Schools shouldn’t be treated as these magical places where you’re put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you’re supposed to learn from your parents.
A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.
Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren’t there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don’t teach because they can’t mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they’ll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they’d be right to lay the blame at your feet.
Some of your examples are just senseless. People don’t have DIY skills because of the increasing specialisation of our society. We’re not at home learning how to fix things, because we’re in school learning how to do other things instead.
This has been the case for so long in some places that a lot of peoples parents don’t have those skills to pass on in the first place.
I think my lack of DYI skills is mostly due to not having access to a garden for sawing wood, and not needing to drill that many holes in my day to day life. I was taught basic woodworking in school (and at home). School did teach me soldering, a skill I’ve used three times outside of an educational setting.
But a lot of it also comes down to stuff not being repairable anymore. Solid wood furniture and old electronics could be repaired, compressed cardboard and razor thing modern electronics can’t be. With video guides explaining just about anything you can do with a basic toolbox available for free in every language, the problem isn’t a lack of information. A lot of stuff has just gotten better, cheaper, or more advanced, to the point where spending money on good tools won’t be worth it most of the time.
Isn’t that quite a bit degenerative? I think everyone should have at least some basic skills.
It is degenerative, which is the point of the argument.
We fostered a society where both parents work, often far away from where they live. The time normally and naturally allotted to educating your own children has been steadily shrinking to make room for an education that normally lasts until adulthood. The expectation now being that your children will not pick up the family trade.
For some people, this trade off has been degenerative in some aspects, and that’s why they complain ‘school never taught me x’.
Boy, if only we had access to a globe-spanning network of computers that could give us access to information on how to perform basic repairs and small construction projects. If we had that we’d be able to teach ourselves the skills necessary to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year by not calling a professional to do simple work.
Too bad such an information network is just a fantasy and everyone is completely helpless. We had better resign ourselves to not even try to solve our own problems.
You actually are better off specializing in something to make more money than you are to diy everything. You’re better off paying people to do things for you so that you can enjoy your free time. Source: have spent the past few weekends fixing my god-damned car due to several problems cropping up at once and having to redo several things due to shitty parts and/or finding more problems once I got everything apart. In fact I should have just gotten rid of the car before I ever started, unfortunately, I don’t have a crystal ball.
Learning how to do simple stuff is worthwhile just so you don’t have to deal with the risk of having an incompetent/careless person working on your stuff. The amount of time I’ve wasted going back and fixing shitty workmanship from people my parents hired to work on their (practically brand new) house is ridiculous and I’m not even a professional. After dealing with all that shit I don’t trust tradespeople at all. I’m sure there’s good ones but if you’re just pulling names out of the phone book there’s a decent chance you’ll get fucked in my experience.
I didn’t say “do everything” now did I?
If I had the money I would hire a landscaper to mow my lawn and a cleaner to come clean my house and have laundry service done for me, and a good accountant who could somehow get all of those expenses written off.
Ok, but because you can’t afford to do that, you cannot specialize completely.