That being said, this is just one guy's opinion, not a true motor behavioral study. The impulse to blame the "kids these days" seems like an ever-present force, so I wouldn't place too much emphasis on this without a proper study of precision dextrous manipulation across age cohorts.
Lamenting a lack of experience with arts and crafts and similar sounds more like an "education these days"-complaint to me. If children do suffer from a lack of trained motor skills it is not their fault, but it is something to take seriously, for their sake more than anyone else.
Also, I dunno waiting for a proper study is worth the risk. It would take quite long, which means that if it is a problem we already screwed over a generation. Plus, people complaining about a lack of physical education these days is not something limited to surgery.
Taking physical education more seriously as being important for general development, and not something just for the people who want to continue in sports is probably beneficial for everyone in the long term anyway.
(tangent: I wonder if these students would perform better when handling robot arms with a control stick than previous generations)
Physical education is awful and it is not capable of not being awful. Even if it was not almost uniformly focused on team sports which some people hate to the point of faking illness and others love to the point of obsession, leading to massive capability gaps, it would still be irrelevant. Two or three hours a week of teacher directed exercise is nothing in the scheme of developing real skill.
If people were serious about this problem they could allow children ample time to play, learning about the world and their bodies as small animals are meant to, or if they insist on making everything into a subject, treat physical education as a core part of the curriculum, English public school style, where everyone plays team sports almost every day.
No one gets good at anything on two hours a week of practice. Absolutely nothing. Two hours a week will barely get you past novice in a year. It’s so little, so seldom that a substantial amount of each lesson has to be revision too but even if learning was instant and perfect 100 hours a year rounds to nothing.
> Unstructured play is great, but it's no substitute for targeting coaching when it comes to developing useful skills.
Tell it to the Chinese football team. Then tell it to the Brazilian football team.
You have never done any sports, have you?
> Tell it to the Chinese football team. Then tell it to the Brazilian football team.
Are you seriously going to use two professional teams with extensive professional coaching as an argument against the use of coaching?
Nobody is arguing against unstructured play, you are just trying to steer the conversation into a direction where it's an either/or situation where it is not.
For some, yes. And it is certainly taught in an inadequate way in most cases.
> and it is not capable of not being awful.
And this is where you basically close the door on any further discussion. I think the issue is more that you are too fixated on what Physical Education is than on what it could and should be.
As an example the Javelin anti Armour missile have playstation-esq aiming controls on them for this reason and most remote weapons systems have a thumb driven joystick config.
Sounds like presumably "USA" is not expending enough time and money on target practice - I would hope that UK still understand s the lesson taught by the Napoleonic wars that well trained and practiced troops are key to winning a firefight.
And crew served weapons is quite different to traditional marksmanship and that's where most of the killing is done these days.