Eclectic Amateur

Mark Steyn highlights a Maclean’s article discussing the lack of practical skills in today’s young workforce:

“They don’t know how to handle a tool properly,” he says quietly. “They’re bright kids, but they hold a hammer at the top instead of the bottom, so it takes four swings instead of one to get a nail in. They don’t know how to read the short lines on a tape measure and they’ve never used power tools, which makes you really cautious.” He says they can’t seem to detect the patterns of the work—you rip up part of the roof, that gets thrown down, that goes into the garbage—so they just stand around. “It can get really frustrating.”

…

Shop classes are all but a memory in most schools—a result of liability fears, budget cuts and an obsession with academics. Still, even in vocational high schools where shop classes endure, a skills decline is evident. One auto shop teacher says he’s teaching his Grade 12 students what, 10 years ago, he taught Grade Nines. “We would take apart a transmission, now I teach what it is.” Remarkably, most of his Grade 11 students arrive not knowing which way to turn a screwdriver to tighten a screw. If he introduces a nut threaded counterclockwise, they have trouble conceptualizing the need to turn the screwdriver the opposite way. That’s because, he says, “They are texting non-stop; they don’t care about anything else. It’s like they’re possessed.”

Steyn’s comment, which I find darkly amusing:

Even if we avoid total societal collapse and/or an Iranian nuclear strike and so will not be required to build a rude dwelling in the wilds, in a post-prosperity America a lot of us will have to figure out how to make stuff last longer. Doesn’t sound like we’re up to it.

Remember: “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.”

Homefeeding: Threat or Menace?