mapcr77 - you mentioned making a spaghetti sauce for half the price of a ready made one - brilliant example. My daughter is 13 and at grammar school. Her first cooking lesson consisted of them making a basic tomato sauce, then using that tomato sauce as the base for countless other recipes. Over the following couple of weeks, they were encouraged to come up with their own recipes using that tomato sauce. My son is a school year younger than her, and at a different school and his first cooking lesson was making pizza - or rather assembling a pizza using a ready made pizza base, a tube of tomato paste, cheese and either ham or mushrooms. How is that teaching them to cook? When I was at school, our cooking lessons taught us not only how to make sauces and pastry from scratch, but how to create a balanced meal. Yes, parents should make the effort to teach their kids to cook, but if the schools are teaching them that assembling a pile of ready made ingrediants is cooking, then that's what they'll do.