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Williamsport Area School District's expansion of the welding lab, reported in the Tuesday edition of the Sun-Gazette, is truly great news for our communities.
The expansion will allow an even greater number of students to learn this practical skill, and the newer technologies will allow all the students learning welding to learn a wider variety of related specialties so that their skill-set equips them to enter our competitive workforce to an even greater extent.
Welding and the trades are an important segment of our economy. School systems that offer a wider variety of training and education for a wider variety of career fields better serve both young people and our society.
Students have different interests and different abilities. Expecting all these student to fit perfectly within a track that takes them to a liberal arts degree, as many school systems in past decades unfortunately expected, fails that diversity.
Just as importantly, it fails to provide the workforce with new labor capable of meeting the needs of all aspects of our modern economy. And while it may strike some as too pragmatic, even too cynical, recognizing the role education fulfills in producing the nation's and region's workforce, it is a vital role. It really is the justification for expecting society at large to pay for education -- because it benefits society at large, even our neighbors who no longer have school-age children or have never had school-age children, to have the businesses on which they rely for their needs and comforts be able to find the workers necessary to meet those needs.
In recent years, the public has begun to better recognize that the trades, including welding, were too often neglected by the nation's education systems. We find our local school district's efforts to correct that oversight, such as this welding lab expansion, to be reassuring.