Shop Class 2.0: Rethinking High School to Accelerate Electrification

It&#x27;s funny, in high school due to social perceptions I didn&#x27;t align myself with the &quot;shop kids&quot;, and took exclusively computer-based electives.<p>It&#x27;s led me to a lucrative career in programming, but now all my hobbiest time is actually spent learning the same hands-on skills I would have gotten in shop class, I love doing automotive repairs, I even learned how to fix my own AC system, and want to learn to weld.<p>Electrical is the tricky one because it&#x27;s the one with the most consequences for mistakes. I wish there was a &quot;electrician lite&quot; night school or something.

I work in renewable energy, and have started to get my hands on electrical work here and there—this is a <i>serious</i> space of opportunity for people starting their careers.<p>Not every job needs to be (nor can be) a desk job, and with the advent of AI tools, you&#x27;ll still have many hands-one roles in the field. Much of the difficulty of getting solar and home battery storage (like Powerwall) is because there is such a shortage of electricians.

At my high school taking trade classes would take up half your day, as you would have to take a bus to the regional facility that had all the trade classes. It was scheduled almost perfectly to overlap with the classes you would need if you wanted to get into college for a STEM degree.<p>We had shop classrooms on site all kitted out to teach kids welding, carpentry, and fabrication skills, and even had the old shop teacher still on staff. Admin just didn&#x27;t want to teach it anymore, and all that equipment sat gathering dust. It would have been sick to offer a beginner&#x27;s welding class as a study hall alternative.

I think this is an amazing idea. My high school was also home to a regional vocational trade center, meaning we had amazing facilities for any kind of trade, including a small restaurant. Students in the program actually built a complete house one year, and many of my friends took full advantage to jump directly into trade careers upon graduation.<p>As a student on the honors track, all of this was completely inaccessible to me due to academic requirements. For example, to take Calculus as a senior, I had to have already complete 4 years of math classes (meaning doubling up one year). Calculus itself was a &quot;lab&quot; class, meaning it met 3 days a week for an hour, and 2 days a week for 2.5 hours. That left zero time for anything not &quot;academic&quot;.<p>As an adult, I use algebra and geometry frequently, and have to resort to Youtube to learn the plumbing, carpentry, and light electrical work I use almost every weekend to maintain my home. It would have been nice to have learned this at a younger age, so that I could do things efficiently and at a higher quality instead of fumbling around for hours.

Just read the recent HN reponses to &quot;The skilled trades haven&#x27;t caught as a career choice [...]&quot; [1]. Until an article addresses that, it&#x27;s just wishful thinking.<p>This article does address the push for all kids to college. Read comments at [2] as well.<p>Very useful comments about the barriers to entry: [3].<p>My own biggest concerns would be:<p>1. Popular anti-union perception: bad for recruitment, and bad once you&#x27;re in.<p>2. Need to be in good financial shape by 40 so you don&#x27;<p>I recently read a long thread explaining how hard it is to apprentice to an electrician, and how only the people at the top who own their own companies are really making good money. Too much work too dig it out.t ruin your body.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34262345">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34262345</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34263317">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34263317</a> [3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34273605">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34273605</a>

We&#x27;ll be short 1M electricians by 2020. Bringing vocational training back into high schools will help us ditch fossil fuels, bridge the skilled workforce gap, and empower more young people to succeed.

It&#x27;s such an obvious problem. It&#x27;s hard enough to get an electrician to come check your place for a basic job -- how do we expect to even simply build enough charging stations so that the average consumer doesn&#x27;t need to <i>think</i> about taking a 500mi trip?<p>I wonder if the average person thinks that something like a Tesla charging station is something that&#x27;s manufactured somewhere far away from them and just plugged in to a the nearest power line. &quot;We have electricity everywhere so it&#x27;s just a matter of time&quot; mentality.<p>We drove kids to college under the guise of &quot;you&#x27;ll be fucked if you don&#x27;t&quot; while simultaneously sounding the alarm on climate change but didn&#x27;t think to try and connect the two problems to anticipate the solution 30 years ago?

New York State has this program called BOCES, which are cooperative job training high schools that students can optionally go to part time in their Junior &#x2F; Senior year of high school. So you can go and learn welding, mechanics, electrical, construction, it networking, cooking, etc. The schools usually are targeting students who aren&#x27;t college bound. But it is a great program which I know a lot of people who were able to get solid careers going right out of high school.

Good idea - but practically, we&#x27;d have to raise the minimum wage to make these jobs attractive to young people, and a national infrastructure program would also be needed to provide the financing. Otherwise we&#x27;ll just continue to slide towards a system of wealthy enclaves surrounded by miles of slums, and slum dwellers can&#x27;t afford to pay for construction upgrades. Granted, wealthy enclave dwellers will be providing some jobs, but they&#x27;ll probably be hiring contractors whose workforce consists of cheap immigrant labor, not recent graduates of American high schools.<p>There are historical examples where electrification was accelerated, e.g. FDR New Deal programs like Rural Electrification and the WPA, but that would entail a complete restructuring of federal government priorities, increased taxes on the wealthy, redirection of military-industrial budgets to domestic infrastructure, etc. Seems unlikely in the current political climate, where oligarchs run both parties like sock puppets.

I took shop class in high school and was a welder for 9 years after I graduated. I think we can absolutely shorten the entry into the trades. I would have loved to work an entry level welding job in the summers once I turned 14. It would have been a whole lot better than all the dangerous shit I did working for farmers. There is so much untapped interest in the trades among teenagers.<p>A neighbor kid I grew up with, struggled with acting out in school. His home life was massively disfunctional. However, he loved to tinker and play with all things mechanical. I think an apprenticeship in high school would have been life changing for kids like him.

Why bother? Western countries doubled down on climate change as their immigration policy. There won&#x27;t be a labor shortage in the future. The only shortage will be the number of guardsmen patrolling the border and the problem with those is that they need to be loyal and swiftly execute &quot;permanent&quot; orders or else their backlog will grow like that of a college student who constantly has to correct his homework and resubmit it.