Stan,
I agree with you completly. I doubt that many kids can diagram a sentence today. As for history, they don't seem to go back much past last week unless it is on U-tube.
I don't want to wander very much from the theme. I could spend a lot of space on what I see.
To be more WBTS, my Granpa Alex who came here from Ireland during the potato famine and who had very little formal education managed to keep notes during the war and I have been blessed to be able to read some of them and I can tell you that a little Irishman who was born in 1828 did a pretty good job of describing what he saw and using the proper verbage to descibe it. And his penmanship was excellent. Funny part is that he crossed his T's on a 45 degree angle and when you read his notes they look like X's. The upright one way and the cross the other.
FC