By now some of you may have read the news that a few schools in Great Britain are removing analog clocks from the walls of classrooms, and replacing them with digital ones. The decision was made when it was found that many students cannot tell the time on traditional analog clocks, which is causing difficulties when they try to determine how much time is left in a test or exam.
The resulting comments from many proves that there is no story so trivial that it can’t drive people into a froth of outrage. It isn’t just the fact that many young people can’t tell the time using big and little hands that has people up in arms (pun intended); some commentators take the opportunity to also castigate “kids today” for not being able to write in a legible cursive hand, or make change from a banknote without a cash register to help them, or any number of other things that were once common and no longer seem to be.
And really, why should they be? While telling time from an analog clock, or having beautiful penmanship, or knowing without being told how much change to give back from a $20, are useful skills, they’re no longer strictly necessary in today’s world. I’ve never heard anyone complain that people can no longer tell time from a sundial, after all; was that a thing when clocks were invented? Having beautiful handwriting was undoubtedly a benefit when that was the only way to communicate, but be honest: when was the last time you wrote anything lengthier than a grocery list by hand? There’s a reason why as soon as Caxton invented the printing press, books stopped being painstakingly copied by hand, and why in the late nineteenth century offices quickly adopted the typewriter instead of having clerks spend time writing letters: handwriting things takes time, and when a faster alternative presents itself people seize it.
As for making change: I used to be able to do that in my head without thinking, but these days I’d have to pause and do some unaccustomed mental math if I didn’t have a cash register to prompt me (and when the power goes out many businesses have to close anyway, making the point academic).
The truth is that the world, and the technology in it, changes all the time, and those living in that world adapt; or, in the case of younger people, grow up knowing nothing except that world. Why on Earth would we blame them for learning the technology of their world, rather than the archaic ways of a world they never knew, and that have no—or very little—meaning in 2018?
Peg Bracken wrote, in her etiquette book I Try to Behave Myself, that it was bad manners (and also boring) for an adult to reproach a child for being shaped by a changing world. “The child can’t help it. He’s learning different things, about a different world, differently.”
That was way back in 1960, showing that this issue is one that has been present, about one new thing or another, for several decades (and probably far longer, given the older generation’s propensity to moan about the shortcomings, real or imagined, of the generations coming up behind). So let’s cut the kids some slack when it comes to how they tell time, and save our outrage for where it really matters: when they show up late for dinner.
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