Let's grow handymen

My jaw dropped last week ... I heard a bloke I know ring a plumber and ask him to fix a dripping tap.

Where I come from, that task would have meant half an hour with a couple of spanners and a bright shiny new tap washer (available at a hardware store near you). For way less than a dollar.

Of course, you would have to know where the toby is, so you could turn off the water. You do know where your toby is, don't you?

You would have been proud of me, curmudgeonly as I am - I didn't ask him if he was going to get the plumber to change a few light bulbs for him while he was there. But I did get to thinking about the sorry state of blokeness in our little part of the world.

I saw the fun some young blokes were having running flat-out down Drews Ave in their "soap-box racers" recently.

Those dedicated blokes had worked hard to plan, source the parts, burn countless midnight candles putting it all together, then risked the contempt of the pitiless crowd by running it in competition down the hill on a Sunday.

From these small beginnings, the young folk watching over the shoulders of the builders could become the builders of the fine machinery we see at the Taupo Quay drags, or at Manfeild. Even one of those powerful hydroplanes racing on our favourite river.

Or perhaps they will be the ones to save our society, as we know it, by working out where the next drop of fuel will come from, or clean up our polluted rivers, or make a wind turbine or an electric car.

They have been shown what is possible, and given the confidence of learning the small things, such as how to hold a spanner, or how tight to do up a bolt, or how to plan.

We hear a lot about how New Zealand's number eight wire ingenuity will save the day, and we will be all right when the world returns to the year 1900 because we are so inventive.

We are inventive. I don't need to rehearse the many technologies developed in New Zealand, or by Kiwis generally, but the blokes who did the inventing in the last 100 years were people who could change their own tap washers and had probably never resorted to a number eight wire construction in their lives.

We have been capable of world-class developments in this country, but are we growing enough young talent to make it happen now?

I believe that this kind of talent is raised over many years, not produced in a politically suspect academic factory, turning out more academics who can't change their own tap washers.

Certainly, our universities will give our young minds some skills, and teach them how to order their thoughts, but these skills are useless when the youngster doesn't know how to think in a practical sense in the first place.

Parents, save our world - help your children gain the skills we will need in the future.

You can start by helping them do little jobs around the house.

Try Google and you'll have 2.8 million "hits" telling you how to change a tap washer. This will take you to quite a few two-minute videos on YouTube which will show you how.

Don't know how to access Google? Shame on you. But you can ask any 10-year-old, who almost certainly can, provided you are able to swallow your pride and suffer the burden of the inevitable patronising.

And if all this is too hard for you, make sure you get the plumber to remove his shoes at the door.