My wife being a primary school teacher is very keen that children learn skills like sewing and making things. She’s just done a sewing project with them, and she’ll have others planned.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to supervise year 5 children doing a Christmas sewing project. They had pre-made kits of tree decorations to sew up and stuff. The pieces were pre-punched for stitching. You could not, in a month of Sundays, get this wrong. Most of them could not do this simple thing. It was sewing, but you could see where to put the needle, but the majority of them just could not do this.
I did too. I’ve just mended a clock. There was a bit missing, and I made a temporary bit (out of a piece of milk bottle plastic and some fuse wire) which will do until such time as I can get to a clock menders and ask for a proper piece. I also got the chime working, by tightening up a screw. Ha! Meccano, I thought. I had a massive box of the stuff as a child - both my parents had sets, so combined gave me masses of the stuff. My wife says I’m good at seeing how things work. I guess that’s Meccano and Lego.
So, a story for you. These are not new problems. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the need to teach practical stuff in secondary schools was being taken away. My dad taught metal work, wood work and technical drawing, and he saw the practical sides of his subjects reducing. He said he could get kids through GCSE exams without going into the workshop. He and his colleagues fought to keep them, and they were allowed to keep some workshop space. My dad was of the opinion that if you are going to work with materials, you might actually need to know how they feel in the hand, how they behave, how to work with it. He was also very, very keen on machine safety. If he taught you to use a lathe, you knew how to use it safely.
Spool forward to 1996, my final year at the Uni art school, and there were workshops for the industrial designers and model makers. The lecturer in charge of all of this found out what my last name was, and asked if my dad taught woodwork and metal work. I told him he did, and he asked me what school. I told him.
Everyone who went near their workshop needed a health and safety session. He said that everyone from that school knew how to use the equipment safely already. He also said that their abilities on the machines were beyond the standards they were running the remedial classes on. People were coming into those model making classes unable to use machines safely or competently, apart from, it seems, my dad’s school. He said if that school was on a student’s application, then he was confident that they knew what they were doing in the workshop with materials.
So, you know, there are people who are trying to push these skills forward, but the education system is very much stacked against practical stuff these days.