is woodworking, quilting, or pottery, etc. All of these CAN be hobbies, and CAN be much more... to some degree they are rendered hobbies (along with sewing/needlework, cobbling, metal work, glassblowing, much small scale food growing/preparation,etc. ) by the fact that most of the results of these trades are mimicked by mass-produced products, made quickly and cheaply and available in Wal-marts everywhere. Making any of these trades a livelihood only for those who can do (and market) high-end custom work.

Add to that the cultural context of an increasingly passive populus...we are taught to watch things instead of do them, listen to music instead of make it, buy things instead of creating them...taught to seek the instant gratification instead of enjoying the process/journey...

Given all these cultural factors, and the economic ones others have mentioned, I'm not sure we can expect schools to be able to continue and promote what the broader society has explicitly devalued.

Somehow people don't seem to have a problem understanding the merit of keeping sports programs around (sometimes at great expense) because the broader society VALUES the activity (at least in terms of what is displayed). People can argue the benefits of learning teamwork and how to be a "good sport", and encouraging early fitness habits. But having sports stars constantly in the media and the Olympics to strive for is also part of it...

Maybe we need better media coverage...
Like Iron Chef, and Martha Stewart, Trading Spaces and Extreme Makeover Home Edition are starting to create "stars" in cooking, hospitality, home decor, and housebuilding

...maybe we need an American Idol show for luthiers, Instrument Makers of the Rich and Famous?

[TommyK]

This is very very worrisome. In the current state of affairs, it seems, all the high paying manufacturing jobs are going over seas. These 'factory' jobs have gotta be overseen by 'papered' (degreed) individuals. I have a BS and worked for a major manufacturer of agricultural equipment. When the shuttered the place up I had to take a job at half the pay. Luckily, I've got benefits... for now. I told my youngest son who wants to be a carpenter that that's a good place for him. It's a little tough to export carpenter jobs... or is it? If the schools are still pushing BS track and all high paying jobs have been exported, what are they gonna do with a degree? Looks to me if the schools are unwilling to teach the 'manual trades', we're gonna have to import all our 'manual labor'. I still think a 'papered' individual has more opportunities. But, it's becoming harder to back that statement up.