Thanks again for the great comments. You’ve given me all the reading I need on this Sunday morning! :). I have heard of that German system as well. I think it makes sense. My wife is a guidance counselor in a public high school and she was just telling me that one of the local community colleges wants to start a program where they will send teachers to the high school to teach tech classes. The idea is students could get a regular hs education plus the tech training. In one way this frustrates me because we really just need more tech schools at the high school level, but at least the college is trying to address the problem. We are very unlikely to see any big investment by states in tech education since most are already cash strapped and most Americans have been convinced that higher taxes are bad, so the solution probably does fall on the shoulders of colleges.
Thanks for the support with the idea of teaching on Steemit. Do you want to take a public speaking course? I might do that as a test. But like we are finding with the 5k training program, it might take a little while to get enough of a following to put together a class.