I think we can split that kind of knowledge into 3 levels:
- Doing your own brake job
- Knowing how to do a break job
- Basic hands-on skill and logic skills to figure out how to do a brake job if you need to
IMO "we" have failed to teach #3 enough - in many areas.
Of course, it takes a bit of #1 in similar areas to get there.
If I ran the world, there would be middle & high school classes on:
- Household finance basics
- Business basics (incl. how taxes in businesses work)
- Personal tax basics
- Shop class (auto, wood, machine)
- How Stuff Works
- Troubleshooting
- Conflict resolution
- Applied Logical thinking
- Applied Critical Thinking
- Practical Statistics - and how they can mislead
- How to get to the truth - how our brains work, biases, assumptions
Oh - I gotta go, the big and and little hand say I need to get back to work!