What happens though is that things are declared unnecessary, and then when they are the objection is, "But nobody does that any more!"
Flint knapping isn't a skill that most need to know. Yet some know it. It's not a lost art. And yet the comparison is specious.
I am told to give feedback to students. I write. Fast. Cursive is fast writing. That's why it exists. That's why it's existed for 3500 years.
But my students usually can't read it because they were taught only print. Why? Because it takes time to teach cursive and it's more important to get them ready for a test. It saves time in 3rd grade and then it's a kind of time tax for the rest of their lives and an impediment to reading certain things. It's surely a way to cut them off from older handwritten materials. Then again, we're so much superior to people just 40 years ago in every way. Except for all the things we can't do and less self-discipline that we expect from ourselves and others (except for modish, fashionable things of an ideological bent, but even then we're many teachers and many masters, with all the pro cons that come with that set of attitudes).
It's the same for spelling. They aren't taught to spell. Machines can take over that job. Then when the machines fale, thay half now eyediah hough two spell. Since reading is for the purpose of getting a job, they read only things that interest them at the moment--meaning that things that might interest them are omitted. Perhaps they find them eventually. Perhaps not. If Einstein had never been exposed to things beyond what were necessary, he'd have been a damned good patent clerk, full stop.
"But nobody needs to do that now!" they say, not because it's true but because it means they then can't be held responsible. It's second only to, "When am I ever going to need this?" as a justification for indolence and intellectual sloth. My answer is, "If you don't know it, probably never. I tutored somebody in reading, he was at the 3rd grade level. Never needed it. Got a job working for an electrician. Could read enough. He watched guys his age read the manuals and take the electrician's tests, so they became his boss. He was okay. Then he was 35, his girl in 3rd grade was reading things he couldn't, and he realized that a guy he trained was appointed his boss, and he'd had the same job for over 15 years and had peaked. He needed to take the apprentice test, but couldn't read the manual. He'd never needed to know how to read above a the 2:2 level reading tests put him at. Until he was 35."
"When am I ever going to need to know about acids and bases?" When you're cleaning your pool with muriatic acid, when you get ammonia in your eye, then it's good to know about neutralization reactions. Stoichiometry? It's all ratios. "Hey, I doubled the flour in this recipe and it came out wrong." "Did you double the rest of the ingredients?" "Huh?" Law of conservation of energy? "Don't need that. But look at this pill, you put it in your gas tank and it triples the miles per gallon."
Strictly speaking, the same holds for civics. There are people to handle that for them. They can always look up what they need to know. (Yeah, if they know that it exists and what it's called. It explains why so many people get so many things wrong. Who knew that the alternative minimum tax was a write-off against income to keep the rich from having to pay taxes?)
And thinking.
And actual knowledge. Since what you know is all there is, it makes sense that PhDs in chemistry work at a 12th grade level when it comes to history; and brilliant historians think at a high school level in chemistry. There is no all-purpose "critical thinking" skill set. No knowledge, no thinking.
It's like a lot of other skills. If we had alternate skills that replaced them, it would be different. But the alternate skill for spelling is slacking off and the alternate skill for cursive is getting ready for another test that doesn't show what everything thinks it shows. Now, in a way interdependence has rendered some skills unnecessary. We specialize, and have since 5000 BC. Still, every skill is a way of not being held hostage. If you can grow food, "food deserts" are what your neighbors suffer from. If you can sing in tune, you're not dependent on commercialized singers and following the herd. "Hey, this is cool!" Why? Because somebody else said so, and you outsourced your aesthetics. Until the market is hyperfragmented, but then either prices go up to support the professionals we need to pay to do what everybody used to do, or the professionals have day jobs.
The upside is that a lot of kids learn these skills anyway.
The downside is that they're taught by parents who value these skills or by teachers who know their kids will do well on the standardized tests anyway. Those parents who don't value them or don't know them don't teach them, and at-risk kids disproportionately not taught them. There's a strong ethnic and class skew in this. Often those who learn the skills are those who need them the least.
Which is why the latest take I've heard on why we don't need some of these skills is because they're elitist or classist or evaluating people on the basis of them is racist. Which is just another way of justifying not learning them, but more pernicious because it says they shouldn't be taught. What's elitist isn't not teaching them to the lower SES students, what's elitist is the idea that anybody should know them. Instead, others should make sure that these skills aren't needed. To not be racist and classist, I have to pay the tax for what others haven't learned.
Then again, I also make my own soap (or buy special, hypoallergenic soap). I grow what food I can. And I'm getting a grip on 7th position on violin and working on springing arpeggios so that I can play even more fun stuff. And in so doing, meet with others and have fun without outsourcing everything to somebody else.
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