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Editor’s Notebook Trading in a computer for a table saw

I never realized a wooden cutting board could have lasted so long.

I was in my mother’s kitchen the other day, and sure enough, there was the cutting board I made for her some quarter-century ago in my seventh-grade wood shop class.

I doubt it lasted all these years because it’s a work of art. It is quite possibly the most lopsided cutting board ever created in a wood shop class. Functional, yes, but there’s probably a bit of parental sentiment involved in its longevity.

It also got me to thinking: My son is in eighth grade, and there is no lopsided cutting board in our kitchen. No ceramic ash trays or shoe-shine boxes either.

After three years in middle school, he hasn’t set foot near a wood shop class. What’s worse, as this revelation hit me, I also realized my two older kids never went near an industrial arts classroom either.

Just call me clueless.

But technology classes, they attended. There were daily visits to computer labs. High-tech learning has been as much a part of their education as dodge ball.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not downplaying the significance of technology classes and the emphasis on its instruction. But think about this for a moment: Computers are as firmly embedded in our educational culture as art and music, yet there isn’t a lathe in sight.

Now, I’m not some technophobe locked in a 1970s time warp. Like a lot of households these days, my kids spend more time at home looking on the Internet for background on ancient Egypt than they do thumbing through encyclopedias and old magazines. I realize it’s a lot faster tracking down the size and weight of a killer whale on the Internet than in an old copy of National Geographic.

I can’t help but feel that in this rush to create a nation of tekkies, we are leaving behind some of the basics. Kids still need to know the difference between a screwdriver and a wrench.

Someone needs to know how to fix a leaky faucet. As inept as I was in shop class, at least I could shape a plastic spatula.

My youngest daughter last year did a birdhouse project in school. The project wasn’t building the birdhouse; that was done by the school custodians. Their assignment was to record what bird actually took up residence in the birdhouse.

It was a pleasant assignment to be sure, and she got a lot out of it. A little science, a little math, a little fresh air while recording data, and a sparrow found himself a nice little place to live.

I bet the project would have meant more if she’d have helped build the birdhouse. Merely hanging it in a tree didn’t make it a hands-on experience.

Maybe all this is rooted in growing up in a union household. My dad was a member of the plumber’s union for more than 40 years, and my grandfather drove a truck for Standard Oil.

Maybe it’s part of the guilt I still carry from choosing a different career path. Thanks to the policies of AFL-CIO union boss George Meany , a plumber himself , I had a construction job waiting for me when I grew up. Fortunately for building owners everywhere, since I would have caused more leaks than I ever would have fixed, I chose journalism over plumbing.

That’s a concept: Your child has a job waiting for him in your profession, no strings attached. Now there’s a perk to retain employees.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked at this de-emphasis on the trades in our schools. When school districts were faced with massive budget cuts in the early ’90s, the courses that came under the most scrutiny were art, music and industrial arts.

Perhaps as California renews its commitment to education, industrial arts can find its way back into the middle school curriculum. Every parent deserves to have a lopsided cutting board in their kitchen.

Bell is the Business Journal’s managing editor.

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