It is the sort of opportunity which should have my fellow knitters queuing out the door - well, not quite but almost.
I was approached recently about finding someone to teach a young boy to knit. That in itself should be something people simply want to do. Let's pass such skills on to as many people as possible is my view.
I know the family. I know the boy. I have been involved in other ways and I can't do this.
He's a nice boy, a very nice boy. He is also extremely physically fragile - so much so that he is home-schooled. Teaching him will be a challenge for a number of reasons but not because of a lack of capacity to learn. He is intelligent, very intelligent. He wants to learn all sorts of things. One of the challenges for me has been to help his family find ways of giving him the maximum experiences possible in his limited world. We are still working on it.
His grandmother taught him to crochet but he can't knit. He wants to learn. It will be a good activity for him. It won't matter to him that it takes time to produce something knitted. I think he will pick it up very quickly and any teacher is going to be challenged by his need to know more.
I am assuming that the secretary passed the information on to the general meeting before I got there. Nobody mentioned it to me but that's not surprising. I know another group has been approached too. We have been trying to think of other people who might be interested and who will be both willing and able to fit in with the unique circumstances of this family. Someone out there will help. I am sure of that.
But it also made me think of how essential it is for the old to teach the young such things. The middle generation, the parents of the young, don't seem to have the time and now the older generation seems to have less time too.
Who is going to teach the household skills, the knitting, sewing, woodwork, mechanical, and other skills? Or, don't they really matter any more?
Are they going to become rare skills?
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3 comments:
I hope that craft skills are going to be passed on, but I think that a lot of young ones will miss out.
I know fire a fact that basic domestic skills and household management skills are not being passed on because I have trouble finding appropriate household help. The lack of awareness of such things is appalling. Perhaps people don't care anymore. Am I the only one who values domestic skills and Home economics?
At Maker Faire I met a number of young parents with children wanting to learn knitting and crochet. The young parents never learned it from their parents. The grandparents of the family were the custodians of that knowledge but are now either living too far away or are too old and frail to be able to pass on the skills, or they themselves have passed on.
Sorry about my typos. (Using the 'dumbphone'
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