Charlotte learned to tie her shoes a couple of weeks ago. She’s doing a few weeks of occupational therapy to help her improve her fine motor skills so that her handwriting won’t stand in the way of her progress in school, and at the first session the therapist showed Charlotte how to tie shoelaces using a completely different method than the way I learned (and probably you did too, if you’re over 30). She was beside herself with pride to be able to do it, especially when I told her that I couldn’t tie my own shoes until I was ten or eleven. Charlotte’s motor development issues were inherited from me, though they’re a lot less pronounced than mine were at that age, and it appears she will benefit greatly from the OT sessions. Such things did not exist in my childhood, and so I simply lived with being unable to do some tasks that required a lot of coordination, or came to them much later than most people. Ask me sometime about learning to drive.
I bring this up because I read this article in Orion Magazine this morning, and it made me think for a minute. The article is coming from a different angle, namely the argument that many small but useful skills are lost to two or three generations of Americans because we have engineered our daily lives to avoid the tasks to the point that we are too dependent on the conveniences. Anyone who saw the movie “Wall-E” last summer knows what I am talking about.
There’s some measure of the “things were better in the good old days when *I* was a kid” in this, and it’s amusingly interesting to note that the sentiment so readily reaches across the supposed liberal-conservative divide. But there is also a nugget of truth in there that while there are some skills, crafts, arts, and trades that truly become obsolete due to the march of progress, there are others that have been transformed into hobby status or are indeed in danger of being forgotten which still might serve people well. That argument particularly resonates with the current zeitgeist that says we’re headed back to harder times and that many of us might find we won’t be able to have so many conveniences in short order. You might remember this article from Popular Mechanics that made the round online when it first appeared: 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Practically nothing on the list is a skill that is in danger of obsolescence, and it’s impossible to argue the usefulness of any one of them, although not everything on this list pertains to everyone’s way of life. The list also isn’t anywhere near exhaustive, because I can easily think up just as many other skills to add to the list that are just as worthwhile, but it definitely speaks to the breadth of mundane competence.
Personally, I am not too concerned that most people don’t know how to butcher hogs or build log cabins or candle eggs just because Grandma did when she was a girl, and if tying laces is less and less of a requirement to be able to put ones shoes on in the morning, then don’t fret that elementary schools don’t teach it as a part of the daily curriculum. But I do agree with the sentiment to the extent that skills like cooking, basic sewing, gardening, minor repair work, and so on are geuinely important fallback skills that any person in our society should acquire. Like the Popular Mechanics list demonstrates, some might be more pertinent for you or me than others, but they can’t be allowed to drift out of common knowledge or practice entirely.
