TEACHABLE MOMENTS, A LA MUSTANG
YOU’VE NO DOUBT heard the oft-repeated lament about today’s youth, and how they just don’t care about cars. It’s been cited in a doomsday sense to predict the end of the car hobby, and it’s also frequently blamed for the severe lack of qualified auto technicians entering the workforce. Auto shop classes have been vanishing from schools for the better part of two decades, but did kids lose interest in auto mechanics, or is a lack of access to technical education responsible for their seeming indifference?
One shop teacher in upstate New York has spent those same two decades seeking to solve this mystery, and his findings may surprise you. By introducing public high school students to the process of fixing up old cars and building hot rods, Ryan Beckley seems to have established that there is, in fact, no lack of interest in the automobile among today’s youth. And this year, he’s reinforcing those lessons with one of America’s favorite cars: The Ford Mustang.
It began innocently enough. Ryan was a brand-new teacher, just out of college and starting his first job as an automotive technology instructor at East Syracuse Minoa Central High School in Syracuse, New York, back in December 2000.
“A substitute had been teaching
