In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Trump embraced an education policy recently advanced by The Star News Educational Foundation: Shop class for everyone!
President Trump’s specific proposal was that every high school in the country should offer technical and vocational education.
“My budget also contains an exciting vision for our Nation’s high schools,” Trump said. “Tonight, I ask the Congress to support our students and back my plan to offer vocational and technical education in every single high school in America.”
“We couldn’t agree more with President Trump,” Kent Misegades, author of the new book, Guide to Shop and Engineering: An Introduction to the Industrial Arts, and executive director of The Star News Education Foundation, told The Tennessee Star. ”
“Until the late 70s, nearly every young man in America took one or more years of ‘Shop’ class, also known as ‘Industrial Arts’ or today ‘Career and Technical Education – CTE’. The shop skills and basic engineering knowledge acquired in these lessons enabled generations of Americans to make, fix and grow things. This saved them money, brought them great satisfaction, launched careers and helped establish countless businesses that employ millions today,” Misegades added.
“Our new ‘Shop and Engineering’ curriculum is based on classical lessons from the past, updated with the latest technologies. It has been in use in several independent North Carolina high schools for the past decade, and designed for modest facilities and school budgets, including home schools,” Misegades concluded.
The Star News Education Foundation is a non-profit organization formed by the management team of Star News Digital Media in December 2019.
“The foundation focuses on improving 7 key areas first identified in the Star News Digital Media Statement of Principles on K-12 Education published in October 2019,” according to its website.
Those principles are:
- Direct Instruction is the most effective way to teach the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic to K-5 Students, and it should become the preferred teaching methodology in all elementary schools in America.
- Individual and local sovereignty and accountability should become the required standard for public school governance. School choice must be available to all citizens respecting the right of parents to make the best decisions for their children.
- The objective of every high school in America should be to equip every student with skills that make them capable of economic self-sufficiency by the day they receive their high school diploma.
- Civics and the Constitution should be required learning for everyone.
- Shop Class (learning how to make things, build things and fix things) should be required for everyone, because developing a vocational skill is the starting point of economic self-sufficiency.
- Home Economics (Consumer Sciences) should be required for everyone, because economic self-sufficiency begins with these skills as well.
- Classical Curriculum, which instructs students based on the values and ideas of Western civilization, is the most effective way to develop thinkers and virtuous leaders in grades 6-12, and should be the preferred standard in all secondary schools. Character formation and the respect for human dignity nurtured in students through this curriculum provides the backbone for a civil society.
Among the foundation’s projects are The National Constitution Bee.
[…] of our key changes in K-12 education. Shop class for everyone at the state of the Union address. That was President Trump saying shop class for everyone. He must have read our mission statement for the Star News Education […]
Bad idea. I am very much in favor of providing youth with the opportunity to receive a technical education. However, technical education is much better served at the post high school level. I personally have observed great results at the community college level. Besides the cost to equipped thousands and thousands of high schools is outlandish in thought.
With all respect – nearly all American high schools had a simple shop class for 9th grade boys in the early 1970s, when public school funding was far lower in real dollars than today. If children at this age are not exposed to basic skills, they will likely not be interested in pursuing them in post-secondary schools. Shop does not have to be very expensive, either. Dr. Scott, recently retired president of the large Wake County (Raleigh), Technical Community College once told me that interest in technical degrees at his college began their decline a few years after high school shop and home economics classes were eliminated. Industry, my world, has paid a great price for this, as so few young people have the skills and character needed to make it in manufacturing, or farming for that matter. Mike Rowe has been saying this for years.