shrug
I'm 45. I predate the web entirely - it came out after I started in college. I almost predate the internet itself. I don't have a TV in the house, but I do watch a lot of hours of youtube during a week, and maybe 60-70% of it is of an educational bent - whether cooking or woodworking or metalworking or some other skill-based thing, or maybe history or something else non-fictional.
I think that youtube is probably one of the best educational resources we've built in the last few decades. I only got started in woodwork because of a Paul Sellers youtube video building a bench in his back garden. All the bowl turning I do is self-taught using youtube (not by choice, mind, covid shut down my course
). The inlay stuff, all the handtool work, the joined chests, pretty much everything has come from either youtube videos or other online video courses that I paid for (like steve latka's inlay stuff done by lee valley) but which I went and got off the back of youtube videos by the people involved (like all of Richard Maguire's stuff).
I mean, I'm sitting beside something like four thousand books along a full wall of double-and-triple-stacked floor to ceiling shelves, and there's maybe thirty pure woodworking and woodturning books, about a hundred cooking books, and just loads more on other topics from target shooting to amateur radio and they're a great resource as well (and better than youtube for a few topics, like electronics) but being able to watch an expert up close in good lighting doing something as they explain what they're doing? That's just an exceptional resource to have. It's like someone took the open university programmes I used to binge watch at 0600 on a saturday as a teenager and put them on fifty thousand channels, categorised, 24 hours a day, on demand, and searchable.
All the other stuff that comes with the youtube package that's negative - from the "like and subscribe!" chanting to the making a song and dance out of the video for editing purposes to the website algorithm trying to send you to pro-nazi stuff if you watch the wrong starting video and let autoplay choose the next four or five videos, well, that's where the whole "critical thinking" bit comes in and you have to exercise care in getting the stuff you want without getting the other stuff on you. I mean, if you went to a school run by the nuns or the brothers, you know negative sides to teaching aren't limited to youtube
And yeah, I learned to change a plug and a tyre from my father and to sew from my mother and to knit from my grandmother, but not all families are going to have (a) all those members, or (b) all those skills to pass along. And in-person teaching from an expert is also very very good, but there aren't enough experts for everyone to be able to go and watch. At least this way, we may not lose all their skills when they pass on.