My niece is in pre-school right now, and the alphabet is the first thing they taught her (alongside numbers through 10). She can recite it backwards and forwards. I’d be surprised if students really aren’t learning the alphabet. It seems more likely to me that the librarian cited in the book just had a few bad experiences with kids who messed up the order of some letters near the middle of the series (which happens to all sorts of people from time to time).

My kid is homeschooled, so I have no knowledge of what is on in public schools.

However, I think the argument could be made that the alphabet, as organized, sucks. Why are all the vowels, like, everywhere? There are plosives and affricates canoodling with each other when they should stick with their own kind… How silly.

I’ve worked with adults who weren’t good at filing things alphabetically several times. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t know alphabetical order (they could sing the ABC song, for instance), but that they couldn’t seem to apply it in real life. Maybe there’s just a certain percentage of people (kids included) with this mental block?

@augustlan how many of us sing the alphabet song in our head at some point while looking through a file cabinet!

@Jeruba my somewhat limited experience at this time (two grandkids in elementary school) would indicate that they are learning the alphabet and understanding that things can be filed, and found, alphabetically. Now actually reading, that is a different story.

My wife has had several millennial employees who weren’t good at filing alphabetically. I don’t know if there’s any correlation, but one of them couldn’t tell time on an analog clock because she grew up with digital clocks, and one of them couldn’t tie her shoes because she grew up with velcro straps on her shoes.

I swear my kid will be one of the people with Velcro shoes as an adult if he doesn’t get his act together.

He can absolutely read a clock, though.

It sounds like the author meant to say that they couldn’t spell well enough. One can know the alphabet backwards and forwards and still not be able to spell words.

Although, having said that… I’ve spent many a year working in bookstores alongside people who couldn’t file Tolstoy and Turgenev in the correct order with the books in their hands. Sure, they can say the alphabet perfectly, but this is a different skill, isn’t it? And it’s the same skill that would allow one to look up a word in the dictionary.

Of course, few young people turn to physical dictionaries anymore. The skill they need currently is to be able to recognize whether the spellcheck on their device has returned the same word that they wanted to look up.

@Seek

If it’s any comfort to you, tying shoes is more about manual dexterity than intelligence so I wouldn’t worry overmuch.

Boys typically lag approx. six months or more behind girls with fine motor coordination and muscle control but by high school age they’re evened out.

This is why there are typically more little boys with bedwetting problems and crappy handwriting. And I think tying shoes fits in with that also.

The only notable exceptions to this are some kids who grow up to be sports stars. Their advanced hand-eye coordination typically manifests early in life.

So, start worrying about velcro shoes if he still has difficulty with this in high school ”)

I use Google to fix my spelling. I sing the alphabet song to file folders. I made it to university and passed the first year in liberal arts. The standards have dropped considerably. I have a high school diploma.
I learned the alphabet before junior kindergarten. My mom , sister , and speak and say audio books helped me master language ahead of the curve. I have a 99th percentile vocabulary. Which means that everyone is worse. Scary thought : ( .

If it’s true, is it similar to young cashiers not being able to make change on thier own?

Children are taught the alphabet, followed by the basic skill of alphabetical order.

If they don’t look-up words in dictionaries, find names in phone books, or file paper documents, the whole concept of alphabetical order remains theoretical. Much knowledge becomes innate through use, familiarity, and repetition. If someone never actually looks up words and names alphabetically, or organizes pages in an alphabetical sequence, doing so might never become a skill.

Kids in my family, my Church, and my neighborhood all learn to read with phonics. They learn the alphabet. We don’t give our young kids gadgets that dumb them down. We still read books, play dictionary games, and actually have spelling bees. We also teach them history. We reject common core on every level.

Maybe the offhanded remark was not to be taken so literally, but more of a complaint that children today don’t bother doing it the old fashioned way, they just go straight to technology?

@JLeslie “Maybe the offhanded remark was not to be taken so literally…”

Perhaps, but maybe it was meant to be taken literally. I’ve read news reports about how some school systems no longer teach cursive handwriting. I try to imagine generations of people who won’t have signatures and will need to print their names in block letters on their marriage licenses and other legal documents.

@Love_my_doggie I agree possibly it is to be taken literally. I was just throwing out a possibility of another interpretation. The OP read the entire text, so she would know better than I. I assume since she asked this question she does believe it to be literal, but maybe if she rereads it, it might be up for interpretation.

It’s true some schools aren’t teaching cursive anymore. I am against giving it up altogether. I think they can teach it for a few weeks in a later grade, but that’s a different subject for another Q.

My daughter is 8. In one of the earlier grades, she learned to alphabetize. She learned the alphabet at home and pre-K (Nursery school).

I am aware of several children who lack basic skills, which they were taught. They learned these skills, then moved on to using calculators and computers, and with no real review of the skills they need to really use those devices effectively. These skills are not simply archaic, and okay if left in yesteryear. Searching reference materials hones the skills of problem solving, and deductive reasoning. It aids the individual in understanding how to complete a task, and cements the importance of being able to complete a task. For someone to believe they don’t need to seek an answer because they know it is on the internet if they ever need it, enables them to move away from follow through skills.
The same goes for calculators. Using them too young, too soon, too often, removes people from the reality of numbers. The whole point of word problems is to make numbers personal to us; to help us have a feel for the difference between more, and hella more.
Kids are being moved through certain basic skills, and then soon abandon those skills. They will pay a price for these oversights.

I’d think that it is more a case of an inablilty to think and apply properly. Lots of people 30 and younger can’t seem to grasp how to count change. They’ve never had to. I can still remember being in line at a Winn Dixie when the cash register stopped working and didn’t pop up the amount to give back to the lady ahead of me. The girl had no idea what to do and several people in line were telling her “Just start counting change!” and I could see that she had no idea what that even meant and the concept of having to figure something out for herself was something thatshe had no idea how to put into practice. I think that same lack applies across the board.

possibly unrelated, but I always think that if I get pulled over and they ask me to do the alphabet backwards, I am pretty much screwed, I know it well enough but still need to go through the tune in my head if I need to know specifically where one letter is every now and then, backwards would just be a nightmare.

My grand nephews, age 8, know the alphabet and know how to look things up in an encyclopedia. “How big is Jupiter?” Boom! They race to do it! I gave them the 30 year old set we had for our kids. Tye have fun with it.

They do not have internet at home. Maybe that’s why they can do it.

To piggyback onto what @LuckyGuy said, my daughter doesn’t play video games. Once in a while someone will lend her a phone and show her how to play one, but she’s not spending hour after hour, day after day playing games. I don’t see how a kid staring at a phone or tablet for hours can be helpful to the kid. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe many will disagree (I remember one Jelly on here ripping another Jelly a few years ago because the Jelly said her daughter didn’t play video games). Just my opinion.

Hashtag: happily raising a gamer kid who knows how to use an encyclopedia, then cross check what he’s read for accuracy by Googling for updated information.

Not for nothing, but I was very disappointed with the World Book’s entry on “human”. It never mentioned once that humans are apes, but that they evolved from apes.

There may be a problem, but I am skeptical because each generation seems to show how much dumber the next one is. At this rate it is a wonder that we are not all functionally illiterate and innumerate. In fact, for the past 100 years what has been called the Flynn effect shows that IQ scores have been rising at a fairly high rate.

How would they Google it if they didn’t know the alphabet?

Why would one necessarily need to know the alphabet in order to type out a Q for Google?

You just type whatever into search. A Qwerty keyboard isn’t in alphabetical order so they just hunt and peck like most people do anyway.