What happened to shop class?

I've had students ask me that recently. It's not a question that I think I can answer easily, and not at all without a little history. What most of us refer to as shop classes, I would call Industrial Arts classes. Industrial Arts included courses like woodworking, metalworking, drafting, electricity/electronics, graphic arts, and power mechanics. When those courses were developed, they represented the industrial base of our nation. But as our world evolved into the "information age" we began developing courses based more on technology and less on industry. The Industrial Arts profession now primarily calls itself Technology Education.

Some of the old classes survived with significant changes. We still offer drafting, but every year more of the work is done on computers and less on the drawing board with pencil and paper. We still offer graphic arts, but the offset presses have been replaced by inkjet and laser printers. Photography has moved from the darkroom to the desktop. Electronics is less about discreet components and more about integrated circuits and microprocessors. Machine shops live on primarily in our Vo-Tech Centers.

The "shop" classes like woodworking, metalworking, and power mechanics have nearly disappeared from high schools while new courses in engineering principals have proliferated. On top of those changes in philosophy, economic pressures have forced changes in the schools. Shop classes need expensive equipment and teachers with the expertise to maintain the equipment and teach their use have almost always been in short supply.

There are other factors, of course, that I won't address here. Shop class as we knew it is probably gone forever.