... interesting...
Interesting little article this evening on a favorite site of mine called Neatorama...
Are men today losing their DIY skills? Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote a really interesting piece for Popular Mechanics on how Americans are losing their ability to deal with every day real-world problems:
Even the simplest of automotive tasks, changing a tire, seems to be beyond the ken of many people. According to AAA, nearly 4 million motorists requested roadside assistance last year—for flat tires.
And just look at the Popular Mechanics Boy Mechanic books to see the kinds of skills that boys and teenagers were once routinely expected to possess. These books (which PM published in the early 20th century and recently reissued) assumed that young readers would be prepared to construct a fully rigged ice boat, a toy steam engine, or—I’m not kidding—a homebuilt “Bearcat” roadster powered by a motorcycle engine.
It’s hard to imagine too many teenagers tackling projects of that magnitude these days. To be fair, young people today are likely to have skills that earlier generations never dreamed of—building Web sites, say, or editing digital movies. But manipulating pixels and working with physical materials aren’t quite the same thing.
Does this matter? And if people are becoming less mechanically handy, is that so bad?
Comments
I have to admit some responsibility for my recently-moved -out son's failure in this regard. He called to say his Lumina had a flat. Left it in a church parking lot near Dimitri's apt. Days went by. I called to ask what we was doing with his car. He was waiting for (a) a buddy who knew cars and (b) money for tires.
I drove him down (no, up) there. We got out. I asked him if he tried putting on the spare tire. "The what? There's a spare?" he questioned.
Put the key in, opened up the trunk and there was what could not be mistaken for anything else but a spare. "Wow"
Strange thing is that he had been putting guitars and amps and tables and lamps in that trunk for at least a year. Never once did he see the tire.