It was once the authority of your teacher who gave up the stars and let people, one by one, go to their designated bathroom. The power held in her tiny hands was as vast as the seas and deep as the garden, and as hard as brass knuckles.
She was a formidable force as she walked the rows with her ruler stick, explaining fire, describing how plants eat, why they don't eat people, and building some dreams while killing off others. She was a thesaurus wrapped inside a dictionary rolled up in old copies of National Geographic.
I went camping with a young person. He's a 20-something Gen Z'er with a hard hat but without much practical knowledge or common sense that people used to learn either through school or at home, maybe with friends. But when I handed him a package of matches to start the campfire with, he was mesmerized - like I'd handed him a half-solved Rubik's Cube.
He had no idea how to start a fire. He had no idea how to light a match. He could not see how the coarse paper or the red-headed sulfur matches mingled together to create fire (trivia: which is rapid oxidation for those reading this for the science).
Conclusion: He could die in the backwoods of exposure with his pockets filled with matches. Nature would drown him. First, he wasn't starting a fire. I didn't even offer him the gas. I would have to learn what schools had stopped teaching kids.
In the pursuit of finding out what teachers were no longer teaching kids, it seems there's a whole world that is getting by on the bare minimum, and even though inspired, curious, urgent, or requirements, I developed a list of things kids will not learn by the time they are 25.
Parents have encumbered many of the occupations that the teacher once held. It's, frankly, irresponsible to unleash our children into the wilds of the city we live in. I can't help but feel that something like cursive writing is still a mandatory skill that will periodically be used throughout life; even just the skill is important. I understand the keyboard and touch screens are outnumbering the need for cursive writing and many of the items on this list - but I have a problem with days of my nephew's school days being swapped out for gender studies... at young ages. You can't change Cursive Writing 101 when there is only a budget for Do You Feel Like A Toxic Little White Boy 101.
Some of these are essential, and some are superfluous. Some are just good to know - all of them are common to the generations before them. But we're building kids without critical parts to themselves. Kids don't get dirt in their faces anymore. They don't get camera shy, they've been raised in a different environment. They don't have to wait for a whole minute for a picture to download. Granted many of these things, as I collected these details, are the parent's job to educate children on rules, laws, and regulations. But teachers teach but so too do bullies and friends and the girl in grade four who is an exchange student from New Zealand. Parents seem to be lacking in the social disciplines of jumping in puddles, cooking a decent meal for one, or showing their kids a simple electrical circuit with wire, a light, and a battery.
Times table - there are new and improved ways of multiplying large numbers, New Math, shortcuts, and rules of thumb we were never given. There are easier ways to do the math we did in the 1980s.
Cursive writing - this gives you the versatility to scrawl a note, write a letter, or fill in a box. I would say writing is an essential skill even though its usage is waning. I do NOT want to see my nephews printing everything because they weren't given the option of learning cursive. And that printing better look alive and worthy of what's being lost.
Self-improvement - kids had three years of their lives dictated by masks and space between people. I can't imagine trying to cope with self-improvement issues and any other mental health. It must be the toughest time to be growing up. Apathy does not count as "improvement."
Character - there are a lot of video games that require a character to be developed, that he or she has their experience gained, and their character is strong-sided, full of charisma, an extrovert, and an alpha male. This doesn't transfer well to an asthmatic who lives in his mom's basement with a pile of puffers. Character is a prime archetypical accomplishment, and kids should have been well into forging them when they're in the later grades. This will go over their heads until they understand it.
Chivalry, this option may be dead, but there is an expectation that people will develop habits and hold onto a set of rules that appears as delightful manners when you are with a woman or even your friends. Holding open a door for anyone should be a gesture of goodwill, and it ought to be something inside a person that reacts kindly to situations, doing much of the work people would do alone without your interventions.
Waving at a driver who let you cut in front of them. Perpetuated by immigrants, this feature of politeness has dropped off the face of driving for every age beneath my 56 years.
Using a rotary phone, phones went through the rotary phase early on, and although it's due to be lost with time, it was still a good tool to learn should there ever be a future game show called CAN YOU USE THIS?
Dealing with a payphone booth - calling home "collect" from a payphone is an international pastime. Everyone should be aware it may come down to calling Mom and Dad at 2am.
How to strike a match (and light a campfire) - the match is a crazy invention, it can light cigarettes, it can start a forest fire, or it can start a campfire. This must be a hands-on affair with you and your kids, just in case they're forced into a forest and need to build a camp.
Chess and the Queen’s Gambit - the opening move, whereupon you move the pawn in front of your queen, out two spaces, is called the Queen's Gambit; it's just an opening. But Chess is a game of the ages that requires a brain to campaign against your enemy and should be taught in school; at least the option best be there for schoolchildren to learn, even if it's just an after-school group and you are developing nrds for kods, it is still an essential skill. If Mozart helps a baby grow intellectually in the womb grow, chess will help it once it's out.
The breeze of touch-typing - try as you might, learning touch-typing is so much easier than the alternative, which I still use - a night school class didn't give me the foundation I wanted. Now, we have to make sure everyone can communicate as effectively and quickly via touch-typing as keyboards become ubiquitous and more information is put into a QWERTY-style device.
Driving a 5-speed - though manual transmissions are fading in North America, they're still all the rage in Europe. It is an extra talent in North America to drive a 5-speed. This is the Art of Driving. This is how to enjoy those Sunday drives and those travels along the hill-hugging, cliff-sided switchbacks, windy roads, and chicanes they show in car commercials.
Wilderness… at some point, maybe a picnic spot, you will see the wilderness, the bears, goats, and raccoons. You may have coyotes or bears encroaching on newly-taken human land, leading the animals to sniff through your garbage. One should be in a confident position using bear spray. Disney has given anthropomorphism a bad name, and kids think they can pet a bear cub.
Reading the 24-hour circular clock - army time, Europe time, Zulu time, the 24-hour clock. They are taught AM/PM for a standard 12 hours. What happens if a train leaves at 17:15? Or arrives at 22:35? Every country I've visited outside of Canada and America, uses the 24-hour clock. Even our own province of Quebec is in on it. I say this is important because every night you can watch history unfold. Think of the time and the year's date. 19:17, 19:59, 20:01, 20:25
Decoding cursive writing - doctors have some untranslatable handwriting. Still, for most of us, cursive writing was a personal collection of how we used a pen to write down information that someone would later have to transcribe. If you learn how a person writes, you learn a lot about them.
The fountain pen and calligraphy - the finest gift to language was the written word. And the extravagances that grew from that, from personal pens to diamond-encrusted quills, calligraphy is a great art to practice for better handwriting skills.
Table manners are essential. If chivalry is dead, table manners for, say, meeting your in-laws over dinner, are still the five-dollar skill. You don't have to know which cutlery is for the salad or the steak but you must differentiate yourself from an animal who is only glued to food to inhale it. Patience is lacking in all people these days. Being able to relax and have someone pass the salt, pour more wine, or successfully eat baby back ribs, is a key element to conducting positive characteristics related to dining out.
Shuffling playing cards, if you can't shuffle cards, you may look stupid to any onlooker who thinks it is a gift everyone is born with. If you are young and the opportunity comes along to play Poker with friends, or in front of a potential partner at a casino, you might want to have some of the essentials in your toolbox.
Backgammon strategies, Chess is a metaphor for life, a gruelling war between your thoughts as the pieces on the board. If you only play checkers, you are missing the larger picture. If you can't play Hearts, Backgammon, or Cribbage, you will miss whiling away time waiting for your overnight train to Cologne (Koln), Germany at 23:55. Board and card games rule where Chess isn't the dominant game. Around the world you can find taxi drivers playing Chess on their taxi hoods. And so it should be, this world needs an aspect ratio of things we used to do in our past.
Family Genealogy, my grandfather was deeply involved with our family tree. He was seeking, armed with a typewriter, envelopes, and stamps, the links of our roots to the 15th century. Few people are so lucky to get to glimpse into one's own five hundred year old self. Few of his offspring, and grandchildren have been inclined to follow him with his fervor. Who will teach kids about their heritage, their DNA sequence decoded to lay bare your genealogy.
Counselling, in high school we had counsellors who were, de facto, there for your mental health. They masked it by trying to sort out your lengthy career goals but they were there to attend to us. With a diversity, inclusion, and equity world upon us, it's possible kids don't get the benefit of a good therapeutic counsellor, whoever that might be, a physiatrist, a psychologist, or just a good friend.
To speak in public. This is allegedly the greatest fear among humans, although making a fool of yourself and death rival our for our amygdala's time. But the time may come when you have to address a large group of people and you'll want our youth to do it right. I went to Toastmasters for a year and gradually shed my fear and embraced the world of podium-speaking. I was not a natural. I don't see Toastmasters around anymore, they're smaller if that's an indication of time and societal biases.
Compass and orienteering. If you do happen to end up lost, in a forest, city, or a corn maze, knowing which way is north will be of great used to you. In a world that is GPS-dependent, having the skill to orient you, your ship, or a maze will be key to your survival.
Semaphore, Morse Code, DOS, Secret Messages, HTML - Latin is considered a dead language but more people study Latin or Esperanto than are learning a working knowledge of Semaphore (which is a person holding up two flags to spell things out in the alphabet from a mountain top). If you ever end up at a black screen with only a blinking cursor, you may be forced to boot your computer using DOS. It still exist and is just a few clicks away to where you may never, ever return from. No one teaches the basics anymore.
NORTH BY STARS Stargazing, celestial navigation, anyone who has seen the night sky without light pollution knows there is a wealth of imagination happening above our heads. Of the 88 constellations, Ply the Elder charted 44 of them, ascribing their luminocity and brilliance to a set of mathimatical entities we enjoy. I was only 100 years ago that Edwin Hubble realized that some of the stars our ancestors watched were actually whole other galaxies with billions of stars. And swiftly after that, he noticed a redshift in the light from these galaxies and discovered they were all flying away from us, some at beyond lightspeed. It's a fascinating at the heavens, it should be passed on before Elon Musk's satellites mess up the night sky with silent orbs of light disrupting it all. At the very least kids should be able to identify the Big Dipper, the North Star, and Cassiopeia.
Physics 101, I am a closet theoretical physicist. My friends are cold, hard numbers. I get excited thinking about String Theory and the wave/particle duality takes my breath away. But I had to elope with physics on my own since there was no higher mathematics in high school than algebra. Not even calculus. So absolutely no particle physics or Quantum Mechanics fell upon my eyes until i read a book. But kids need to be made aware of some of the incredibly impossible-to-grasp concepts of modern scientific thinkers. I think at least one hour out of twelve years of school ought to be dedicated to planting the seed in a young person's mind.
Chronologies: timelines of history, and the scientific method, today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation from Auschwitz. A news item said that more kids nowadays believe the Holocaust was a hoax. A generation that does not have to go to war may live to see a greater tragedy befall their eyes as 9/11 did to me, watching it unfold live on TV. How many people know the scientific method? How many people back science instead of G-d but would be lost to explain quantum entanglement, supersymmetry, or superpositions? We should not expect this information to fall upon people without them wanting it. Kids should want to know how science actually works and that flame should be fed gasoline because much of the subatomic world defies logic and is holistically unintuitive. "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't." said Richard Feynman. It's a fascinating universe and it can not be deduced or manipulated by rational thought but only be explored through information.
Storytelling, the ability to tell stories, whether they actually happened to you or someone else, or you are just making it up, is key to good communication with people. Anecdotal evidence to support your claims about love, the world, or the best movie you ever saw, will go the distance in rewarding you with a great character skill that people seem to be lacking in. How many people can tell you the same experience going to Disneyland?
Basic survival skills - from chopping wood to settling kindling to putting the food bag high enough that bears can't get it, the old Scout booklet was a great book for explaining the basics to kids.
Drums, there is a natural rhythm within me but I cannot dance, play basketball, or play the drums. But I know there is a natural rhythm within me, all people, that we could expose by playing its beat on a drum. If you can't keep a simple beat, the violin is a light-year away from you.
CPR and basic first aid - minimal first aid should be given to anyone going hiking. It may fall across your kids that they dress a would or shoulder you out. They shouldn't get 'grossed out", they have to know this is life and death. The "Golden Hour" is the critical window of time to get someone from an accident site to an emergency bed. Wouldn't it be great if everyone took a one-day course on saving each other?