During the years I taught debating and other forensic skills, I found that students (or maybe most are just pupils) can think if we will allow them to do so. We stifle them with a lot of rot. Unfortunately, I disagree that things were better 40 years ago. At my point of graduation 56 years ago we were taught a lot of garbage. Much of what we learnt in history was untrue. I think the book "Lies My Teachers Taught Me" has hit much of the nail on the head.

A German Ph.D. I once met told me that the difference between an American college graduate and a European college graduate was that the American thought he had obtained an education while the European felt he had obtained the tools with which to get an education. I love it.

-- J. Philip Schediwy, Apple Valley, Calif.

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Your column on today's school problems hit at the heart of the problems. I am a retired Industrial Arts teacher, having retired after 34 successful years and about 4000 students. I now have an Internet business selling unfinished skateboards to the nation's school shops for the kids to finish.

The whole industrial arts program is almost dead. Many teachers left are just counting their days. I know because I'm in contact with hundreds of them. Here are the main problems:

1. Society thinks all kids need college, and blue collar jobs are a disgrace, even though many earn very good incomes.

2. The shops became a dumping ground for students who didn't fit in the regular academic program. In shop they became behavioral problems, and the shops became impossible to run effectively. The shops' students size rose to as many as 35, making an impossible teaching environment. The school counselors and administrators are to blame for this.

3. If you follow the money trail, you'll see that today's shops have become "Tech Ed" programs, sold to state legislators and state ed. departments by the computer and software industries. The shop equipment was sold to convert them to tech ed., where students sit in modules and work off a computer, but nothing of value is made, and there is no hands-on work. We are now at the stage where the original tech equipment is outdated, the kids have much better computers are home, and the poor school is looking for another $80,000-plus to upgrade the equipment.

4. The good old U.S. government also entered the program and undercut the traditional industrial arts idea. They came up with R.O.P. This was designed to train anyone who wanted it, or didn't want it to get skills training at a local facility. Most facilities were the school shops. The school administrators went for the idea because the R.O.P. money freed up the previous industrial arts money for other uses.

Now with the U.S. in a school's pocket, the shop teacher had to take anyone into the program who was sent to it. That meant "walk on" students of any age or background to come to a high school, walk on to the program, leave when they wanted and often leaving unfinished projects and work. The walk ons didn't fit into the high school environment, and the school kids stopped taking the classes. Most of those teachers bailed out as soon as possible.

I also have a service business where I recycle antifreeze for 30 of our local car repair facilities. Many of these are former students, and I talk to them often. This country is running out of repair technicians of all types because there is such a lack of training. Many of these people are earning good wages, much higher than many college graduates.

One of the shop owners told me that when his son was in high school he went to a meeting of high school parents and school counselors about college and high school training. After listening to the whole presentation, he raised his hand and asked why there was no training for his son who wanted to step into the family auto repair facility. The counselor said there was enough money in that field, and their attitude was that every student must go to college!

-- Bob Merriam, Santa Cruz, Calif.

When I was earning my doctoral degree in adult education in the '90s, I ventured the opinion that we were shoving far too many people into college classrooms and not nearly enough into the noble occupations associated with the crafts and trades. This suggestion was met with horror by my professor. Her view was not unlike that of so many in the higher-educational establishment -- that is, no high school graduate (or GED student) should be denied an opportunity to have his or her mind further numbed by the purveyors of PC in college classrooms.

This kind of self-serving snobbery, which is aimed at throwing as many bodies as possible at as many college teachers as possible, is entrenched in the higher education establishment, which has no value for the crafts or trades. Indeed, I wonder whether such work isn't a threat to the intellectual crowd, which lives mostly in its head and thinks a lot about "valuing diversity," except when it comes to valuing different kinds of jobs -- or political views. Thank you for pointing this out and taking on the mushy-minded, duplicitous educationists once again.

-- K. Beauchemi

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