King of the Hill (of beans)

Every once in a while I start to worry about whether kids these days are developing the skills they'll need to succeed in adult life. Sure, they may have mastered World of Warcraft, but have they learned all the best ways to cheat at Monopoly? Can they catch a fish, sketch a bush, sew a trousseau for a Barbie doll? Do they know how to fling a soybean adroitly enough to hit another kid on the back of the neck?

I'll admit that I was generally better at dodging soybeans than at flinging them, and I wasn't particularly good at dodging them either. For a few years in my misspent youth, I waited every morning at a rural school bus stop on the edge of a soybean field that was annually transformed into a battle zone in the ongoing Soybean Wars. A properly flung soybean can sting and even raise a welt, so a kid equipped with a handful of soybeans and a lot of practice could become King of the Bus Stop.

How well do soybean-throwing skills transfer into other contexts? With their penchant for precision, practice, and ruthlessness, those kids could now be ruling worlds much bigger than our rural bus stop.

I've never been very good at catching fish, but I spent enough time fishing in my youth to now consider myself exempt from ever baiting a hook. Likewise Monopoly: you can't spend an entire summer playing the game without mastering all the winning moves, legal or otherwise. And the hours I spent designing and sewing clothes for my dolls were ideal training for clothing my children--until they moved beyond the "little doll" stage and demanded real clothes, like from a store.

These days I don't use my doll-clothes-designing or soybean-dodging skills much, and I worry about whether these skills are being passed on or whether they'll die out. Will future generations of children know how to improvise clothes or weapons from whatever materials come to hand (old curtains, worn pillowcases, sticks, stones, soybeans), or will their creativity be confined within the clickable world? If no child ever again flings a soybean, I worry that some essential experience will be eternally lost.

But then again, maybe that loss won't amount to a hill of beans.