100 skills every man (or woman) should know (with videos!) from Popular Mechanics - learn how to split firewood or solder a wire, among others. Before you look, take the quiz and see how you stack up against people like our own Adam Savage. Need more? Esquire offers a more touchy-feely list of skills; the Art of Manliness has a list that includes how to land a plane and how to survive a street fight; and also a (PDF) book listing medical skills for surviving the end of the world. And if you prefer the fictional, there is also the classic list of skills from Robert Heinlein and the skills of a certain TV stuntman.
posted by blahblahblah on Oct 2, 2008 - 96 comments

What do making a poultice out of deer fat, IDDQD & IDKFA, and balancing the tonearm on a turntable have in common? They are obsolete skills.
posted by shiu mai baby on Feb 20, 2008 - 49 comments

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking...
posted by Kwantsar on Sep 7, 2006 - 54 comments

The Value of Algebra: "Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers."
posted by daksya on Feb 16, 2006 - 190 comments

Teenagers find the internet a frustrating experience A survey in the north east of England finds that teenagers are increasingly being alienated in their online experience because they aren't being given the skillsets to cope with finding or using the information. Seems to be the old story of schools buying computers but the kids not being engaged enough on how to use them (which has been the case since I was stuck in front of an Acorn Archimedes fifteen years go). Here is a similar article from Australia which describes how their eductation system is coping with the issue.
posted by feelinglistless on Jul 23, 2003 - 14 comments