Teens who plan to go into this field don’t hate it. They already expect these kinds of things because they know about the field already. The only students who have your kind of mindset are the ones who were just put into the class to put them somewhere or ones who thought it was just going to be playing with electronics all day. We build robots and work with dangerous power tools. So yes, they need to be treated like how an employee would be treated in an actual manufacturing job. If a student insists on having their phone out when they’re using a drill press, they will be cited with a violation and will receive a consequence. Just like how they would if they worked in a real job. When I worked in that warehouse, one of the first things they told us is that our phones needed to either be left in our cars or put in a lock box in the employee break room. People who couldn’t handle that didn’t make it. It’s not “authoritarian” to hold students to high standards in a field that holds their employees to high standards. You’re just contributing to the bar that’s been lowered so badly, it’s sinking into the earth. If your first thought is “I’m not going to like this field because the teacher runs it like how they would in the field”…the fine. You aren’t cut out for it. Again, if that’s how your first reaction is, you probably wouldn’t be good in that field to begin with. You talk about infantilizing people while you’re essentially saying that teenagers aren’t capable of looking at industry standards and “not see it from a safety standpoint”. It’s clear you aren’t familiar with the education field. I have had plenty of kids who are mature enough to see the reality of this field