High school shop classes are back in a big way as students and educators prepare for a future in which AI could take over many of what we today think of as "white-collar" jobs.As theWall Street Journal reports, school systems across the United States are building out new curricula for shop classes that merge old-school skills like woodworking and welding with higher-tech instruction on how to operate automated machinery.After Wisconsin's Middleton High School spent $90 million updating its facilities to include a high-tech new manufacturing lab which features a fishbowl-style window to watch computer-controlled robot arms build things interest in the state-of-the-art shop classes began to rise.Quincy Millerjohn, an English teacher-turned-welding instructor at the Madison-area school, told the newspaper that he began showing students union pay scales for ironworkers and boilermakers that ranged from $41 to $52 an hour. In recent years, roughly a quarter of Middleton's 2,300 students have taken at least one of the school's classes in construction, manufacturing, or woodworking a massive proportion, especially considering that many school systems eradicated shop classes in the 1990s and the 2000s."We want kids going to college to feel these courses fit on their transcripts along with AP and honors," Millerjohn, a former English teacher, said. "Kids can see these arent knuckle-dragging jobs."Though shop classes have been experiencing something of a renaissance for years now amid increasingly unaffordable college tuitions, concerns about AI replacing office jobsseem to have led to even greater interest among America's next generation of laborers."Theres a paradigm shift happening," explained Jake Mihm, an education consultant with Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction who in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. "[Manual labor positions] are high-skill, high-wage jobs that are attractive to people because theyre hands-on, and heads-on."The same year that Middleton overhauled its shop class facilities, the Houston-area Spring Branch Independent School District successfully passed a $381.6 million bond proposal to fund so-called career technical education (CTE) facilities at its schools. According to that system's superintendent, Jennifer Blaine, vocational training enrollment has risen 9 percent over the past four years."Not everybody wants to go to college," Blaine told the WSJ, "and some people dont want to go to college right away."It's true that AI ispoisedto radically change the face of education and labor but we've got to admit, we didn't expect it to result in the return of shop class.More on AI and work: People With This Level of Education Use AI the Most at WorkShare This Article