I was a Junior in high school in Springfield, Oregon and we had classes like these. One was Principles of Technology were we played with wiring houses and oscilloscopes. We also had a robust machine shop with CNC machines. In Principles of tech we had a injection molder. I also took four years of drafting and auto-tech.
So we had the tools in the tenth grade to design a part in autocad in drafting class, take it over to the machine shop and have a CNC machine mill a mold that could then be pushed over to have parts injection molded.
All that is gone now due to cuts in funding.
And for fun we actually had a class to teach people how to be a logger.
Doesn't that piss you off that those types of classes are not around anymore? I'm a bit older, so our machine shop was all manual WW2 surplus lathes and mills. Our well equipped woodshop had a teacher with requisite missing digits.
It's been ~3yrs since I've graduated high school, but my high school (top in the county and an 'A' school in Florida) didn't have any electronics, shop, or computer science classes. I vaguely remember almost taking "Web Development" thinking they would go into PHP or something like that, but apparently they just made small sites on Microsoft Word and played video games the entire class. Such a shame.
So much anger. My sisters boy just turned 21. His dad is a electrician and always stressed that he should do jobs that can't be outsourced. Corey just got a union job for 30 a hour as a carpenter.
So we had the tools in the tenth grade to design a part in autocad in drafting class, take it over to the machine shop and have a CNC machine mill a mold that could then be pushed over to have parts injection molded.
All that is gone now due to cuts in funding.
And for fun we actually had a class to teach people how to be a logger.