Schools destroyed shop class. In the 1970s, shop was taught in most American high schools — wood, metal, auto, ceramics. Then No Child Left Behind tied funding to test scores, and there's never been a standardized test for shop class. Budget committees cut the expensive rooms first. Liability officers saw table saws and said no. Guidance counselors stopped mentioning trades unless a kid was already failing. Seattle went from seventeen shop programs to four. Phoenix closed every one. The mid-1980s had 48,000 shop teachers in American schools — most of them are retired or dead now, and nobody replaced them.

The result is two generations of Americans who have never held a real tool. They can't fix a wobbly chair, change a bike tire, or look at something broken and figure out how it works. The pipeline from "kid who's good with their hands" to "adult who builds things" was severed at the root. Some states are rebranding what's left as Career Technical Education, but the infrastructure is gone — the teachers, the equipment, the buildings. You can't rebuild fifty years of shop class with a policy memo.

And now it's happening again with AI. The most powerful tool in a generation landed in everyone's pocket and nobody taught them how to use it. Schools aren't teaching AI literacy. Employers aren't training for it. Community colleges don't offer it. The people who need it most — small business owners, tradespeople, first-time inventors — are the last ones to get access, because the tech industry built AI for developers and charged everyone else admission. We watched an entire country lose the ability to work with their hands because nobody prioritized teaching it. We're watching the same thing happen right now with the tool that could give those hands a brain.