Anyone who went to high school before the early 2000s likely heard the noise of saws & drills from a shop room. Or perhaps they took part in it themselves. Either way, shop class was a normal part of the school day, but over the years, those courses changed into something different…or disappeared entirely.
Why did this happen? And what was shop class replaced with? Here’s what happened.
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Key takeaways
You’ll learn about:
- The roots of shop class & what early courses covered
- The federal acts that funded hands-on programs
- How policy changes in the 1980s–2000s changed schedules
- Where “shop” went next
Where shop class came from
The beginning of shop class didn’t come from a high school at all. Nope, it was thanks to MIT’s president, John Runkle, who started a “School of Practical Mechanism” back in 1876. He got the idea after seeing a Russian system that mixed book learning with actual tool use.
Calvin Woodward launched the Manual Training School at Washington University around the same time in St. Louis. His students did wood & metal work, alongside drawing, while also doing regular classes.
There was also a similar idea in Boston. The North Bennet Street School taught a Swedish system called “Sloyd,” which focused on making useful items, step by step. This way, students could see their progress while learning woodworking skills.
What schools actually taught
For most of the 20th century, shop class didn’t change a lot. Students worked their way through woodworking, metalworking & drafting, then later learned about auto mechanics, too.
It was a good idea. The whole point was to make sure that students came out of high school knowing how to use tools safely & fix or build basic stuff.
Later, the government also became involved, as the Smith–Hughes Act of 1917 sent federal money to states specifically for agriculture, trades & industry, and home economics. This gave schools across the country the resources to set up labs. They could also pay teachers to run them.
However, by the 1980s, shop class faced some competition. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk encouraged states to focus more on required credits in math, science, English, & social studies. It left less space for electives.
Things changed even more as time went on. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act put annual tests in reading & math on the calendar. This led to many schools investing more in tested subjects and away from everything else. That included electives like shop.
What the data says about course-taking
The national numbers show this decline, too:
- In 1990, graduates averaged about 4.2 credits in career & tech classes.
- By 2009, that slipped to 3.6.
- By 2013, nearly 8 out of 10 grads still had at least one CTE credit. However, there were more kids in health sciences & fewer in traditional trades.
As a result, shop class didn’t exactly vanish overnight. But it was definitely trimmed back and, in some ways, became mixed into other categories.
The issues with tracking
For a while, “vocational” became part of tracking, which is the system that pushed some kids toward college prep & others toward trades. Research in the late 20th century found that lower-income & minority students often ended up in the vocational track more often. Was this really such a fair system?
Why shop class failed
One big issue with shop class was the teachers. The majority of university programs that used to prepare industrial arts instructors began closing or shrinking. As a result, fewer graduates went into teaching shop class, so even the schools that wanted to keep a shop program had trouble staffing it.
Running a shop class isn’t cheap. You need working saws & lathes, along with protective gear & ventilation systems. Everything needs to be kept up to code. However, when safety standards became stricter, it was good news for students, but expensive for districts.
In some cases, career & technical programs became more expensive per student than typical classrooms.
There’s also the bigger picture of the labor market. In 1979, manufacturing jobs peaked at around 19.6 million, and then after that, the number began decreasing. Sure, there were a few rebounds. But there were fewer traditional shop-related jobs around.
As such, schools had less outside pressure to keep big shop programs going.
What replaced the old “shops”
So what happened to shop class? Well, by the late 20th century, a lot of “industrial arts” programs were renamed or reshaped into “technology education.”
Federal laws like Perkins IV (2006) & Perkins V (2018) also encouraged schools to design programs of study that connected high school classes directly to college majors or industries. That meant that, instead of one woodworking class, you’d see a multi-year pathway in engineering or IT. It might even be one that focused on health sciences.
Either way, the shop room has changed. It first became industrial arts, then technology education & now is modern CTE. The table saws and car engines might not be as common. But the idea of learning by doing? That never really left.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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