Example: Old people often complain about young people not having “basic knowledge” and say that younger generations know and understand less of the world than they do.
Who was responsible for teaching them?
It’s fine in specific institutional contexts, like academia or employment where training is provided. Basic knowledge would be what’s covered in a 101 class, apprenticeship, or orientation.
Out in the world? People will yell at you for not knowing something, and the something they know is wrong. Don’t bother with those people more than is required. You can’t even expect that everyone makes it out of high school with the same information.
It’s entirely subjective and one generation’s “basic knowledge” may be someone else’s “useless esoterica.”
For instance, old people jerk themselves a lot about writing cursive and driving stickshift (and winning WW2 somehow???) but don’t know how to put their phones on silent.
On the other hand, people are forgetting how to read and how to learn, and I’d say that’s basic knowledge… so, case-by-case.
to add, the “basic” part is subjective, like you said, and downplaying other knowledge the generation might have.
can’t really say what a good diplomatic response for this should be. i usually just shrug and say “sorry” when complained with this.
If you’re polite about it, you’re being more gracious than they are being. I think maybe something like, “Yes, I can see where that would be a very helpful skill to have.” And maybe it would be a helpful skill to have, and even a further maybe would be that maybe it would even be worth learning!
Checkmate, I can write cursive, drive manual all the time, and put my phone on silent 😉
I also can operate an 1890 Victrola.
Am I normal? No.
Millennial?
All knowledge, even “basic” knowledge, is learned. No one was born with the ability to write cursive or operate a manual transmission. Manual transmission drivers can even spot a newbie on the road when they pop the clutch and stall out. We all learned these skills.
The real issue in modern society is that we aren’t effectively teaching the newer generations these skills, whichever ones our society considers basic. Thats a problem far more complex than this post can really cover.
But I don’t think it’s too much to ask students to have way less screen time (no phones in school and less reliance on laptops/tablets for assignments and lessons.) I’d also go so far as to suggest schools do away with sports if they are unable to meet their academic mandates (school is for teaching academics, sports are a “pass-time” because they were activities we did with the free time we had. If you aren’t accomplishing the goals of your institution your institution doesn’t deserve the reward.)
I think part of it is that the concept of teaching yourself things or learning on your own seems to be vanishing.
Totally!!
My take: the inability for a human to be bored today has killed the love of learning. Bored? Open the Tok and scroll. In ye olden far before times (even before Ye Family Computer of Yore) you were bored as a kid and used your brain to find activities.
When I was a kid and even now, when I’m bored I look around me and do a project or fix something or learn how to do something ive been wanting. I just want to learn all the time. I feel thats really rare now.
I’d agree on zero screens in school,or at minimum, Linux only laptops. Zero tablet bullshit.
Fair argument. Just wanted to point out that cursive has actual academic benefits. For one thing writing and drawing use both halves of the brain and since cursive is a form of drawing it engages both sides better than writing alone would. The information has a better chance of being retained that way.
Taking notes by hand also improves the odds of the information being retained with the added benefit of having a hardcopy to look back on if you forget. Like a grocery list. Taking notes is labor intensive so cursive was developed as a way to quickly write. Thats the whole point of it.
Luckily some schools are bringing back paper and pencil and teaching cursive because of the unmitigated disaster digital-only schooling has proven itself to be.
Edit Added some of the documented benefits of cursive handwriting since so many people are calling me out. Yes, cursive is good for you. Practice it, take time and improve the letters you write sloppily and you’ll learn to love it. I know, I was once like you and had to work to improve my cursive and now I love it.
Cursive writing helps improve brain development, memory retention, and fine motor skills.
Brain and Cognitive Growth
Stronger neural connections: Writing in cursive engages both sides of the brain, unlike typing or standard print.
Better memory: The continuous motion of linking letters helps students remember words and grasp new concepts.
Aids learning challenges: The fluid style helps students who deal with dyslexia or dysgraphia by treating each word as a single connected unit.
Motor Skills and Writing Ease
Finer hand control: Shaping connected letters builds hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity.
Less hand fatigue: Smooth, flowing lines reduce the stop-and-start stress common in regular print writing.
Fewer letter reversals: Connected motion stops young children from confusing similar letters like “b” and “d”.
Practical Uses
Reading history: Knowing cursive allows people to read old family letters, journals, and major historical papers.
Personal signatures: It gives individuals a reliable way to sign official forms, checks, and legal documents.
Isn’t cursive faster?
Generally yeah. That was one of the main selling points of cursive
I don’t know that cursive has demonstrated benefits, but writing by hand does improve learning, as does reading on paper.
Cursive has a weird cult following. As someone who likes the idea of cursive, it took quite a bit of effort to give up on it. It’s only theoretically faster, and it does so at the expense of legibility. I can’t read my own writing at speed, and I can´t read Charles Darwin’s either.
I started taking up Gregg shorthand to solve this problem. Faster and more legible, even without abbreviations.
Cursive writing helps improve brain development, memory retention, and fine motor skills.
Brain and Cognitive Growth
Stronger neural connections: Writing in cursive engages both sides of the brain, unlike typing or standard print.
Better memory: The continuous motion of linking letters helps students remember words and grasp new concepts.
Aids learning challenges: The fluid style helps students who deal with dyslexia or dysgraphia by treating each word as a single connected unit.
Motor Skills and Writing Ease
Finer hand control: Shaping connected letters builds hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity.
Less hand fatigue: Smooth, flowing lines reduce the stop-and-start stress common in regular print writing.
Fewer letter reversals: Connected motion stops young children from confusing similar letters like “b” and “d”.
Practical Uses
Reading history: Knowing cursive allows people to read old family letters, journals, and major historical papers.
Personal signatures: It gives individuals a reliable way to sign official forms, checks, and legal documents.
Sounds plausible.
Basic knowledge is knowing when to cite your sources.
Dyspraxia gang say no to that
The left/right brain thing has never had any scientific backing. We use both hemispheres of our brain for art and logic.
In addition, cursive is no more a form of drawing than block printing is. And it was historically used primarily to speed up writing and make quills last longer. It is often used in calligraphy, but that’s not typically what boomers are ranting about (very few of them know the first thing about calligraphy).
Taking notes by hand does have documented benefits, but I’m not aware of any evidence that cursive is better than block printing (unless speed is a significant concern). And as a millenial who grew up reading and writing both, I can say with certainty that block printing is typically more legible and more consistent across penmanship.
Did you read your link? It actually does talk about the two sides specializing. Have you ever seen the people who had the connected sliced? You would never say that if you had seen the videos. There is most certainly differences in how the left and right brain function.
Its well studied and in fact has many benefits. You’re just mad your cursive looked like shit and the teacher called you up to her desk in frustration as she tried to decipher an s from a r on your work.
Cursive writing helps improve brain development, memory retention, and fine motor skills.
Brain and Cognitive Growth
Stronger neural connections: Writing in cursive engages both sides of the brain, unlike typing or standard print.
Better memory: The continuous motion of linking letters helps students remember words and grasp new concepts.
Aids learning challenges: The fluid style helps students who deal with dyslexia or dysgraphia by treating each word as a single connected unit.
Motor Skills and Writing Ease
Finer hand control: Shaping connected letters builds hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity.
Less hand fatigue: Smooth, flowing lines reduce the stop-and-start stress common in regular print writing.
Fewer letter reversals: Connected motion stops young children from confusing similar letters like “b” and “d”.
Practical Uses
Reading history: Knowing cursive allows people to read old family letters, journals, and major historical papers.
Personal signatures: It gives individuals a reliable way to sign official forms, checks, and legal documents.
source?
I’m not wasting time sourcing a half dozen research papers on cursive handwriting. Sorry. Read up on the topic yourself instead of knee-jerk hating something you never practiced enough to get good at. Like I said, I was a shitty cursive writer in highschool and years later when I began practicing my cursive I got better and began enjoying it. It is useful. It’s a great excuse to not use your phone (spybot) for everything like making a grocery list. These are just facts.
phone (spybot)
That greatly depends on the phone and app used for note taking.
That’s a lot of assumptions about me in a few sentences! I briefly searched for sources myself, but couldn’t find them. Since your comments here read like copy/pastes I guessed you had sources, but it seems it’s more like a religion to you; no sources because they’re just facts.
I looked and found a probably AI page that conflated every study that looked at “writing by hand” with “cursive.” Honestly, the most stupid shit. Cursive is just a form of handwriting with a cult following.
That’s what I found, so it really is a religion.
I think it greatly depends on “basic knowledge” definition. I once worked with an new-ish engineer who couldn’t put air in her car tires. She told me she tried, she went to an air pump but couldn’t figure out anyway to attach the hose. I offered to take a look. Turns out she didn’t know that you could remove the valve stem cap.
Another example was another person didn’t know you had to file taxes, this is in usa. He knew taxes got taken out of his paycheck. He knew he paid sales tax. He didn’t know you had to file taxes and you could either get a refund or a additional bill. Not saying he didn’t know HOW he literally didn’t know it was a thing.
These were both college grads in stem fields before Ai. That said I mostly place blame for these things on their parents for not showing these basic things.
At my job, I assemble display items (bicycles, BBQs, lawn mowers, log splitters, etc). Been doing this for 8 years. So far, two customers tried to assemble their BBQs but couldn’t. Both claimed to be engineers. It’s not that difficult if one reads the instructions.
I don’t know, I wouldn’t consider bbq assembly “basic knowledge”
Their education levels don’t matter here. These are examples of things your parents are expected to teach you.
True, hence my final sentence. Also I would consider these “basic knowledge” which is what the question was asking about.
Yeah. I really think there is only so much people can really keep up where they know it. Preppers pretty much teach themselves stuff that was common knowledge in the past. those older people lack all sorts of basic knowledge. It comes down to what you need to know. The most useful basic knowledge is just reading and reading comprehension and math helps a whole lot to up to a point. Enough to read how to books and such. good to have enough experience that it does not have to explain how every tool works. of course we have video instructions now so hard to say how much that is needed. Still math, reading, writing. They help a lot in general cognitive understanding. I highly recomend elementary logic.
Subjective and this hardly useful.
Yeah. Basic knowledge at one point used to include car maintenance and cursive.
I think there’s merit to it — there’s just some stuff you need to know to be a successful person in the world. If you’re a couple generations removed from me, or from a culture that’s significantly different from mine, your corpus of “basic knowledge” will be significantly different from mine, and that’s okay.
They think the things they learned as a child are still relevant today.
Sometimes they’re right, most of the time they’re not.
Like, some people are still super upset that cursive isn’t taught in school, mostly because humans don’t like being the last in a line of knowledge, because that means they didn’t really need it.
For an extreme example, look at the pushback again cochlear implants from deaf communities, especially from people over 40. A significant amount want to prevent deaf children from being able to hear, just because it makes the deaf community smaller.
Even if people don’t admit it, we all want our “tribe” to expand. And tribal lines are only racial lines when racial segregation is happening. Segregate all the dead kids into a “school for the deaf” and they’re gonna get tribal and want to see that tribe continue to exist even if that means their tribe members are worse off personally.
It’s basic human psychology, to tie it back up to your question.
Getting mad at later generations for not learning the same stuff, is just a small slice of that behavior.
