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Comment by hilbert42 | Hacker News Reader

>"Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget."

Gender issues not withstanding, you're absolutely correct, the tragedy is that very few people of either gender know to do these skills today and it's resulted in some very negative consequences.

As I've pointed out in a rather long post below, we desperately need to regain many of them and there's multiple good reasons why we should do so ASAP.

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There's nothing stopping most people from learning, except interest and impulse control.

Carry that to the extreme and why bother having school at all? I'm all for a lot of classical curriculum components. But I also think that there is a huge amount of value to exposing high schoolers to hands-on activities that are both practical and potentially rather enjoyable. This includes electronics and so forth by the way. But it might also include sewing.

Our society systematically encourages people to throw away and buy new things. Its an absolute disaster.

You're so, so right. It's an ecological disaster in the making, and by repairing things we essentially deskill the citizenry—we've far fewer repairers and tradespeople nowadays—and we concentrate knowledge in the hands of large multinationals (at expense of information being open to everyone). Take John Deere's proprietary tractors or Apple proprietary iPhone for instance—no one is allowed to repair them except those authorized by these manufacturers.

It's a damned disgrace. No wonder there's 'Right to Repair' movements starting up everywhere. They need our full support.

What about social engineering and distractions? Even ancient Rome used this technique—take the Colosseum for instance. The problem is that in recent years our culture has be stuffed up by vested interests (and IT and the internet hasn't helped here either).

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