“If a fabric is contaminated with mildew. . .”
These days, with the internet and access to it, it doesn’t take a lot of searching to find out how-to guidance. I found a website that shows how to mix basic fabric dye colors to come up with hundreds of other colors. There are websites that tell how to tie dye.
But there was life before the web, connectivity, and believe it or not, before social media. Most practical things I learned from my father and my mother. Being in a military family, I learned things in addition to what other guys usually learned. Things like sewing a button on a shirt, darning a sock, ironing, and some cooking. There was Boy Scouts, and later Explorers. Outdoor knowledge that added to what my father taught, plus a lot of other things.
Then there are schools. In my lifetime, and in my father’s life, school was part of growing up. At school I learned the 3 Rs. At first. Later teachers tried to teach me to diagram a sentence, but failed miserably. I’ve known a few men born in the latter 1900s that didn’t attend school more than a few years. They worked successfully as tradesmen and one a trucker.
For my mother and her family it was different. While my mother did go to school, not all did. Many boys, including one of my uncles, went into the mines at age ten. That’s the way it was in Welsh mining towns in the 1930s. Then the English ran the schools, apparently in hopes of educating the Welsh miners’ children to be somewhat civilized. The English teachers used canes to enforce the use of the English-only rules. Despite the cane and the English tutorials, that I’m sure weren’t meant to lead them anywhere, my mother learned piano and eventually earned a degree from the London College of Music and played at the eisteddfod, the Welsh National Festival devoted to music, literature, and performance that has been ongoing since the 12th Century.
In many of the trades in America, there is a prescribed program of training that has a person working directly with a more experience worker, learning the trade. Apprentice programs. They aren’t new at all. I don’t know how long they’ve been going on, but I’d guess it started when an unruly youth didn’t want to shoe horses like his father, and went to work with a barber or whatever.
But what about several thousand years ago? How did people learn to herbal use in say treating a wound or as a remedy of a headache? How did we learn what foods weren’t good to eat, and how to best prepare foods? How did we learn about disease and epidemic prevention?
Question: Who said, “If a fabric is contaminated with mildew. . .”?
Please leave a comment or email wil@jonahzsong.com.
L-RD Bless, Keep, Shine. . .
JonahzSong 
Great questions. I think a lot of people forgot that there was much information about how to do things before the Internet, but it is so much more with it. As a professor, I was ambivalent towards the Internet, trying to get students to think critically when there are countless pages on every issue is hard. Thank you for following us. We are so grateful. Regina
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Thanks for commenting. A lot of teachers I know don’t allow their students to use Wikipedia as a reference on paper. They will allow internet reference, but only if it is a specific book, magazine, or other article. The internet does have value, but it’s like the old saying, “buyer beware.”
L-RD Bless, Keep, Shine. . .
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