Esther writes:

> Reading all the shop commentary, in my day (graduated HS in 1968) shop
> was for non-college prep boys, college prep boys didn't have space in
> the schedule for more than possibly a year of drafting, and girls were
> no more thought of as shop students than Martians.

And Curt Seeliger writes:

> Continuing to pick up on the JT and JR thread, I'd argue for the
> utility of shop for those planning on college, at least for the
> sciences. By necessity, research requires a 'do it ourselves'
> approach.

Proficiency in geometry was once argued for, at least in my part of the
world, as being a necessary accomplishment for any young person who
hoped to embark on any course, not simply engineering, the sciences or
the armed services, of tertiary education. The argument went that any
person incapable of exercising his mental powers effectively in the
relatively concrete matters presented by geometrical problems had
Buckley's chance of applying his mind successfully to the necessarily
abstract considerations which would be presented for his absorption at
university. Those were the days, however, when a ready command of
language in its oral and written forms was taken as given.

These days, I think, were I an educationalist, I should take a step in a
slightly different direction to submit that the attainment of a
reasonable standard of competency in shop work, particularly in working
with wood, would winnow the wheat from the chaff in the matter of
determining whether a particular person will ever be fit to follow, with
any reasonable chance of success, an avocation or profession, be it
bricklaying or brain-surgery, which requires some amount of serious
training and learning. There are always valid exceptions to any
particular rule (musicians who have shown vast competency from childhood
comprise a case in point) and it is not argued that the young chap who
can make piston-fit drawers must evolve into a nuclear physicist
although it is not argued that he should not, either.

I suppose that I am, in reality, struggling to find a silver bullet to
destroy in its tracks the sinister dumbing-down of the education system,
certainly present here and, doubtless, from what I read, in the U.S. and
the U.K. as well. Trouble is, what should be feelings of sorrow at the
waste, through miseducation, of able young minds, resolve too readily
and, perhaps, unjustly, into feelings of fury when patent principles of
trickery are employed, almost universally by the possessors of these under-
educated intelligences, to disguise their shortcomings in the abilities
they profess to be the masters of.

The practical result of all this angst is the ever-increasing
proliferation of private schools here as many parents, only too aware of
the seemingly intractable inadequacies of our once-proud public school
system, almost impoverish themselves to pay for an education of their
children at private schools free of the dumbing-down sickness which has
infected the public system. This must inevitably lead to the evolution
of a self-perpetuating underclass of the uneducated, a circumstance
which does not sit well in the remnants of what used to be our
determinedly egalitarian society.

Umpire calls "Over".

Regards from Brisbane,

John Manners

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