> Building things has been looked down upon for 40 years because boomers thought it was a step backwards since their parents worked on the assembly line.

No, it was looked down upon because the pay to quality of life ratio was much better in white collar careers. It probably still is for the most part. Wake me up when the same people are deciding between becoming plumbers or electricians rather than lawyers or doctors or engineers.

Well then wake up because most of those parents didn't send their kids to school for those careers.

But that was the goal. If they didn’t make it to the doctor/lawyer/engineer/financier level, then middle management or consultant or whatever other desk job would have to do.

Either way, a Mon to Fri 8 to 5 salaried gig with benefits requiring little travel and no health risks was a comparably better goal to aim for due to the lack of sufficient price premium for the non desk job labor.

"We'll just design things and have people elsewhere do the building" is one of the dumbest ideas. How do you think you learn how to build things without building things? Who's going to build the next big thing? Oy!

A great litmus test to see if an educational administrator is knowledgeable on STEM is to see if they regard woodshop/metalshop/autoshop as purely "vocational".

Bare in mind, vocational still means "not college bound" == "useless" == "doesn't look good in the US news rankings"

Ive talked to superintendents and they just give me a blank stare when I told them that a great way to get kids to understand the cartesian coordinate system is in machine or woodshop, reading a blueprint, schematic etc. Actually doing the work is better than a word problem. They have no respect for it and this is in the best educated state in the US with supposedly the best school system.

Bottom line, if we are going to build things again, it needs to start in the schools.

I'd argue this attitude is sexist. Boys tend to learn best with hands on instruction[0], like woodshop, and as we see girls are outnumbering boys in college and the trend is increasing. Instead of including activities and topics that engage boys, we push boys into special education classes and feed them drugs to punish them for not being more like the girls.

[0]https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/how-boys-learning-styles-di...

Learning the cartesian coordinate system from shopwork may work for some but my experience is the majority of tradespeople, even very skilled ones dislike STEM and academic subjects and see their trade as a body of facts and hands on skills not something systematic from which to learn abstract mathematical principles. The few who can are well equipped to be actual engineers.

Sounds like a crappy change, because when I was in 8th grade in MA they literally had us take a class learning to use a blueprinting desk and the Cartesian coordinate system.