Subject: Re: How the mighty can fall
I went to a rather unique public high school (Brooklyn Technical High School) whose original premise was that not all students could afford to go to college, so they offered tracks in electrical, mechanical, aeronautical and chemical engineering as well as architecture and industrial design teaching a variety of courses in each which approximated those taken in college. The school was rather large (6,000 students +/-, ten stories, 12 double-sized elevators) and had modern labs, shops and facilities for each program. The common core, taken by all, included up to four years of assorted technical drawing (along with a number of years, depending on track, of machine shop, foundry, pattern-making and so on). Entry to the school was strictly by performance on a standardized test which was tough enough that the class was largely made up of valedictorians and salutatorians from schools throughout NYC. That also meant that the majority of students took multiple advanced placement (college credit) courses - which generally meant that going to college was a walk in the park for most.

Anyhow, every student not only had a slide rule (the K&E was the obvious luxury car), but also a professional-quality drafting set of compasses, triangles, mechanical changeable lead pencils, India ink pens (not to mention a micrometer, drill bits, lathe tools, a 6-inch steel scale) and so on.

So, fast forward to when my firm was in the business of selling CAD (computer aided design) systems during the late 1980's. Keeping a rather long story short, we ended up setting up the first classroom dedicated to teaching CAD in the NYC school system at my alma mater. I strongly advised that they teach a year of hand drafting before migrating the students to the computers in order to give them the basics of the craft. Well, that advice lasted about six months and, from then on, students started on the CAD systems (we had equipped a number of addition rooms by then) and all the tools required for hand drawing became land fill. There was a local store (between the nearest subway station and the school) which had supplied these tools since the 1940's. After this (and a couple of other changes to the curriculum) the store closed its doors for ever.

Changing hats to my construction-oriented divisions, in many cases we had to build what others drew. CAD systems allowed anyone with a minimum of training to turn out beautifully crafted drawings very quickly. Unfortunately, that didn't mean the designs were necessarily very good and the ability of CAD systems to mirror and duplicate parts of drawings meant design flaws could more easily be multiplied.

It was an interesting transition to watch, but unfortunately, during the 1990's the school had a principle who "didn't get it" and who literally scrapped the machine shops and so on - to the extent that those who came after him couldn't recreate the infrastructure and had to create new curriculum (for my piece of that, I donated funds to the school to build a genetic research and gene-slicing lab.

That first CAD lab was my first significant sale to the NYC school system - which, with its 1853 school buildings, in aggregate, became our largest customer for goods and services including design/install of school-wide networks, surveillance system, auditorium audio/visual systems as well as a vast array of hardware items.

It's funny - what goes around, comes around.

Jeff