BillMiff

People might be interested to know that woodworking is alive and well (or at least hanging on) in new york city. Several of the top private schools here use it in their curriculum (including for elementary age kids). If you're not familiar, some of these schools look like Harvard (at least one of them is older) and cost as much. They are fiercly competetive with one another (some years, you have better odds of getting into Harvard), and I would guess most parents send their kids to them to try to get them into Harvard. Anyway, some of these schools have long made the deliberate choice to teach woodworking. These schools typically make a big deal of their "integrated curriculum". So, they learn some geometry in math class(e.g. how to bisect a line with a compass and tsquare) and practice it in woodshop. The two approaches reinforce one another. It's not extra-curricular in other words; it's part of the core. These schools are also often big believers in the idea that physical skills and mental skills build on one another. I'm guessing here, but I would bet that they use woodshop in part to help develop the fine motor skills you need to write well, as well as to teach math, decision making and planning (lots of schools teach chess for this reason also), etc. I haven't heard that they us woodshop because of any particular research on the topic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was. Lots of these schools make programming choices based on the latest research.

That's all a long winded and rambling way of saying: some of the best schools in the world (which have all the funding they need, have the best facilities, can hire the best teachers and administrators, etc., can offer literally any subject or program they want, and make active real-time use of educational research) choose to offer woodworking to their students. If it was better in their mind to offer another foreign language or some other subject, they'd drop woodshop in a heartbeat. But they haven't. That's not proof of anything, but I think it sends a pretty good signal that it can be a valauble part of any school's program for reasons having nothing to do with giving students a trade (though that's a perfectly good reason also).