The other day I took my seven-year-old son Louis to buy some running shoes. “Pick something with Velcro,” I said, as he trotted off to roam the racks.
A clerk, hovering nearby, gave me a jaundiced look, “You know we get high school kids in here who have to buy Velcro because they never learned to tie their shoes. Every year their parents would just buy them Velcro because it was easier than making them learn how to tie laces.”
I stared at him and he went on.
“The other day we had to special order a pair of shoes for this kid’s high school graduation because he couldn’t tie his laces, and he needed a pair of Velcro formal shoes.”
I put the shoes Louis had chosen back on the shelf, and picked out a pair of lace-up running shoes. It wasn’t just that I’d been shamed into compliance by the salesman, but something Jane Jacobs had written about in her last book about the coming dark ages hit home. The loss of knowledge, she said, once vanished, is so difficult to regain — even if it’s something as mundane as tying your shoes.
In case you think this episode is an isolated example, the other day I heard a youth worker, whose job it is to help teens at risk, say that almost none of them know how to tie their shoes. I’m sure this isn’t a causal relationship — wear Velcro, go to jail — but it made me think. What else have we lost, or failed to pass along, to the generation of kids about to inherit an increasingly compromised planet?
I have long argued that my generation is by and large worthless. But I have a hard time believing that kids are growing up without even learning how to tie their shoes.