On Jan 8, 12:20*am, geoff wrote:
In message , Tim Watts
writes









On Monday 07 January 2013 21:30 geoff wrote in uk.d-i-y:

In message , Brian Gaff
writes
Well if he can raise the bar, but at the moment I feel that the bar has
not left the ground yet. Mind you I'm flabbergasted by the lack of
knowledge in average people of under 30 years. IE not knowing that planets
and stars are different or which planets are gaseous and which rocky and
which have no atmosphere etc.
Also not understanding the rudiments of how electricity works and how
transformers work. There are very simple books on these concepts and we
were taught them as a matter of course.

I see little desire to "find out", no sense of discovery, a lack of
wonderment how and why

we're becoming a nation of hairdressers

Yep...

I wonder if in part, everything is now too complicated?

In 1970, you could open your car bonnet and identify everything - and the
choices when something went wrong were limited.

OK - TV's have always been specialist - but most other machinery was pretty
simple.

Most people don't even make any attempt to grasp the rudiments of
anything vaguely technical or ... anything at all really

You don't see kids playing with Meccano sets any more.

Just been treading up on it. Typical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano