I remember even when I was in school (a good time ago now), they were already killing off shop classes and the like. How sad that schools couldn't see what values classes like that have in critical problem solving.
I took a hands on physics class in high school (elective at a magnet school) called power and energy, in which we took apart, cleaned, and put back together an engine as our semester project, as well as learning all the math and physics behind the way in which they operated, how to calculate pretty much everything they did, etc.
It was an enormously valuable class in learning, fairly early on in my proper STEM education, how a system could be made up of many moving parts and subsystems - an obvious boon to my work today in software.
We had so many things there that would be considered unsafe and dangerous these days for US kids here I'd imagine. Same thing with chemistry experiments. Though interestingly there more encouragement here to play contact sports like football which leads to concussions and injuries.
Better brain dead than Red ;)
They are probably still able to legally be offered as courses (states usually don't remove entire course from state standards. The just go unupdated). School boards like to remove these courses because they are expensive (among other reasons) and on paper they look unpopular (hard safety caps mean a 15 person shop class looks unpopular compared to a 45 student overfilled history class).
Schools and school boards are parts of the government most susceptible to public pressure.
As a teacher, I want parents and community members to lobby their local schools. They don't listen to teachers but they buckle to parent complaints[1]. Please use your "complaining" powers for good.
[1]Unfortunately, schools can have a bad habit of viewing all parent contact as "complaints" or "whining."
Of course I found it especially cool because I was shop foreman both years - which meant I got to direct the cleanup at the end of class instead of having to do the cleanup!
The first semester was mechanical drawing, and the second was using the power tools and building whatever we'd designed in the first semester. Whoever scored highest in mechanical drawing would be shop foreman.
It was pretty awesome getting to use drill presses and bandsaws and lathes and all that good stuff as an 11-12 year old.
We did use eye protection, unlike my third grade "special ed for smart and restless kids" class where I told the teacher I wanted to etch a printed circuit board and I needed a tank of nitric acid to do it, and she got it for me! No eye protection back then, I just got to watch the copper dissolve away. (And fortunately, not my eyes.)
Anyway, I think I may have won the shop foreman job because I took great care in erasing cleanly. When you're doing mechanical drawing with pencil and paper and compass and protractor and a French curve and straightedge, a good eraser and that little metal erasing shield are your best friends:
https://www.google.com/search?q=erasing+shield&tbm=isch
That interest in whitespace seems to have carried over into my programming career. I'm a bit saddened by today's popular wisdom that says it really doesn't matter what the whitespace conventions in your code are, as long as you pick some standard and make everyone stick to it now and forever, and if you don't like something about the standard you're just bikeshedding.
I've had the good fortune to mostly work on teams that simply didn't have whitespace standards, so I got to see a variety of styles and learn from them all - which ones helped communicate the structure and meaning of the code, and which ones maybe less so. And also that it really isn't that hard to read code where one person's work has minor variations in spacing from another's.
If I'd been locked into rigid standards all along, I don't know if I would have had the chance to learn any of this.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about sloppy indentation! You gotta get that right. ;-)