Well, a couple of other teachers have posted up here, so I guess I might as well wade in. I'm in Ohio. We have a vocational school system here for those kids who, for one reason or another, intend to go into some trade or career not requiring college.
For the most part people here listen to the statistics that support the idea that the more education you have the greater your income will be as an adult. Therefore, the big push is to get the kids ready for some kind of continuing education after high school, be it a trade school, 2 year associate degree, or a 4 year college education followed by grad school. The state mandated testing program pretty much follows this idea, and schools have their "report cards" published to show parents how well the schools are educating their kids. There is a great deal of pressure from the state to continually increase performance on the standardized tests.
There is also pressure to get the test scores up since the voters here can pretty much control the finances of the district through non-support of bond issues and levys for the schools. As a result, our curriculum is more or less driven by the state mandated standardized testing program, which has little or no technical, hands-on sections.
The kids who do like to get their hands dirty and make things tend to learn it at home if they're lucky, or in our wood tech, electricity, Ag classes, or go to the career center. We have them do some hands on build it and make it work things in science classes, but it's not working on real hardware.
I don't think the blame can fairly be placed on the schools, at least not in this area. We have seen a lot of manufacturing jobs leave with predictable economic consequences while white collar jobs have stayed and done well -- at least until Rubbermaid was bought out. The blue collar workers are hurting a lot more than the white collar set with the degrees. Parents want their kids to be in the more secure income segment, so push for college education. The state pushes theoretical, bookish kinds of knowledge through the mandated tests. You simply can't graduate without passing the tests.
We in the schools are forced to concentrate our efforts on making sure the lowest performing kids pass the test, with the result that we don't have time to work with or worry about those who have passed them and are hungry for more options in their high school education. We are being forced to educate everyone to the same low level of mediocrity, much to our disgust and dismay. It's not a question of what we want to do or where we want to take the kids eager to learn, but rather how do we motivate, indoctrinate, or intimidate those who resist learning into getting a passing score on the tests. Of the students in our school who have not passed the tests, it is usually by two or three points out of 400. This is complicated by the fact that the number of points needed to pass each section is continually adjusted by the state based on the scores of the students who took any particular version of the test that year. There is a state decided and changing rate of failure to which we are not privy and which is not actually known until the tests are scored, but no matter how well everyone does, a certain percentage will fail. Teachers, especially new ones, feel a great deal of pressure to get their kids to pass the test lest they lose their jobs. Simultaneously, the teachers are required to continually go to grad school, develop, maintain, and keep on file an "Individual Professional Development Plan", and take periodic rigorous tests to maintain their license. This while spending their days working with kids who come from wildly disparate home situations and bring any number of out of school problems into school with them and being required to perform an increasing number of tasks formerly done in the home like teaching the elementary kids how to blow their nose. All this for a starting salary in our district of less than $30k after at least 4 years of college and the attendant lack of income and increase in personal indebtedness.
I know this getting really long, so let me finish up by saying that I am fairly handy in an all around sort of way. I can pound nails, cut and hang boards, drywall, shingles, run wiring and plumbing (threaded, soldered, plastic), do a fair share of wrenching on motorized things and pretty much fix anything mechanical that breaks, including fabricating a part now and then. I did not learn any of this via a formal education, but learned a lot from my father, a carpenter by trade and ships carpenter in WWII. While going to college, I worked in factories in the summer, picking up stuff from the guys there, too, and messed with my bicycle, wagons, push car, and so on as a kid. In short, my mechanical abilities came from sources other than school. We often expect todays schools to do too many things formerly done in the home and the trend is increasing. How long will it be before someone is decrying the lack of hunting/fishing skills in todays kids and blaming the schools for that, too? Schools were invented for "book-learnin'", not to replace parents. Parents need to decide if their kids should learn to fix what breaks, then show them how it's done. When I taught driver education, I asked the kids how many had driven with their parents -- about half. I asked how many planned to use the family car or one their parents provided. -- about 95%. I asked how many were shown how to change a tire -- none. Where are the parents in all this?
