The front-page headline of the March 3 Wall Street Journal contained the most encouraging and unifying news that I’ve read in months. A 2,000-word story by Te-Ping Chen, “Schools Revive Shop Class,” showed the new momentum in reinvesting in high-school shop classes. The article’s deck states: “Hands-on skills staging comeback, driven by high college costs, demand for choices.”

I’m old enough to have taken shop starting in the 9th grade — a general shop course that included foundry, machining, plastics and woods. I continued to take printing, photography and three more wood courses throughout my high school days for fun – and, of course, to make cabinets, furniture, cutting boards and knife blocks for Christmas gifts.

Even in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t exactly “cool” to take shop classes in my suburban, university-obsessed school district. I might’ve even been concerned what girls thought about the guy who smelled like foundry sand and sawdust. But I found satisfaction in building something useful and, luckily for me, I knew something about metallurgy when I started my first real job in Chicago — an unexpected stint at Modern Casting magazine covering the North American foundry industry. That was a job I NEEDED when Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine failed to come calling during the 1991 recession.

I’m guessing I might be among the last of the dinosaurs lucky enough to have had shop-class exposure. My sons, who attended my same high school spanning 2013-2024, certainly did not. Woods courses survived, but all other remnants of the shop classes afforded to me were long gone.

We’ve Been Talking About the Problem for 30 Years

I was reporting on manufacturing’s troubled outlook 30 years ago — at a time when fewer and fewer respected those "hard industries" for their contributions to our national wealth creation nor manufacturing’s expansive and varied employment rolls. As a manufacturing journalist, and later, as a trustee of the Foundry Educational Foundation (commissioned to provide scholarships to faculty and engineering students at accredited universities), we saw that a full generation of prospective manufacturing talent failed to launch. Hard times had quelled hiring and education administrators at all levels turned up their noses at vocational education. The manufacturing and wrench-turning trades got the shaft, and we all paid the price. As is now well-known, kids contemplate their careers by early high school, if not before, and there was a near-total absence of exposure to the trades in many school districts.

In that frenzy to boast of better standardized test scores (and college acceptance metrics) that support higher home values, we endured a full generation with an almost blatant disregard for roll-up-your-sleeves work in manufacturing and machinery service.

But change is afoot, even in my home state of Wisconsin. When the suburbs surrounding the elite intellectualism of Madison are held up as shining-light examples of embracing shop curriculums, a renaissance is clearly underway. 

Get your hands on Monday’s WSJ’s article; it provides hope for so many industries that need it.

Key Takeaways

Among the rays of hope to share with you from Chen’s article:

• “School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college.”

• In Middleton, Wis. (just outside of the capital-city of Madison), 2,300 students signed up for at least one of the shop courses at Middleton High. “We want kids going to college to feel these courses fit on their transcripts along with AP and honors,” said Quincy Millerjohn, a former English teacher turned welding instructor at the school, which is one of the state’s very best for academic performance. He shows his students how ironworkers, steamfitters and boilermakers can pay from $41-$52 an hour. “Kids can see these aren’t knuckle-dragging jobs,” he said.

• “As white-collar hiring slows, more younger workers are finding blue-collar careers. Last year, the share of workers ages 20-24 in blue-collar jobs was 18%, 2 points higher than in 2019, according to ADP. Enrollment in vocation-focused, 2-year community colleges jumped 14% in fall 2024 vs. a year earlier.”

• At Oregon’s Sutherlin High School, 150 students (or half of the student body) elected to take Josh Gary’s woodworking class. When he took over a single 30-student shop class in 2014, he had to open his own wallet to buy tools on Craigslist, along with whatever funds he could raise from sales of student-made picnic tables. Today, the wood shop features laser cutters and computer-assisted routers, and the school added a $750,000 metal shop last year. Harbor Freight Tools for Schools provided the funds to buy a pickup truck for class use.

• In Bakersfield, Calif., (home to our friends at John Deere dealer group Kern Machinery), the Kern High School District “spent $100 million from a voter-approved bond measure and state grants to build a new vocational center in 2020 and expand its Regional Occupational Center. Roughly 70% of the students who take courses there continue their education after high school, mostly at community college or trade schools.” Natasha Hughes, who recruits for the district programs, adds that a teen can make $20 an hour as a welder’s helper after graduating with technical-education classes. Another year of welding instruction at a community college can boost pay to $60,000 a year.

A Shop Teacher to be Lauded

Here’s my favorite part of the story …

“Staci Sievert taught social studies for 22 years at Seymour Community High School in Seymour, Wis.,” writes Chen. “After the school went through three shop teachers in 4 years, she told the principal she would learn to weld, work with wood and teach the classes herself and became a shop teacher in 2017.”

Sievert made a personal, permanent change to solve a problem and serve a community where 20% of all work is in manufacturing. 

Sievert left her comfort zone to learn a new craft she could teach to others; an "ask" that might be too much for the “set-in-their-ways” teachers dusting off last year’s lesson plans at the start of a semester. But consider if some bright teaching talent COULD leave their comfort zones over a winter or summer break – for even a few weeks’ of “teach the teachers” work alongside real-world workers and in the industries they’re preparing students for. Education would never be the same.

Don’t Waste the Gift

So if we’re truly witnessing a renaissance like the WSJ has reported, it’ll be up to you and me not to squander it. Protecting these programs could be a tall order. 

Chen’s reporting showed that vocational education is more expensive than math or English classes. At Middleton High School, for example, shop teachers spend $20,000 per year on materials, and updating the equipment for manufacturing, woodworking and metalworking costs the district $600,000.

Dollars will be needed, though I’m confident that a DOGE-like examination of your local high school's spending could free up plenty of lost “couch-cushion” money to fund deserving shop curricula.

So if you’re lucky enough to see this renewed interest happening in your area, get involved. That includes donations and funding, of course, but shouldn’t stop there.

Donate tools and materials. Show up at the career fairs and industry nights. Support the educators in ways that show you care and appreciate what they’re doing. Provide students with scholarships that keep them engaged. Endow educator and student-of-the-year scholarship awards in your founder’s name. Hire the educators and their students over winter and summer breaks -- and make it worth their while.

We have a chance to correct a woefully misguided and disrespected problem of the past. Don’t let history repeat itself.

P.S. The trades have personal meaning for me. My grandfather, John Lessiter, was able to electrify the centennial farm in Michigan in the 1930s following his Michigan State Ag College education (now Michigan State University). Meanwhile, my other grandfather, Jack Fuzak, a first-generation born American, landed a teaching/coaching job in Washington state in 1939 thanks to his shop educator’s degree from the University of Illinois. He parlayed that degree into a PhD and professorial post to eventually become Dean of Students at Michigan State Univ., Associate Dean of Education and later NCAA President. As troubled as he’d be today about what happened to his treasured views of the student-athlete amidst today's NIL deals and transfer portals, I envision him smiling over a new renaissance in vocational education.