Those sort of courses have been very popular with model engineers in the past – they often weren't too bothered about what people actually made. Once people do know what they are doing reasonably well it was a good way of making more expensive tooling using decent equipment that was perfectly capable of doing the job.
As far as I am aware there are none of them about round here now. Once schools had a lot more metal working equipment than they tend to have now and offered evening classes.
There has been another change as well. Eg A local astronomy club had excellent facilities for making telescopes buried in the basement of a university. The powers that be didn't know it was there. Last thing I heard was that they found out, decided that it was unsafe so no one can use it any more.
John
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