The Manual Arts

John Ratzenberger (Cliff Clavin) was on GMA this morning promoting Pixar's new Ratatouille film. His other comments were most notable to me. He started the "Nuts, Bolts, and Thingamajigs Foundation" to foster manual skills required by industries.
http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/

His book, Made in America, honors skilled labor within the United States. The following excerpt caught my attention:

ON WORKERS: The manual arts always has and always will take precedence over the fine arts. Everything physical that the fine arts depends on—from theaters to canvases to printing and binding—depends on the manual arts. Educators who make the rules have bought into the popular notion that we’ve moved out of an industrial economy and into an information age, and therefore, they think, every student has to be educated in the same cookie-cutter way that ignores the importance of manual skills.

See http://www.ratzenberger.com

I guess I should at least look for his show on the Discovery Channel.