This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.
I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.
But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?
I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.
It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.
I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.
The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.
China scales its approach to demand. It can build mega- factories or it can build small batches. Small batches require the dextrous artisans you mention.
A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it
I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
I think it's appreciation of the world and people to look and think, "some people did that". So many people working together globally to produce anything you see, sometimes over decades and many lives.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get.
Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
Custom machine building is a very difficult business to be in. As you mentioned, it's hard to scale. I knew of a particular service provider (custom motion systems) whose philosophy was to break even on the first job and profit on any followups.
Neat, but sort of ironic their main product is an "AI clock" that takes an intrinsically human act, writing a poem, and pulls the human out of the loop.
It's nice that they explained the process to a bunch of kids, helping to de-mystify something quite abstract to many of us (where does all the stuff come from?).
I just think that perhaps we have over-indexed on STEM and this is a prime example of that. The article mentions talking about industrial designers, which is cool.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest.
but what about the poets?
It's the sort of thinking that I've seen all over tech, where people are so focused on/obsessed with using technology to solve problems they seem to forget and lose appreciation for all the people that make their lives possible and enjoyable.
Anyway, cool article but don't buy the slop-flinging e-waste please.
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work. But I've always augmented that with "okay and this is how we'd make something like that." As a result my kids, now adults, always start with the mindset of "Somebody made this, so I could too if I had to." and that really unlimits the kinds of self constraints people put on themselves. When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. And when I see someone building tools out of the abundance of capabilities that are out there I say, "Yup, they get it." 3D printing, inexpensive miniature milling machines and lathes, libraries full of books about making stuff. Its all doable, you don't have to buy it from a store and the one you make yourself will work exactly the way you want it to.
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.
Edison did not build his stuff himself.
Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.
Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.
What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone? Of course the first sets of people to build something aren't buying it off the shelf... but the reward for the millionth person to be able to do the same thing from scratch is also gone.
How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?
For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.
I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.
But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.
I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.
This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical faculties. I found all kinds of tech fascinating as something one could create, but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development. I felt like a fish out of water telling everyone about water and them not noticing it growing up over there
> I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that."
Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.
This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!
If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.
I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.
It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.
Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.
I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!
I do think that this blog post is quaint and I find it hard to hate on a guy showing up at his kid's school and giving a talk—oh boy, remember when your parents came to school? Or anyone's parents. Especially a dad? Woowee.
The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".
Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.
Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.
You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.
Great stuff! Great! However, the issue is not, and has likely never been, that young people aren't willing to believe "they can do that". It's that most people, of necessity, are not good at both inventing, manufacturing (how to efficiently make that invention many times), and sales (how to get someone to buy it). Therefore, they will need to find someone willing to hire them to do one part of that process. And the modern labor market is not interested in training people on the job, they want someone who's already done the job somewhere else.
Not saying you shouldn't go tell kids about how things work! Just that the reason kids don't do that as much, is not primarily anything to do with education or the kids, but rather because the modern labor market has done its best to avoid ever having to give anybody a chance to do something they haven't already done many times before.
This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.
I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
Zoning and related matters is what really holds the US back. You are allowed to open a restaurant nearly anywhere, but good luck renting out a random office space or garage to start any other kind of small factory without a whole lot of pushback, especially if the process is "dirty".
Unsurprisingly, 70% of the manufacturing that does take place in the US is in rural areas. Trouble is that 80% of the population live in urban areas, so when a factory starts to gain some steam it cannot find anyone around to hire, starving any potential growth.
The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.
I think he is just trying to say he spoke to 'a' year group. If he said he spoke to a class, would that help? You are right that it is not that specific, a year group maybe one class, multiple classes or part of a class.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] threadI like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work
https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.
I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.
It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.
I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.
The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.
A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
There is extraordinary in the ordinary.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get. Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
It's nice that they explained the process to a bunch of kids, helping to de-mystify something quite abstract to many of us (where does all the stuff come from?).
I just think that perhaps we have over-indexed on STEM and this is a prime example of that. The article mentions talking about industrial designers, which is cool.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest.
but what about the poets?
It's the sort of thinking that I've seen all over tech, where people are so focused on/obsessed with using technology to solve problems they seem to forget and lose appreciation for all the people that make their lives possible and enjoyable.
Anyway, cool article but don't buy the slop-flinging e-waste please.
Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.
Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kruesi
How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?
For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.
I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.
But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.
I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.
Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.
This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!
If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.
I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.
Any standouts you recommend? My 6 year old son loves all those David Macaulay books. Haven't taken that to the next level of "How to build stuff" yet.
I like the spirit of it.
Even though I am no longer involved in hardware manufacturing, the same thing applies to software development.
I shared it with some friends that own/run factories.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.
I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!
The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".
Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.
Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.
You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.
Will future sweaty factory work be any good?
But I think it fits incredibly well here. A factory is just a social constructions. A room where everyone agrees something is produced.
Not saying you shouldn't go tell kids about how things work! Just that the reason kids don't do that as much, is not primarily anything to do with education or the kids, but rather because the modern labor market has done its best to avoid ever having to give anybody a chance to do something they haven't already done many times before.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
Unsurprisingly, 70% of the manufacturing that does take place in the US is in rural areas. Trouble is that 80% of the population live in urban areas, so when a factory starts to gain some steam it cannot find anyone around to hire, starving any potential growth.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
Bit of a long answer to your question