Your tale of adding a new machine to your shop reminded me of this excellent book:
"Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work"
By Matthew B. Crawford
ISBN: 978-0143117469
The basic premise is that taking shop class out of schools was and is a bad idea giving us generations of young people who for the most part
don't know how things work or how to work with their hands - how to make things or how to fix things.
"The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work:
he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality"
Here are some excerpts from the opening pages:
"Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond,
Virginia. Noel's bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns
out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop
class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become "knowledge workers.""A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive
and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called
forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary
people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an
expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part."
Read more here: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/CrawfordShopClass.php
So true, all of the really practical things have been taken out of schools. No shop, no home ec. And some sort of just basic finance class would be good, although I didn’t have that in school either.
Not only are schools not teaching the required subjects they are taking away the Practical ones as well. There’s just keeps our kids more and more dependent and incapable of doing anything for themselves. And certainly not thinking, they don’t want them thinking either.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just bought that book on Amazon for our Kindles.
This has been a major concern I have had for years. Along with changing from education to indoctrination, the “Public Education System” is discouraging anything related to manual skills, whether it be for boys in the wood, metal or auto shop or girls in the home.
It is all part of the long-term socialist plan to destroy our society and our country.