By the time you graduate high school, will you have had any classes designed to give you the hands-on experience that develops skills like being able to build something out of wood or cook a meal?
If your answer is yes, have these classes been valuable to you? If your answer is no, do you wish that you had taken such classes, or had the opportunity to? Why or why not?
We’ve reached that lull in the school year when the excitement of Back to School has worn off and the reality of spending long stretches staring into the laptop and Smart Board has set in. Sitting still, glued to screens, for hours.
Pandemic-era remote learning is well over, but for middle and high school students, school can still seem like an endless Zoom in the dullest sense of the word. Many schools have schedules loaded with class work, and with early starts and less frequent physical education classes, and have curtailed lunch and recess — seemingly in an effort to improve America’s woeful standing in student performance.
The kind of classes that used to cut into desk time have largely been squeezed out of the schedule. No more woodworking or shop, automotive arts, typing or home economics — classes that taught skills better learned through active doing rather than passive learning.
Instead, after decades of decline, Career Technical Education, as it’s now known, has focused on “upgrading” itself academically. C.T.E. is now likely to consist of digital design, 3-D printing, communications and computer science; in New York State, for example, what was once known as “industrial arts” has evolved into “technology education.” And forget altogether about home economics; student enrollment in the full category of Family and Consumer Sciences courses declined by nearly 40 percent between 2003 and 2012.
But there’s an argument for bringing back home ec and shop, not only for students who may be better served by opting out of college, but also for those students bent on white-collar life. These are the kinds of “adulting” skills many kids no longer learn at home, whether it’s because their working parents are too busy or their extracurriculars too onerous. And the benefits of these classes — using one’s hands, working with real-world materials, collaborating offscreen, taking risks — extend well beyond the classroom.
First, to state the obvious: Kids need a break. The advantages of getting up from one’s desk — standing, walking around, going outside, taking 15-minute breaks — are well known to adults, especially for people who spend much of their days on screens. Yet we don’t extend the same courtesy to schoolchildren. An hour or two each week grappling with wood planks or mixing batter can leaven a long and monotonous school day.
Second, kids learn from physical work just as they do from mental labor, and when the two are interwoven, academic learning can also improve. Moving our bodies and letting our minds wander bring renewed focus. According to popular educational theory, some kids are what educators call tactile learners — they do especially well with a kinesthetic instruction that involves actively doing over passively absorbing. Schools apply these ideas to early childhood education, with its emphasis on sand tables and “hands-on learning.” But older students, particularly boys and kids with attention difficulties, also benefit.
Home ec and shop skills especially make sense in light of current environmental and health challenges. For kids who wear fast fashion but care about climate and overconsumption, it’s worth knowing how to darn a sock or patch a hole. Likewise, in a country with skyrocketing obesity and high consumption of processed foods, learning how to make healthy, inexpensive meals is important.
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
