Telling the time and handwriting... do our children need to learn skills like we did?

DOES it matter that children aged 16 don’t know how to tell the time? This, I’m told, is the reality for some teenagers in 21st Century

Britain.

My friend was horrified to learn from his son that some boys in his class couldn’t tell the time from an analogue clock… because they’d never had to. They just look at their mobile phones.

“It’s shocking,” the dad said. “That was one of the basic things we had to learn when we were kids.”

I shared his outrage at first. Like him, a child of the 50s and 60s, I had to learn what the big hand and the little hand meant in various positions.

But that’s the key, we had to. It was the only way we knew when we had to get home from playing out; when it was time for Doctor Who on the telly; or how much further the big hand on the school clock had to move before we could escape the misery of geography.

But if we had had little digital wizards in our hands, showing us the time in figures, would we have seen the sense in learning clock language?

We probably wouldn’t have got over-excited about Pick Of The Pops on the radio on a Sunday evening either, because we could have listened to what we wanted, when we wanted, with Spotify at our fingertips.

Or longed for the “sixpenny rush” for the Saturday matinee at the local fleapit when we could stream movies live on our mobiles.

Cursive writing is another casualty of modern times. During the First World War, even poorly educated working-class lads sent beautifully handwritten letters home from the trenches, yet my friend’s son also revealed that some of his peers could only write in print.

Then there’s spelling. As one who had to master that dark art as part of his job, I cringe at the ignorance shown by some on Facebook (“dosant” for “doesn’t”, “ur” for “your”, “defiantly” for “definitely” and so on) with long, rambling sentences devoid of capital letters or punctuation.

But I had to learn that stuff. They didn’t, and would probably regard me as an irrelevant old geek.

If all this makes you despair for the future of younger generations, take heart. The old times-tables are alive and well – but where we had to write out “two times two equals… etc” over and over with a leaky fountain pen on sheets of paper, today’s youngsters are helped by modern technology. A video shown in local primary schools employs eye-popping graphics as a spaceman counts up the tables and explodes a giant meteorite with one kick.

It could be argued that those kids don’t need that stuff, since they’ll be able to do it all on their phones. But there’s a lot to be said for stretching the mind not merely when we have to, but because it’s good for us.

If we had had little digital wizards in our hands, showing us the time in figures, would we have seen the sense in learning clock language?