He said he's starting to encounter students who have never used a screwdriver.
I can imagine the hilarity ensuing when he attempts to explain which way to loosen and tighten a screw.
Then, hit them with reverse threads.
Dang. I'll admit, I didn't do much work on things until I hit about 12, then it was as an apprentice gofer on my dad's car projects. But I had an Erector Set at 8, and I knew darn well how righty-tighty and lefty-loosie worked.
I was working on a project with a millennial coworker building a wood frame for a demo. I needed another 2X6 so I marked everything for him, handed him a hammer and left. 30 minutes later I returned to find one nail almost done. This guy had no clue how to hammer a nail.
Two minutes later I completed the job to his utter amazement.
Which means their parents have become too lazy to teach them by doing simple household repairs. Mine were being taught life skills at the toddler stage. Helping in the garden, using a real kitchen knife at 3 (no fingers lost) to cut homegrown cukes for home canned pickles, 4-H at 9 with cooking and raising animals, meat judging so they'd know how to grocery shop for meat, calculating price per unit to work on their math, winning county fair sweepstakes at 10 with pretty much all areas including sewing and quilting, them thinking the Home Depot kid projects too elementary, doing the laundry as soon as they could load and unload, house cleaning, grocery shopping with choosing produce when they were in the buggy seat, mowing the lawn, couldn't have a driver's license until learning basic car maintenance and changing a flat. Want your room painted? Do it yourself. Want an allowance? Then open a bank account, learn to write a check and sit with me as I pay the monthly bills. Swim in a river, shooting skills, archery, flintnapping, soldering, jewelry and stained glass making, chainsaw, varmint disposal, etc. Daughter was on a middle school field trip to a deli meat market when she asked for casings and made a balloon animal. She has recently graduated from college and didn't bring her laundry home once.
My son would help me a little bit at work or around the house, but I never thought him very handy. When he went off to college I gave him some basic tools to go along with the Leatherman he had.
One day on Facebook some girl had posted about my son: “Jack fixed my closet door with a binder clip and a screw he pulled off of my desk - my hero!” (I was both shocked and proud!)