This is part two in a two-part series about shop classes in the Burnaby school district and the history behind conditions one retired local tech ed teacher calls “deplorable.”
‘A vein that runs right through the school system’
When he was 13 years old, John Clarke remembers his woodwork teacher gathering students around a workbench in Burnaby’s old MacPherson Park Junior High.
The man took a hand plane to a piece of pine, and the wood came off in long curly chips.
“He would take a cut and he would hand it to somebody,” Clarke said. “I remember that curly piece of pine to this day. I thought that was so cool. I loved the smell of it, the texture, the feel of it.”
Clarke had little interest in school back then, but, from that point on, shop classes gave him an anchor.
By the time he graduated from the old Burnaby South five years later, he had designed and built award-winning furniture and even his own acoustic guitar.
“We had all the types of tools you’d run into if you went out and became a cabinetmaker,” he said.
Clarke went on to become a tech-ed teacher instead, with a master’s degree, a 33-year career in the Burnaby school district and four years training B.C.’s tech-ed teachers for UBC.
He might not even have stayed in high school if it weren’t for those early shop classes.
“They kept me sane,” he said. “And that is a vein that runs right through the school system – still does. Kids have not changed.”
What has changed, he said, are today’s shop classes.
Overcrowded and under-equipped, Clarke calls them “deplorable.”
Critical mass
Many of today’s tech-ed teachers blame inadequate provincial funding and class-size limits.
Before the province barred teachers from negotiating class-size limits in their contracts in 2002, Clarke – who retired in 2000 – averaged about 20 students in his senior shop classes and 24 in junior classes.
Today, Alpha secondary tech-ed teacher Russell Evanisky told the NOW it’s unusual to have fewer than 30 students in any of his shop classes.
He and other tech-ed teachers also have more ESL and special needs students in each class, according to Clarke.
“I have been back in the classroom,” said the retired teacher, who worked as a substitute in the district until 2013, “and I’ve seen what it’s done to the programs. Class size went up, and it just made it horrible in the classroom. There is what I call critical mass. Safety is a huge issue when you have 30 students instead of 20.”
If the province is serious about preparing for a looming labour shortage in the skilled trades, Clarke said, it needs a government willing to invest in school programs.
“Right now, you have to take half the class and park them off doing book work,” he said.
But not everything wrong with School District No. 41’s shops can be laid on the provincial government’s doorstep, according to Clarke.
He said Burnaby school officials in the 1990s – determined to become provincial leaders in computer education – gutted school shops without any help from the province.
How shop teachers fought back has become the stuff of local tech-ed teacher legend.
The leader and loser
The tale begins in the early1960s, right after Clarke graduated from Burnaby South and headed off to university.
From 1960 to 1966, the federal government – under the 1960 Technical and Vocational Training Assistance Act – injected $1.5 billion into technical and vocational education across the country, including the construction of gleaming new “technical” wings at Burnaby’s existing high schools, amply stocked with top-of-the-line, industrial-grade shop equipment.
Much of Clarke’s teaching career was spent in these wings.
Aimed at addressing rising unemployment, the facilities and programs were great for students and for the skilled trades, he said.
“They were wonderful. We produced people that were proud of what they did. They became tradespeople. They are – a lot of them – people that are now running your local, very successful businesses.”
Clarke, who once co-owned a manufacturing company with 45 workers at its height, employed many former students himself.
As the 1990s approached, however, things changed.
Enrolment in shop classes dropped, Clarke said, as more academic courses became mandatory and more electives came on line.
With the rise of computers, he said, senior school officials opted to “throw the baby out with the bath water” and take the lead in computer education, largely at the expense of shop classes.
“I call them the leader and loser on that basis,” Clarke said.
Across the district, shops were closed, and money was poured into computer technology.
Instead of using real tools and real materials, students increasingly learned design and construction on computers and through what Clarke calls “toilet-paper engineering.”
“They decided kids could be building bridges on a table top out of Popsicle sticks,” he said.
The new Burnaby South, which opened in 1993, was the crown jewel of the new regime.
Hailed as a “bold stroke in education” in a 1993 Tech & Learning Magazine article, it was stuffed with multimedia communications technology.
Shop space and equipment, meanwhile, was cut drastically to make way for Tech Lab 2000.
"Students were voting with their feet and leaving the shop empty," said then-superintendent Elmer Froese, explaining the changes to the magazine.
Clarke said district managers had asked him and another shop teacher to rubber stamp the shop plans for the new school, but the two had refused, since the equipment and the size of the shops had already been predetermined.
And what happened to the top-of-the-line equipment when shops were shut down?
Clarke said it was auctioned off for pennies on the dollar.
“I remember having to put tags on equipment that was going to the auction. I had tears in my eyes,” he said.
To avoid confrontations with angry shop teachers, Clarke said the equipment was often removed from schools in the evenings and on weekends.
He and his tech-ed colleagues at Cariboo Hill fought back by collecting some of the equipment and stashing it behind a false wall in an alcove of the school’s shop wing.
“We knew we couldn’t take it off the premises,” Clarke said. “That would have been theft, so we thought, well if they can’t find the God damned stuff, they can’t take it. We had to make sure that everybody took part in it. …We were all going to go down together.”
Rod Ramage, another retired Burnaby shop teacher whose career spanned the same era as Clarke’s, was one of the group.
He said some good things were added to tech-ed with computers, but the district’s approach at the time was lopsided.
“We were concerned about what was being given up,” he said.
The Cariboo Hill teachers added the equipment back to their shops some years later, and, to this day, the school has the best-equipped shops in the district, according to Clarke.
A cautionary tale
For Clarke, who is passionate about the trades and the importance of teaching kids to work with real tools, real materials and real processes, district decisions about shop classes in the 1990s were disastrous.
“They followed false gods,” he said, “and it’s come full circle because now people are saying, ‘Why don’t we have the equipment and the facilities to train tradespeople?’”
Clarke has nothing against computers, he said, but the district’s pursuit of computer education at the expense of shop classes hasn’t turned out to be the best move for all district grads.
As an example, he points to the many computer-based jobs now outsourced to developing countries.
That’s harder to do with trades jobs, according to Clarke.
“You cannot export a construction site,” he said.
Clarke said the administrators – all since retired – who steered the district single-mindedly towards computer education in the 1990s kept elected school officials in the dark about the effect on shop classes and shop equipment.
“There was a kind of culture, at that time at least,” Clarke said of school district staff. “They figured the elected board was basically a nuisance.”
His colleague, Ramage, said trustees should have paid closer attention.
For him, it’s a cautionary tale for today’s board.
“They need to question some of the things that are coming across in the minutes and on the agendas of their meetings and delve a little deeper into things,” he said. “I think they can do that without pissing people off.”
Clarke, meanwhile, said the tale should be a lesson to parents as well.
For too long, he said, they have focused on getting their kids into university and ignoring the benefits of trades careers, both in terms of employment and personal satisfaction.
After spending plenty of time at both, there’s no contest for Clarke.
“What am I the proudest of? The things I can do with my hands and the equipment and the machinery,” he said. “It is that tactile thing that most human beings need and a lot of us cannot live without. And a lot of kids are totally frustrated in school because they don’t get that opportunity now.”
