By the way, the way that No Child Left Behind impacts the trade worker shortage in the US is because in about 2002 shop classes, home ec classes, auto classes, etc, had their funding diverted into teaching kids how to pass standardized tests so that the schools could continue to pay teachers and keep the library open.

It's hard to figure out that you might be interested in plumbing as a career when you've spent twelve years learning how to pass multiple choice tests and having ceramics and band as the only available electives.

This is one place where I actually WILL do the generational thing and say that Millennials and Gen Z got completely fucked in a way that older generations didn't.

It's actually really fucking hard to repair a cabinet when you've never had a shop class. It's really goddamned difficult to learn everything about car maintenance on your own through youtube videos instead of in a semester of auto shop. It's really goddamned difficult to figure out you want to be a plumber or an electrician or a welder when you are eighteen years old, have been taught to pass tests and cajoled into applying for college, and you've never handled an air compressor or used a socket wrench.

I want the rugged individualist homeschooler tradcaths who have found this post to know that I am also all in on socialism and DIY abortion.

This is not a post about unschooling your children in ancient greek and shitty carpentry so they can read the bible impressively enough to find a partner at a private college and get married by twenty two then poorly repair the cabinets in their two bedroom apartment while selling LuLaRoe and dreaming of wheat fields, this is a post about eradicating location-based taxation for funding public schools so that we can have more shop classes and less competition for federal funding based on performance but more overall federal funding for public education.

College is a scam, shop class isn't. You can literally be artsy on a vehicle with the right paint & learn how to keep it running too. I don't see how y'all don't want to have a badass car with a badass paintjob of your favorite fandom(s) on it.

Fandom Freedom Rides should be a thing anyway!!