If something is a “lost art” then either; it isn’t the most efficient way of doing something and was just naturally dropped as common practice, or those who practiced it failed at teaching the next generation. I’m sure exceptions exist, but I have never heard of any.
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Reading?
I would argue that reading is a lost art not because of poor teachers but because of a society that does not incentivise its practice.
I would argue that many arts are lost this way.
A lot of handmade custom goods are soon going to gone. Skills that some of these old timers have will be gone when they die. More often than not it’s a lack of students. Very very few members of younger generations want to learn these difficult skills. Everything is about doing it the easy way or the cheap way.
A few that I know of:
Saddle making, Tool and DIe Makers, Machinists (not CNC operators), and pretty much any skill that doesn’t require electricity / electronics.
True, some skills are no longer used regularly. But those specialist skills, that can only be learned and mastered over a life time, will soon be lost.
Blacksmithing is becoming a lost art, sure there are a couple of people out there still doing it. But there’s not nearly as many people that WANT to do it anymore. It’s relatively hard to learn the nuances to it, hot, and you’re likely to get burned while banging out a piece of hot metal.
Stone masons, Ferriers, Thatchers, Cobblers, Seamstresses, Hat Makers, Carpenters, Leather workers, and there are quite a few more that I could probably name off. But these are slowly dying because people no longer really want to do them anymore, not because they can’t be taught.
Dying language. It can easily happen at somewhere remote enough where there is no one left to teach and no one interested or even know about them from the outside to learn. It also needs a community to even be used to begin with.
These two are correct, there’s also a third reason: gatekeepers that like to mystify crafts.
Writing in cursive is about to become a lost art lol.
Timing cams in production equipment is a lost art. Cams are outdated and not used anymore, so knowing how to time them is a useless skill unless you work at some weird museum that keeps outdated production machinery running.
“Hey kids, let’s go to the museum and watch the machine from the 60’s that makes paper clips”
I thought Tunica was a dead language because of the genocide of the native Tunican people. I guess it was because they were bad teachers and there were better ways to communicate.
Yeah, that’s not it chief. It’s a lack of students either because everyone left to find jobs in a big city, or there’s no money in it.
No… usually it’s because a cheaper less god version became readily available and the people doing the real craft were pushed out by imitators and money grabbers.
The industrial revolution ruined a lot of things for a lot of people for the sake of a fee people earning a LOT of money off of other people’s backs…. And if we’re honest, we’re still in it.
Not really. It’s all about demand and record keeping. For example, 100 years ago, there were quite a few cobblers around because everyone needs shoes but since then, the demand has dropped significantly as we have companies who produce hundreds of thousands of low quality shoes with machines and sell them for low prices. At that point, it’s hard for a cobbler to stay afloat, so most would have retrained or were kept afloat by their dying customer base and retire. If your trade is dying, it’s hard to justify the cost of getting an apprentice and also convince one to spend years learning something that they may never get a proper job in.
Cobblers are great and make good quality shoes. Ive got a pair of safety boots from a company with skilled cobblers who hand make each one with old machines and they are very good quality but also cost me more than a regular pair of boots. Most people would rather pay a cheap price many times over spending a lot once.
Your point does stand, but it’s not the main reason.
Driving a car with a manual transmission seems to be a rather lost art because it’s hard to even find passenger vehicles with a manual transmission. At least in the states, maybe it’s different elsewhere.
Reading history books is apparently a lost art
This isn’t an unpopular opinion, it’s just dumb and not thought out
Or there’s just better and more efficient ways of doing it.
Makes sense, I doubt a nuclear physicist can be a hands-on teacher.
Where’s Harvard when you need em
It can also be a lost art because the younger generation assumed that it wouldn’t be needed (glassblowing for many medical uses) , because the materials it requires literally no longer exist (making true Damascus steel), because the people who knew how to do it and the machinery used were all destroyed in a catastrophic event (having issues with actually finding this one but there’s a type of silk that we can’t make anymore because the machinery was destroyed in WWII and we lack the knowledge of how to recreate it) , because of colonial pressure and capitalism destroying the demographic who was able to perform it (Dhaka muslin). There’s probably a handful more reasons; this is just what came to mind right off the bat.