Yes I did woodwork, metalwork, photography, cooking, sewing, language, music, art, history, geography. I think all of these things are powerful for different reasons.
If stem gives you abstract science, all of the practical arts give you hands on experience of real life chemistry, physics, and the feeling of making something and trying to improve until you can make them well, skills you need for creativity and innovation. Making stuff, making mistakes and learning from them, being able to connect theoretical science to practical work. History, geography, language, are the foundation for the humanities and arts that we need to be able to question borked economics, foreign interactions, law, civil rights, society, how to change patterns. I think we need economic innovation to underpin the practical work. At this point our economics is a funnel extracting value and capacity from the country at a rate of knots. Where do people get the practical experience to think about different kind of economic models, different kinds of governance, management/leadership? Volunteering perhaps? But it would be interesting to be able to step into other kinds of management of our ecological and social commons to learn how to be constructive? reciprocal, innovative? Experiment with currencies and how they are framed, what they mean, where the tensions go, experiment without currencies, what happens with a universal basic income, what happens in an IP free zone. What would it take to have properly free health and university education with enough resources to do the practical subjects which require one on one rather than en masse lockstep approaches. If those things are the underpinning for the innovation we are losing then how do we make an economics that delivers that? Preferably without any other borked ideas like nuclear, dependence on non-sustainable mining, flattening forests, emptying seas. Technology can only help if we get the foundation value structure on a stable sustainable peaceful footing. imho On 24 January 2016 at 11:22, Scott Howard <sc...@doc.net.au> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 3:42 PM, Jim Birch <planet...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I don't get this idea that everyone should be coding an app. It's a > > specialized area with limited opportunities. > > > > My mother still uses the sugar scoop I made in metal-work class at school. > My grand-mother still uses the sugar scoop my father made in metal-work at > school. > > Neither of us took up careers in metal-work, which last I looked is pretty > much a specialized area with limited opportunities. > > Does that mean it was wrong of the schools to run metalwork classes? > > Scott > _______________________________________________ > Link mailing list > Link@mailman.anu.edu.au > http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link > _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
