Schools were forced to stop teaching anything "arts", effectively, by NCLB (which is basically designed to destroy public schooling and give that to private industry).
Many schools would love to get more arts back in their curriculum, but their funding goes away if they don't focus on those damn tests to the exclusion of all else.
You mean, NCLB revealed how most schools were failing to teach the most basic things needed for success in the real world, which they somehow were able to convey to the "carpenter-track" students just decades ago?
Seriously, I hear a lot of kvetching about schools burdened by having to "teach to the test". I never very little about which specific parts of the test are unfair or about things students shouldn't be expected to know.
Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom? Test preparation takes a huge amount of the bandwidth. Student assignment to classes is apportioned so there is a good "balance" to testing averages.
To dismiss NCLB as anything but an attempt to sabotage the entire public school system is nieve.
>Do you know any teachers or have you spent time recently in a classroom?
Actually, yes. I volunteered weekly in a 4th grade class at a public school for five years. But even if I didn't, and even if I were just now finding out the managementspeak::bandwidth allocated to passing the tests, it wouldn't matter. The fact that it's so hard to get the students to pass simply means the teaching is inefficient and using ineffective methods to teach students the most important, core skills that they need in the real world.
Again, don't tell me the tests take up a lot of resources. Tell me why the tests are unjustifiably hard and why it's acceptable to graduate kids that aren't passing them. Show me, say, a test problem that you don't think an 8th grader or whatnot should be unable to answer and yet be tossed on to high school.
It exists in multiple namespaces. In the managementspeak namespace it is used a clumsy metaphor for resources, the sense in which the OP was using it. To indicate equivalent usage, I indicated equivalent namespacing.
What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?
I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy, had a large amount of tools, and my mother always had him working on a project around the house. Building a deck, remodeling the kitchen, that kind of stuff. I hated being dragged away from friends and video games to help him out with random stuff but I learned quite a bit.
I also had the fortune of learning from my birth father on how NOT to do certain things. He'd always take shortcuts that ended up hurting the end result, which to this day I point out as we work on things.
Too late to edit my previous post, but I'd like to add:
When speaking in the general case, I think it's worth thinking about using gender-neutral language. The attitudes in the article that home improvement and all things handy are "manly" things are worth challenging, and using gender-neutral language is a simple step you can take.
The sentence "What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?" tacitly reinforces the idea that handiness is a man's skill because it is in line with that norm. Phrasing it in gender neutral language makes it clash against the norm, and that clash encourages the reader to pause for a moment, consider the norm, and possibly conclude that there's no inherent reason that a mother or grandmother couldn't be the handy parent. Or that both parents could be handy.
Why does this matter apart from political correctness (which I find obnoxious when it's for its own sake)? Getting over the idea that cooking is a woman's role or that repairing things is a man's role encourages people to pass on knowledge in ways that doesn't reinforce these traditional gender roles.
If a person lives their life without ever having these challenged, and then passes knowledge on to his or her children in a way that reflects the roles, the cycle continues for another generation. Then we have another group of boys who can't cook or sew and another group of girls who can't hang a picture or replace the fill valve in their toilet. If you think those are worthwhile skills for all people to have, please think of how your choice of nouns and pronouns reinforces or challenges the attitudes that lead to people deciding what to teach their children.
In case it matters to anybody, I'm a guy. I can cook, but my sewing skills are self-taught because (in my specific case) my mother didn't teach me. And obviously I didn't pick up on the gendered language before the edit window ran out. It isn't my intention to make you feel called out; rather, writing this was in part an exercise in figuring out for myself why it matters so that I might be more aware of my language in the future.
What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?
I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy...
Whether you meant to or not, you've answered your own question. Suppose you lived in the alternate universe where you didn't have a stepfather and learned everything from your birth father. Who would you have learned the skills from then? The problem with relying on passing handiness down from generation to generation is that once it fails to propagate for a generation, it's very hard to get back.
It's hard to find a teacher for adults for handy skills, and a lot of being handy comes from having long term exposure to handiness anyway. Taking a weekend class (if one exists) or reading a book from the library on how to hang cabinets (for example) isn't going to cover all of the possible gotchas that could come up. Some of those gotchas are probably best solved by people with a lot of experience hanging cabinets, but there are probably others that you could probably solve if you've lived a generally handy life.
If this sounds like institutional knowledge, that's probably a fair comparison. It's just that the family is a very small institution that doesn't necessarily have a lot of redundancy in who has the institutional knowledge. Once you lose it, it's pretty much lost, and that's the reason to have a shop class in school. It provides a mechanism to add that knowledge to families that don't have it from a (hopefully) experienced person who has enough time in contact with his or her students to impart more knowledge directly and pass on general handiness as a mindset rather that a specific skill.
What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?
My dad worked nights, so I learned what kind of noise was or was not going to wake up my dad. My grandparents were about 23hrs away by car. So not everyone is that lucky.
