Kids today don't really know how to create or repair anything

This is going to come across as a "back in my day" old man rant that every generation probably makes about the newer ones but in my case it is more of a redneck upbringing one because even in my own generation, most of the people around my age don't really know how to do anything useful.

General maintenance on vehicles, your home, and machinery in general I believe are very crucial skills to have. I think we could add in basic cooking, gardening, electrical repair, and general repair or carpentry to be including in what I believe to be essential skills also. There are extremely few people under the age of 40 that know how to do any of these things.

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_{back when SNL was a good show, Dana Carvey's "Grumpy Old Man" skit was wonderful}

Not I am not extremely old. I suppose I could be considered as such by the youth of today but I am merely in my mid 40's. I don't feel old but I do have a bunch of man skills like all of the things I described above. How did I get such a wealth of knowledge about practical life skills? Well, my parents encouraged or in some instances forced me to learn them. I didn't go to school for most of these things and was expected to help out my parents, mostly my father, when he was doing this stuff. He went out of his way to teach me about them as well rather than just having a useless flashlight holding child next to him. I resisted helping as kids do, but my father was right in insisting that I help out. He didn't actually NEED My help but he wanted to use this as a learning opportunity for me. He wasn't just looking for free labor.

When I look around at most of the people that are my age or younger these days they don't know how to do most or all of the things that I listed above. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a licensed electrician or be able to build furniture on their own, but having a basic understanding of how electricity works, and what the purpose of tools are, is a skill that I think is disappearing from our youth.

When I was in 8th grade, all of the boys were required to take "shop class" where we would be introduced to a bunch of power tools and taught how to use them. In retrospect I can't believe that we were allowed to be around these extremely deadly tools at such a young age. It's not like they were locked or anything. We could have been cutting one another's arms off on a daily basis and Mr. Stewart, our extremely old teacher would have slept through it.

I can understand the safety issues being a problem but these days, even having a class like this available would probably be considered sexist. Girls were not forbidden from joining the class, but there weren't any females in the classes for the 2 years that I was in it. They were in a class called Home Economics where cooking, sewing, and other "female skills" from a 1950's point of a view were taught. Again, boys were not forbidden from joining this class but joining it would have probably resulted in some level of mockery in the locker rooms.

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The above is not my shop class but ours was far more industrial and frightening that that. The machinery was probably constructed of the same steel they make tanks with and would have impressed anyone that works in the lumber industry.

Getting back to my original point: I kind of fear for the next generation because it isn't that their parents don't want to teach them these things, their parents are incapable of doing so because they, themselves don't know how to do it either. It isn't being taught in schools for the most part either.

We are going to have several generations of kids who lack the most basic survival skills and are going to be subjected to hiring a contractor for any little problem that they ever encounter in their lives. I wonder what the percentage level of people who even know how to change their own oil in their car is? This is an extremely simple process that is very difficult to do incorrectly yet I would imagine that if people were being honest that less than 30% of the population would even have any idea where to begin with something like this.

Their justification would probably be "why do I need to know how to do that when I can pay Jiffy Lube $35 to do it for me?" Well using that logic I suppose there isn't any reason to ever learn anything.

I think that if kids are smart these days they will start to look more and more at trade skills such as plumbing, electrical work, and mechanics very seriously before thinking about going to a university for something that they haven't even figured out yet. When I was in college a lot of people that were there weren't studying anything in particular, they were just in college because that was what a teenager is supposed to do in our society.

If someone were to go to a trade school and find something they were truly interested in they would all but guarantee a life of financial freedom because I believe that the amount of DIY people is diminishing with every year that passes. I almost never need to call a "professional" to do something in my home but most of the people I went to high school and college with need to call someone for even the smallest problems.

So turn lemons into lemonade kids! Get into that trade school and take advantage of the ignorance of others. I think that this divide of the people who have the know how with their hands and the people who have a lot of book learnin' but not actual skills is going to grow a lot before it shrinks.