"Hey diddle diddle" is nonsense. A cow jumps over the moon. A dish runs away with a spoon. Generations of children have repeated the words anyway, often before they could explain what any of them meant.

That was part of the point. Nursery rhymes gave children a place to rehearse language: to hear its sounds, anticipate its patterns and discover that words could be rearranged into something memorable and fun. An Education Week story on the decline of nursery rhymes notes that knowledge of them at age three has been associated with later success in reading and spelling. But fewer children now arrive at school knowing the old verses. Parents read and sing them less often, and tightly structured literacy blocks can leave teachers with little time for read-alouds.

Manners are another kind of rehearsal. In The Atlantic, Annie Joy Williams writes about the changing rituals of Southern politeness: saying "yes sir," waving at strangers, filling a guest's plate again and listening to a familiar story as if it were being told for the first time. The history behind those customs is neither uniformly gracious nor uncomplicated, and Williams notes that people have been mourning their decline in that same magazine since the 1890s. But their practice taught attention, reciprocity and hospitality, behaviors children absorbed by watching and repeating. Today, their models are no longer limited to parents, teachers and neighbors. They also include content creators and online friends.

Then comes the adult version: the first job.

Jay Caspian Kang writes in The New Yorker about a labor market turning against young college graduates. The unemployment rate for recent graduates is now higher than the rate for workers overall, reversing a pattern that held for decades. Artificial intelligence has not yet caused mass job losses, but employers are beginning to wonder how many junior workers they need when software can perform some of the assignments that once went to them.

The problem is that entry-level work was never valuable only for the work it produced. It was where young people learned how an organization operates, watched more experienced colleagues exercise judgment and made low-stakes mistakes before being trusted with higher-stakes decisions. Automating the assignment may also eliminate the apprenticeship hidden inside it.

Not every inherited tradition deserves to survive, and no one needs to preserve every frightening nursery rhyme or antiquated social code. But these stories raise a larger question about what happens when we discard experiences because they appear old-fashioned, slow, or easily automated. Children rehearse language through rhymes. They rehearse life with other people through rituals and manners. Young adults rehearse professional judgment through beginner work.

A child who has heard the rhyme fifty times still cannot tell you why the dish ran away with the spoon. She can tell you what comes after the little dog laughed.

— Thomas

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