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Show WhaE The Kids E-3aven'S Learned By FLORENCE BITTNER Students in today's schools are learning hosts of things I never knew like third grade arithmetic, the parts of a jet engine, the principle of thrust and how the moon and mars are alike. THERE ARE a few things I grew up knowing they will not know, however, and many of these are not taught in schools. You either grow up knowing them or you never learn and it just might be that someday they might need at least part of the old folk wisdom. wis-dom. The best fence posts, for example, are cedar. Juniper they call it now, but when my dad cut them and planted them in post holes, they were cedar posts and didn't rot the way any other kind of log would if stuck into the ground. PALOMINO horses don't come from palomino horses. They come from brown mothers and white fathers. Or is it the other way around? And if it's only light brown with maybe blonde hair on mane and tail it's a buckskin. My kids wouldn't know any better than to try to milk a cow from any old side-or to get on a horse from either side. None of the kids 1 grew up with would walk behind a horse or a cow close enough for a sudden kick to connect any more than they would approach a cow or horse from the left. WHEN you're gathering wood for cooking, look for pine knots with a lot of pitch in them. They burn better and hotter. You can't expect to get butter but-ter from cream unless the cream is cold, and if you want it to taste sweet, be sure every part of the churn is scalded good before you use it. There's nothing better than sunshine for sweetening a churn. TO GET good cottage cheese with small sweet curds, set the clabber way to the back of the stove. Don't let it get too hot, and save the whey. Put the whey in the gravy. IM1 bet my kids wouldn't know a-china nest egg if they tried to crack one. All our nests had china eggs to encourage en-courage the hens to use the nests and not go off under the barn or under bushes to begin accumulating a clutch of eggs for setting when she got broody. My kids don't know what a broody hen is either or -how to break one up to get her off the nest. Or how to keep track of a setting hen and how to mark the calendar so's to know when to look for the chicks to hatch and to keep watch of the weather the first few days so the whole batch doesn't freeze. MY KIDS don't understand the responsibilities of owning and caring for animals and how the cow has to be milked twice a day whether it is convenient con-venient or not and if you are going to have a tame riding pony it has to be ridden, frequently. Some of the things I know they will almost certainly never need, like how to advance ad-vance the spark on a Model T or how to crank an engine or the way the pilot of the aeroplane had to have someone to crank the propeller while he sat in the cockpit and yelled "Contact." THEY PROBABLY won't need to understand the way the drafts worked on a wood stove or how to shake down a grate or how high to have the stove pipe stick up through the roof to get a good draw. They might never need to know how to card wool for bats for quilts or how to render lard when you butcher a pig or how to lard down sausages so the meat will keep. THE PROBLEM is, someday they might need to know at least some of this, and if they don't learn from those of us who knew, where will they find it out? I remember hearing Henry Ford quoted as saying he would hire a country boy before a city boy any day because a country boy grew up knowing things a city boy never learned, but a country boy could learn city ways in a hurry when he needed to. MAYBE HE said it, maybe he didn't, but there's truth in it. |