Skills | Special events

How important are the old and dying skills today?

To help answer this question, here is an amusing story with a double meaning, an allegory.

It is set in prehistoric times and consequently can't offend anyone because it is so clearly just a story. Probably, only after digesting it, will its true meaning become clear. I find it very provocative. It is in the box below.

The story may bring a smile to your face. However, replace prehistoric children with children of today and sabre-toothed tiger with any one of the skills that were common among ancestors and it does make one think.

Which old skills are still worth being taught today?

To be fair, schools have generally learnt the lesson of the sabre-toothed tiger. They no longer, for example, teach children how to use log tables or slide rules because electronic calculators work more efficiently and have become so common. You will be able to think of more examples.

My question is whether it has all gone too far: whether some of the old skills do still deserve to be taught. Many older people, for example, regret the passing of accurate spelling and neat handwriting - and again you will be able to think of more examples.

Of course many of the old skills are still taught in specialist colleges or groups or through apprenticeships - for example wiring plugs and tying particular types of knots. However are some important ones now left out of mainstream teaching?

An example of a dying skill from watching young people knit laboriously

In a recent television episode of The Edwardian Farm, viewers saw Ruth Goodman, a modern historian who was living as the woman of the Edwardian house for a year, sitting relaxing of an evening with her colleagues. She was knitting. That was what an Edwardian women would certainly have been doing as would previous generations before her - but those women would never have knitted how Ruth Goodman was knitting. She had clearly never learnt the old skill.

Within a few days there was a repeat of a Miss Marple starring the elderly Joan Hickson. She too was knitting - precisely the way all the English women of earlier generations would have done - women who had been brought up to the skill. It was how every woman knitted when I was a child in the 1940s, and how I was brought up to knit.

Knitting clearly fascinates many young people today because it is not uncommon to see them knitting something simple like a scarf. However they do not seem to know how to do it the quick and easy way that their grandparents or great grandparents would have used; their work is laboured and demanding; and they can't take their eyes off what they are knitting - presumably because they have never been taught the old skill.

My list of skills that ought to be taught today

My personal list of skills that ought to be taught more widely today comes from watching young girls trying to do tasks which women would have regarded as straightforward in the past, having been taught at a young age how to do them efficiently and effectively. Notice that I say girls and women, not men and boys. I am sure that the same is true for everyone, but I, being a woman, more easily recognise skills that would normally be associated with women.

The fact that these young people are trying to do these tasks shows that they obviously want or need to do them. Yet the young people I have watched at worst make a mess of the tasks and at best waste time and energy working inefficiently.

Here is my list. Other people would make different lists, but mine comes from my own experience and includes the following:

• How to make a really tasty roast potatoes, gravy and to clean dripping

• How to knit quickly and easily, without having to look down all the time

• How to darn a hole in knitted clothing, like socks, gloves and scarves.

What would your list be? Please let me know via the Contact page.

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