Leonardo da Vinci would’ve made a great CTE student.
Circa 1500, when Leonardo was in his prime, reading and building weren’t separate things. Somewhere along the way, we stopped expecting our students to read.
As if good hands don’t need strong words.
In our shops, sparks fly, screens light up, scissors buzz.
With all that activity, you’d think reading would be part of the picture. It usually isn’t.
I asked one of our second-year cosmetology students if she ever reads outside of school.
She smiled and told me she reads romance, and sometimes suspense, when she has time.
During our conversation, she said a book about cosmetology might have brought people together, something they could all share. And still, even in a program built on community, she felt something was missing.
Reading holds things together. It gives students context, confidence, and the words to tell their own story. They read a line. It hits. That’s it, they think. That’s me. While other students write essays, ours are already explaining procedures to clients and checking in patients. They build technical skill, yes, but they also build relationships. And that takes language. Disciplinary literacy tells us that every field—health care, digital animation and game design, and the construction trades—has its own language. Our students are already fluent in more than one.
Walter Isaacson says calling Leonardo da Vinci a genius almost misses the point. He was largely self-taught. He studied, sketched, experimented, and asked questions. His to-do lists included not chores, but concepts: what he wanted to understand that day, and who could teach him.
That kind of self-direction feels limitless in hindsight. But it started with time, space, and the belief that it was worth learning. What are we doing to encourage that kind of drive in our own students? They generally have the space and the time (CTE session usually go beyond one traditional class period. James Paul Gee calls this kind of exploration ‘mucking around’ and highlights the power of ‘horizontal learning’—moving across contexts, disciplines, and practices to construct knowledge without having to “race up the skill tree”. Could books, offered freely and purposefully, help spark some of that curiosity?
I first read The Great Bridge years ago, but recently downloaded the audiobook again.
Listening now, while walking around the track at the school where I serve as a district school board trustee, I keep coming back to one line: that this structure was not just the greatest engineering feat of its time, but a work of art. Roebling might not have sat in a welding booth or a game design lab, but he was a CTE student in every way that matters. And like CTE students, he didn’t work alone. McCullough reminds us: “Little of consequence is ever accomplished alone.” It took his son, his daughter-in-law, and thousands of workers to make the bridge real. At one point in The Great Bridge, McCullough notes that Roebling was sometimes called “a lesser Leonardo.” The qualities we revere in da Vinci didn’t vanish with the Renaissance. We’ve seen them since, in Roebling, and, if we’re paying attention, in our own students.
What connects Leonardo and Roebling is more than invention. It’s imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge was the first of its kind. So were Leonardo’s flying machines, his anatomical sketches, his war devices. Both men studied, built, and reimagined the world around them. What they did was unprecedented. That’s what we should be preparing our students to do, not just to follow instructions, but to imagine something new. Leonardo da Vinci should remind us that education isn’t about knowing. It’s about questioning. Self-discovery is what we should be teaching our kids.
This is what CTE should be at its best. Not as a separate lane, but as a path. Not a backup plan, but a full education, rooted in hands-on skill, shaped by academic depth, and driven by the kind of curiosity that once led a young artist to study flight, anatomy, and water pressure in the same week. We call him the original Renaissance man. But maybe he was just the first CTE student.
This post marks the beginning of a new series on integrating reading into Career and Technical Education. As we pilot a choice-based reading assignment tied to both grade level and CTE content, I’ll be reflecting on the process, sharing resources, and highlighting what we’re learning along the way.
References
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. Routledge.
Isaacson, W. (2017). Leonardo da Vinci. Simon & Schuster.
McCullough, D. (1972). The Great Bridge: The epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Simon & Schuster.
