> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver.

"And you, too, will be a mechanic", which is how that usually goes.

People should spend enough time with tools to get the basic skills down. Some years ago a Stanford mechanical engineering prof was complaining to me that many of the Indian students from wealthy families thought that using tools was beneath them. "They've never used a pair of pliers." Now, to some extent, that mindset has spread to the American middle class.

> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?

Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.

> We'll be fine, your children aren't you, they'll find their own passions.

There's an Unschooling group on Facebook I watch. If you search "calculus" you get threads where a parent asks how their kid is going to learn calculus and the answers are mostly "when did you need calculus after high school." Aside from needing it for college, my answer would be "why am I raising my kid to be a 1:1 clone of me and not someone with a lot of different options." So I dig this as an answer. The world has ended a billion times already. People who work hard pursuing a skilled passion have never been obsolete.

I dunno, my parents were correct about my STEM education that was basically shoved up my ass as soon as I showed any science/engineering aptitude.

I'd say giving them the tools to make good decisions will naturally lead them to a particular path, why not push that path as well?

But give a boy until the age of 7 and he's ours for life, is what that old order of the monks said about values. What do you do for the remaining 11 years?

OK, sure.

Now what does that look like concretely? Still sending them to school for several hours a day, 5 days a week? Doing what during those hours?

> My mum was a mechanic, my dad was a mechanic/truck driver. My grandfather and uncle were mechanics...

Mona Lisa Vito, is that you?

Education and intellectual work isn't really worth anything if AI succeeds, so keep in mind that anything you're teaching is a hedge against AI stalling or collapsing.

We're moving more slowly on physical robotics in varied environments, so it's going to take a while before we automate reaching under the sink and turning a knob. Or maybe your kids will have a bright future in janitorial work, who knows?

Yeah, but that doesn't mean, that parents can't give their children a head start by teaching them stuff, that will smarten them up or help them understand stuff at school.

I remember my father taught me how to divide numbers and somewhat how to multiply them, before we learned that at school, with his own explanations. For multiplication he taught me indirectly, by making "number tables" with me:

    . | 1 | 2 | 3 | ...
    -------------------
    1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ... 
    2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | ... 
    3 | 3 | 6 | 9 | ...
    ..|...|...|...| ... 

For division, he often said: "How often does one number fit into the other?" as a way of explaining that operation.

Ah and he also taught me about negative numbers, when other kids at school didn't even understand what that was supposed to be, and teachers still wanted us to write "not solvable", instead of the correct answer, which were negative numbers. How silly.

When the time came and we learned about division and fractions, I had an easy time to understand what the teacher explained, due to knowing an intuition about what division actually means. The hardest thing for me was not dividing numbers, but following that methodical procedure to divide in the written form, digit by digit. Something I had done in my head already, when thinking about that some number "fits into another number" only half, ergo must be 0.5 added to the number of times it fits in there whole. Only that I didn't realize immediately, that this written way of dividing 2 numbers was the same thing actually.

In this way parents can make school life and learning soooo much easier and less painful for their kids. Granted, I did seem to have a gift for calculation in primary school, but what was so casually taught to me by my father every now and then, helped tremendously. It wasn't even like strict hours of learning. It was just using chances to show me stuff.

From my mother I learned to actually pay attention how I write words. Initially, my spelling was only OKish, not great, until one day I somehow realized "Hey I just have to think a little and pay attention." and suddenly had good spelling. But this didn't come about, without my mother sitting down with me and complaining about my handwriting and also once or twice forcing me to do some writing. My handwriting is still no good though. Glad that didn't influence my grades. I write better Chinese characters, than German words, apparently.

If I had children, I would definitely try to teach them such things. Even if it is just how to look at something or what to pay attention to, or small calculation tricks. I would try to make their learning easier and offer support when they need it to learn.