> Why where they so much more skilled than today's schoolchildren?
Because today's school children spend a little more time studying mathematics and science. Music, arts and crafts took up a much larger part of 17th century girls education. Upper and middle class girls were being taught what they needed to be good wives.
> The school provided lessons in writing, reading, math, music and art. The girls studied paper cutting alongside other crafts, such as embroidery and needlework
Because that's what they practiced, presumably. Given that they misspelled a 3 letter word, I suspect they were better at arts and crafts than writing?
OED https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hen_n1?tab=forms#1717329 says "hean" was never a standard spelling of "hen". 350 years ago would be the late 1600s when there were "hen" and "henn" and "henne". (I don't know exactly when in the 1600s the latter two stopped being used; 350 years ago might actually be too late for those.)
On the other hand, the idea that for every word there is a single Correct spelling, as opposed to "write it however you like so long as it's clear to the reader", wasn't so well established in the late 1600s. But I think most 17th-century English folks would have regarded "hean" as wrong, not merely unusual.
(The article itself calls "hean" a misspelling, though of course that doesn't prove much.)
No cable, radio serials, abundant and cheap ready-made toys, recorded music, game boys, smart phones, pre-made mass manufactured decorations for nearly no money, dirt-cheap puzzle books at every store, clothes so cheap they’re disposable, et c.
If you want creative and skillful culture to be mass culture, just make stuff really expensive and eliminate recording and mechanical reproduction. Elevate the social and financial rewards of sub-superstar levels of craft, art, and creativity. We’re losing those things because the value of them’s been driven into the ground.
You’re judging two wildly different generations of children based on one of them being able to do something the other one wasn’t even thought.
Imagine training a chihuahua to do tricks, then looking at an untrained golden retriever, not even try to teach them, and saying “why are chihuahuas so much smarter than golden retrievers?”
> No one said "smarter", they said "more skilled".
No one said dogs, either, they said schoolchildren. It’s an analogy. Either way, it makes zero difference to the point. You could change my word to “skilled” and it would work the same. Skills are learned and thought, that’s what matters.
> A perfectly legitimate answer to that question might be that we stopped teaching them.
Which is what I wrote as the first sentence. The second is merely an analogy to exemplify that notion.
Well, presumably outliers exist. I don't think we have a large enough sample to conclude anything. Pretty sure there are plenty of children these days who are significantly more "skilled" (just like back then).
Of course modern writing/drawing utensils are on an entirely different level and paper was very expensive back then e.g. an average labourer supposedly only made
enough per day to purchase less than 100 sheets, so practising was expensive.
