Do You Need to Know How to Tell Time?

What do horse-drawn carriages, typewriters, and telegrams have in common? You’ve only ever seen them in old movies?

If so, that’s not surprising. All those items have been replaced by new technology. Today we have cars instead of carriages, laptops instead of typewriters, text messages instead of telegrams.

But there is one piece of very old technology that has managed to hang on into the 21st century.

Clocks.

We’re not talking about the digital kind, with the time shown in numbers like “12:47” or “3:35.” We’re talking about analog clocks— the ones with a hand for the hours, the minutes, and sometimes the seconds. The hands move around a dial to point at numbers from 1 to 12. You “read” or “tell” the time by looking at the position of the hands.

Today, the skill of reading analog clocks is fading away. Sure, most kids in the United States learn to tell time in first or second grade, but many later forget how because it’s not part of their day-to-day lives. There is little data on exactly how many kids can still read analog clocks, but one small study found that 75 percent of American kids don’t know how to read these old-fashioned timepieces.*

The question is, does it matter? In other words, do we still need to know how to read clocks at all?

On the other hand, there are still reasons to learn to read clocks. For one thing, it’s a way to strengthen math skills, like counting by fives and fractions. It can also be helpful for visualizing the passage of time. That’s because unlike a digital clock, which shows only the current time, an analog clock shows the current time as it relates to the past (the numbers the hands have already gone by) and the future (the numbers the hands will go by later).

Then there is the fact that phones are notoriously distracting. Glancing down at the time can easily turn into checking your millions of notifications, scrolling through TikTok . . . only to find that 20 minutes have vanished. That can’t happen with an old-timey clock face. (Though, to be fair, it can’t happen with a digital watch either.)

Plus, there are situations when we can’t use our phones, whether it’s during a dance class, while taking a test, or when our phone batteries are dead. In those situations, what if the only clock around is an analog one? The fact is, analog clocks do still have a presence in public spaces—including many schools.

Just look at what happened in the U.K. In some high schools, students were getting stressed during exams. They were struggling to read the analog clocks on the walls and figure out how much time they had left.

But here’s the thing: Rather than helping the students learn to read analog clocks, some schools chose to replace the analog clocks with digital ones instead.

So who knows? Perhaps one day, analog clocks will disappear.

Only time will tell.

_{* 2016 study of 2,000 kids ages 6-12 across seven states by DiscountWatchStore.com
** “Mobile Fact Sheet 2021” by Pew Research Center; “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2019” survey by Common Sense Media}

^{This article was originally published in the March 2022 issue.}