I was talking to my kids about this only this week.
Back when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s in the UK, kids were brought up aware of the dangers of things like electricity, large bodies of water, roads etc, but all that has fallen by the wayside. We even had a rally driver visit our school as some sort of education program around how to drive safely.
I guess it just isn’t profitable to educate any more.
Do they not do stuff like that anymore? I'd be interested to hear about what's happening in schools nowadays — I don't know any school-age kids, so I'm unaware of what things are like.
My local school does a drunk driving "skit" every year which involves student actors being pulled out of a junked car donated by a scrapyard using the fire department's real "jaws of life". Hard to tell if it actually gets the message across though since most kids seem to think it's just a cool show.
I was just thinking recently about the time I got a faceful of strychnine as a small child prowling through the hall closet while my grandma's back was turned. It was just sitting on the shelf, white powder in a little glass jar, no safety cap, no Mr Yuck sticker. It might not have even had a label. I happened to knock it over, and I can still remember the taste nearly sixty years later. We used to live so dangerously.