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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I mentor at a public high school that has a dozen metal lathes, a half dozen wood lathes. Plasma cutters. CNC everything. A giant planer. My favourite thing is that half of it is super modern and half of it is indestructible WWII surplus, which looks really cool mixed together.

I cannot imagine the concept of lathes being taken out of schools because of accidents. What a self destructive cultural attitude.

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People are good, maybe a little too good, at assessing the risks of acute instances like an injury from some equipment. We seem to be awful at assessing systemic risks like growing up without knowing to make things for yourself, and what that does to a society.

Sometimes it feels like people think: "Yeah what's the point of learning how to make things when you can buy cheap things made in a factory in china by some low skill people. If they can make that stuff so cheap it must not be worth that much"

It only takes one student to lose an arm, face, life and their parents will sue the school into oblivion and start PAPT (parents against power tools) or something "for the kids!"

I'm on your side that I'd rather see the tools at the school. At the same time, I took an auto-shop class in high school and the majority of students in the class were dipshits and were lucky not to get more hurt. The teacher managed to stop them just in time from trying to turn over an engine on a rack that would have crushed them if the teach had been 5 second later.

We actually did have an unprecedented accident a couple years back and as a result some new safety requirements were put in place. But no tools or access to tools were removed.

I wonder if the culture here is different than the U.S.? Dipshit students are removed from these classes before they can get anywhere near tools. It’s definitely a privilege to be in a shop class.

> I wonder if the culture here is different than the U.S.?

There's definitely going to be cultural differences between the US and wherever you're located, but be careful not to generalize too much from one comment you read on the Internet.

I don't want to generalize it but as soon as you said "if the culture here is different than the U.S" I thought "Okay yep that's why."

I don't even know if it counts as culture, but the US inevitably seems to have such a refined sense of litigation and, insurance mindset for lack of a better term?

Anecdotally, schools are indeed a prime example, we had cooking classes in high school that were stopped because of the costs to insure for it.

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