What ever happened to learning this stuff from good ol' dad, or your grandfather?
I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy...
Whether you meant to or not, you've answered your own question. Suppose you lived in the alternate universe where you didn't have a stepfather and learned everything from your birth father. Who would you have learned the skills from then? The problem with relying on passing handiness down from generation to generation is that once it fails to propagate for a generation, it's very hard to get back.
It's hard to find a teacher for adults for handy skills, and a lot of being handy comes from having long term exposure to handiness anyway. Taking a weekend class (if one exists) or reading a book from the library on how to hang cabinets (for example) isn't going to cover all of the possible gotchas that could come up. Some of those gotchas are probably best solved by people with a lot of experience hanging cabinets, but there are probably others that you could probably solve if you've lived a generally handy life.
If this sounds like institutional knowledge, that's probably a fair comparison. It's just that the family is a very small institution that doesn't necessarily have a lot of redundancy in who has the institutional knowledge. Once you lose it, it's pretty much lost, and that's the reason to have a shop class in school. It provides a mechanism to add that knowledge to families that don't have it from a (hopefully) experienced person who has enough time in contact with his or her students to impart more knowledge directly and pass on general handiness as a mindset rather that a specific skill.
I was lucky enough to have a step-father who was fairly handy...
Whether you meant to or not, you've answered your own question. Suppose you lived in the alternate universe where you didn't have a stepfather and learned everything from your birth father. Who would you have learned the skills from then? The problem with relying on passing handiness down from generation to generation is that once it fails to propagate for a generation, it's very hard to get back.
It's hard to find a teacher for adults for handy skills, and a lot of being handy comes from having long term exposure to handiness anyway. Taking a weekend class (if one exists) or reading a book from the library on how to hang cabinets (for example) isn't going to cover all of the possible gotchas that could come up. Some of those gotchas are probably best solved by people with a lot of experience hanging cabinets, but there are probably others that you could probably solve if you've lived a generally handy life.
If this sounds like institutional knowledge, that's probably a fair comparison. It's just that the family is a very small institution that doesn't necessarily have a lot of redundancy in who has the institutional knowledge. Once you lose it, it's pretty much lost, and that's the reason to have a shop class in school. It provides a mechanism to add that knowledge to families that don't have it from a (hopefully) experienced person who has enough time in contact with his or her students to impart more knowledge directly and pass on general handiness as a mindset rather that a specific skill.