In the physical sciences you are simply expected to troubleshoot and perform basic maintenance on lab equipment. No, I wouldn't know where the helplessness amongst today's undergraduates comes from. Is it an unquestioning adherence to "the rules" that was beaten into them in school, or is it a desire to deflect potential liability? No idea!

Even when I was in high school about 15 years ago, we were always punished for violating any procedures or rules. Zero tolerance policies weren't just for violent actions but for everything. Our society does not tolerate children who disobey authority and that doesn't magically switch off when we kick them off to college

Pre-undergraduate education is nothing like the University level. Some of the students have never been in a laboratory, some of them didn't have user-serviceable cars or bicycles or computers, even those who "have coded" might not really "be programming," and authority figures who could fix everything almost magically basically were their lives for 18 years. That's before you examine eccentricities and differences in upbringing. And, before addressing the "not not totalitarian" practice of 'Zero Tolerance' and its sizable human cost. As the other user said, that adds up. I wouldn't be surprised if kids doing gun violence in schools are reacting to a false image of society which they're getting from people for whom tardiness results in detention.

I still can't weld like some of my friends. They're so brilliant, it'd take me years to catch up.

Anyway: if you really want to sell students on becoming the complete Scientific Humanist Who Delicately Breaks Rules AND Can Fix Anything, which you seem to fancy, start off the laboratories with "LSD Synthesis: from Ergot to Your Homemade Blotter Art" and then break the thermal cycler before the next lab, with the phosphorescence plasmids.

And, yes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, I would expect some (perhaps milder than I imagine) difficulties with that; and, no, I don't really condone drug use but I think you can see where I'm coming from with this reasoning.