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...you can mark all the books you've checked with a hole so you know you've checked them.

Work harder, not smarter. /s

Jokes aside, I still agree with GP, in that there are more practical skills that are left out of education that would be far more useful in day to day life. The Dewey Decimal System has been replaced with search engines.

I don't need to know how a search engine works in order to type in "how to use a drill press" and read the results. But that's because the knowledge and understanding of how computers work at a high level circumvents the need to do that - a search engine is a form, give it something to search and hit the submit button. Easy.

Being taught by someone to use machining tools helps build an understanding of how every day items are made using those tools, so you have a more fundamental understanding of the items could be combined together into other more interesting things, repair them, take them apart and service them.

It's almost the opposite problem of maths in schools. We're taught maths in various incresasingly complex ways, all the way up to calculus. Those methods teach us how to use maths to do clever things. But every day maths doesn't need that. We're taught compound interest, but we have to use that to figure out how to do our taxes by ourselves without any help. Wouldn't it be nice to have an overlap there, hit two birds with one stone and we all walk away with a stronger understanding of the world?

If we're not taught how to make things, we struggle to learn how things are made, which means less things get made. Learning how to make things early, and embedding the knowledge of how things are made, enables more things to be made in future.




Yeah, sure, today we can teach people to use a search engine and whether you should believe the first result. Is the chatbot always truthful? Not sure when or why it was decided that media literacy isn't a useful everyday skill.




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