Time's up?

I was alerted by Mr. Philbin to this story -- it's from 2019, citing a story from 2018, and it's from Mr. P, but it's still interesting.

Schools Are Beginning To Take Down Analogue Clocks 

Because Kids Can’t Read Them Anymore

...Should we be at all surprised to learn that kids today are having trouble reading analog clocks? Unless their parents have these types of clocks hanging on the walls of their homes, why would the children ever need to use them to tell time? So even if someone teaches them how to read an analog clock, the children might quickly forget again if they never get any real practice.

This has become so much of an issue that a lot of teachers in the UK have taken down analog clocks in classrooms and replaced them with digital clocks. They are afraid that students would otherwise waste too much time wondering what time it is and stress themselves trying to figure out how much longer they have before they need to turn in their exams.

The source of the story is questionable -- something called APost -- but it links to The Telegraph, so I assume there's some basis for the piece. The 'Graph story is behind a paywall, alas. 

Is it true that kids can't read a regular analog clock these days? I guess it's possible that no one ever taught them. Still, I remember my mother teaching me the basics -- the Little Hand is on the Hours, the Big Hand is on the Minutes -- before I even started school. How hard is it to remember that?

Of course, the piece about children freaking out about the time during exams has the ring of truth -- not because the kids do panic, but because teachers might think the little perishers would, and our whole goal in life is not to educate and challenge the next generation but to coddle them like fresh eggs.

A follow-up piece in USA Today, however, quotes Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, who says telling time the old-fangled way is still valuable: 

"The skills that you need to read an analog clock are skills that kids when they’re young begin to learn," she said, citing concepts such as counting by fives and fractions.

Good for you, Carol Burris! Her answer is similar to the old answer to "Why do we have to learn algebra?" which has always been something like "Learning algebra helps to develop your critical thinking skills. That includes problem solving, logic, patterns, and reasoning." (Quote from Wonderopolis.) So being able to understand the face of a clock is not only easy and interesting but useful. Look at some of the things schools are expected to teach kids these days -- music, drama, cheerleading, sex ed, environmentalism, hating America -- are any of these necessary to produce citizens capable of conducting themselves in the world? No, but our teachers think they're important. Well, I think being able to read an analog clock is, too. In advanced classes they'll learn to read the ones without the numbers. 

Roman numerals are graduate-level stuff, though.

It's nice to know that in an era where schools and libraries are dumping world classics, and teaching woke history and even woke mathematics, that there's still support in the United States for something that isn't dumbed down. So there's hope that when the little brainwashed know-nothings emerge to hang us all in an American cultural revolution, they'll be able to determine the time for the public hangings in both digital and analog. 

In the UK, the oldsters will be able to send messages to one another with a clock cipher and escape.