Well, it's different in a million ways. But people don't need to know how to service a car to operate it, and this has made cars harder to maintain, but also much, much cheaper and more accessible to others.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make anymore, but your post has made me think. Thank you.

Um. Not to a professional level, but my parents most certainly did teach me to do basic plumbing repairs, minor electrical work (think replacing a switch/outlet), change oil, use power tools, and an assortment of other skills under the broad header of "being handy around the house". People absolutely can and should have at least a basic understanding of how to do stuff.

Eg, everybody should learn to dance just to learn decent posture and how to move yourself. Everybody should learn how to grow a few common vegetables. Everyone should learn how to extinguish a fore for each class (A, B, C, D). Everybody should learn some basic first aid outside of CPR and putting a bandaid on it. Everyone should learn the rules of the road - even if they don't drove (to get a feeling for what others that are driving will be doing in the next few seconds). Everybody should learn enough about musical theory to recognise the basic structure, variations on it, and various genres. Everybody should learn a language not spoken in their immediate environment. Everybody should travel, and, when travelling, once or twice look beyond the default tourist traps and experience another culture. Everybody should know some basic self-defence. Everybody should have sufficient financial literacy to do grocery shopping. Everybody should learn about history. Everybody should learn some basics about minorities (race/gender/handicap/...), including what are really offensive stereotypes (to avoid) and common problems (to be able to help). Everybody should learn how to sail - trust me on this one. Everybody should learn how to "navigate" from place to place without a smartphone. Everybody should learn the basics of organising a small get-together (including booking venue). Everyb should learn how to gauge prices for things/services they rarely buy/use. Everybody should know at least one sport and their body sufficiently well to be able to stay in shape. Everybody should know some basics of multiple religions (since you'll run into them). Everybody should know how to use the index of a book. Everybody should prefer vi over Emacs. Everybody should know how to cook several different meals. Everybody should know enough about nutrition to be able to not to die from malnutrition when having a choice for foods. Everybody should be able to swim - including swimming a short distance with their clothes on. Everybody should learn to ride a bike. Everybody should be able to change a diaper. Everybody should learn to be able to teach some basic things. Everybody should learn more about cosmology than "that's the Big Dipper". Everybody should learn geography - at least rough position of multiple countries and cities. Eveeybody should learn ice skating / skiing / snowboarding.

That's just some stuff from the top of my head. I miss at least half of that.

But does vi have an teledildonics mode?

Seriously, I agree with what you're saying but I did a double take when I got to that part, like "why did he slip that in there?".

Life is short and I agree you can't do it all but a society that facilitates people's ability to do all of those things, plus learn some basic coding and all the other things you didn't list is still a worthy goal and one that I want to live in.

Trying to do as much or even some of what's on your list is also a worthy goal. Maybe it's enough to just say everyone should try to never stop learning new things and challenging themselves to be more tomorrow than they are today or were yesterday.

We humans have set a very high bar. And every discovery in science makes the bar higher, but all of us should know where the bar is, because all of us are needed to vote on steering this ship. Informed voter is not about reading some manifesto. It's informed about the world and the economy and how it all fits together.

Flat earthers are trying to opt out of being informed so they dont have to have the responsibility of deciding.

In parts of America, operating a chainsaw at 10 years old is part of the bar. My bar does not include riding a horse, operating a tractor, or firing an automatic weapon. But there are places where those are simple life skills.

I guess you're right that there is some kind of blended average you could take of every bar in the world. It would probably include basic math and communication skills.

I did not even understand this one! :)

A is most fires, B is liquids (oil/petrol/etc), D is metals.

I learned very young not to throw water on a fire if I didn’t know what was burning.

Honestly, there’s a lot to learn, but childhood is long! Well resourced parents can teach nearly all of this by 15 (driving and speaking another language well are more challenging).

(As a father of two kids, I admit it is wickedly difficult to get them honestly interested in programming.)

I've experienced the same thing. One observation is that "back in my day," you could learn enough programming in a few weeks to hack something together that looked just as good (bad) as real software, with little or no adult guidance. And programmers were a community of nerds, hackers, scientists, etc. Hacking was much closer to bare metal, so it felt more "real" too, rather than digging through someone else's drawers.

And it was cool to be able to do something that my parents couldn't even fathom.

Today, programming has become professionalized, and way too hard, with functioning software requiring layers of abstraction. It has changed from a private passion to a varsity sport, and the kids who have declared an interest in "computer science" are the most straight-laced, helicopted kids in the whole school. Some kids discover that there's still a hacker subculture, but only by luck.

Granted, all of this stuff has been good for me, career-wise, but that doesn't translate into something of interest to my kids.

For me, I can distinctly remember deciding to tinker with building games when I was very young. I was completely overwhelmed, however, by the jump from "basic Batch programs" to "OpenGL and C++." Obviously, that's an enormous jump, and I could have simply dabbled with Flash or whatever, but the point is that the software I enjoyed playing with was years and years of dedicated learning away from anything I could build or tinker with.

The web, however, was not. It was still nascent, there weren't mature, robust technologies for it, and I could build all the things I saw online completely on my own with maybe a dedicated weekend. This was huge for me, and kicked off my lifelong involvement in computing.

I guess the point that I'm getting at is that technology is so good now that the gap between what an average child can consume and what they can produce is enormous. When I tried teaching my nephew basic scripting, their first questions were "How do I make it do X" where X is some involved bit of graphical interactivity. That level of development simply is what software is to them now.

My hope is that this is cyclical. That there is always another frontier cropping up where the gap between "state of the art" and "hobby project" is incredibly small. I think that is naturally where you'll see kids getting into development.