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Bring Back Shop Class!!!

30 07 12 - 07:18 Because I passionately care about this hobby & I have been bemoaning the demise of an actual education system in the US, I am swiping part of a Hemmings.com post:
Hemmings blog

From Hemmings' Daniel Strohl:
The graying of the collector-car hobby becomes an increasing concern with each passing day, particularly as the question of what to do about it remains largely unanswered. Yet a new lecture series, Bring Back Shop Class, aims to tackle that question by inviting New York Times bestseller Matthew Crawford to Hershey this year.

Initiated earlier this year by Collectors Foundation, a non-profit committed to supporting the collector-car and boat hobbies, Bring Back Shop Class aims to do exactly that, to "support and inspire the continuation and revival of shop classes throughout our education system for future generations." Michael Schneider, president of MacPherson College, kicked off the series earlier this year in Scottsdale, and it's only appropriate that Crawford, the author of the 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, continue it.

In his book Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a Ph.D. in political philosophy, argues that the dismantling of shop classes during the 1990s and 2000s and the push for high-school students to go on to college and then into the knowledge economy has actually in many ways made Americans less self-reliant and more anxious about their prospects in the world. As he wrote in The Case for Working with Your Hands, his essay adapted from the book for the New York Times:

The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass... Somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

One shop teacher suggested to me that in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.

Crawford's Hershey presentation, titled " The Case for Actually Being Able to Do Stuff ", will take place at 2 p.m. Friday, October 12, at the AACA tent on Hockersville Road next to the show field. Admission is free. For more information on the Bring Back Shop Class series, visit CollectorsFoundation.org.

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