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Comment by grabcocque | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it has a different name, but surely every nation in the world has similar classes with similar content?

In the UK the GCSE Design and Technology syllabus covers all of the bases mentioned in the article as a standard part of the National Curriculum for every child.

http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/design-and-technology/gcse/de...

The article is written as if there’s something special about it unique to Scandinavia, beyond its name.

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The US does not have anything like this in its mandatory public school curriculum that I know of. My experience in a good public system was that if you had time in your schedule to take a shop class (wood and metal working) it was because you weren't taking a foreign language or music class. Same problem with art -- there was no room built in to accommodate those classes in a typical student's schedule.

Hmmm. Odd. I took all the above. Maybe our classes were shorter (~50min each)? Or we had longer days (7.30am to 3.30pm and then the extracurriculars started)?

I and the other students from the AP classes at my school effectively had no electives -- we all took math, science, English, history, a foreign language, and at least one music class every semester of every year throughout middle and high school. With 6 classes a day and extra curricular sports, robotics and music there was no way to take a shop or home-ec class, and that's after getting arts and gym waived.

> and at least one music class every semester of every year throughout middle and high school

Seriously? I'm all for music in schools, did a fair bit myself, and went to a public school with a strong program... but 14+ semesters of required music seems like overkill for most people.

I went to my city's "public school you need to test into" (so it was very big on academics) and it still had a shop class.

We had a shop class. What we didn't have was time to take it without skipping out on another core class. This should be required curriculum -- that was the point I took home from the article.

States and school districts still have a fair amount of control over curricula, so "the US" does mandate hands-on classes in some places. My high school had a mandatory shop class (student's choice of woods or metals). Middle school had mandatory home ec for all genders.

We didn't skip out on another class, it was just part of the curriculum. This was 8th grade, and I transferred out after that year, so I don't know what they did in High School.

I went to a regular public school and we had a mandatory program called 'Life Skills' that served roughly this purpose in 8th grade. It wasn't a full class though. As I recall it was 2 hours each Friday afternoon for a semester and everyone rotated through a few sub-classes: cooking, wood shop, sewing, and mechanical drawing.

Man, looking back I kinda wish I'd taken DT over some other subject as one of my GCSEs. Probably music.

Not at similar age with similar intent, no.

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