Headline isn't what the article says.
“We disrupted the tradition of the teenager taking care of the young ones,” Martin Boye of the Loro Parque Fundación says.
“They should have been under the watch of their teenage relatives, but there were no teenagers left,” Boye said. “So these calves started doing stupid things, they were not afraid of anything.
“And then they grew up and became adults and when they play now, it’s a little bit more robust.”
So they're adults who grew up without the traditional supervision of the teenagers. Journalism has gotten so bad.
Yeah, it's interesting. I was hiring embedded software engineers for space-based, human rated applications. The company was hardcore engineering, with software being a tiny piece of the engineering staff. They wanted engineering degrees from good schools as a kind of risk reduction: it didn't guarantee people were good, but it ensured that they had mastered the subject matter from an academic point of view.
But I was there 40 years, from the mid 1980s, and computer science had only more recently been a degree offered by universities for a little while at that time. Most of my peers when I started learned to code as part of other degrees or non-degreed interests. A number of math and physics majors, but a couple excellent employees who learned to code as part of music/recording. A degree wasn't a requirement for software people before my time.
So I had mixed emotions about it. Certainly a person could be an excellent developer by having learned on the job, but we were only rarely short of applicants with good GPAs from good schools. Oh, and we mostly promoted engineering leadership from the engineering staff, so your dad's situation wouldn't apply.
As an aside, my dad also came here (US) from England with only a high school education, though at least at the time, English high schools were more like US junior colleges.