Paper cuttings made by 17th-century schoolgirls discovered beneath floorboards

Why where they so much more skilled than today's schoolchildren?

Were they?

Look at the perfectly printed writing, even in italics, and the delicate crosshatching shading.

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".

A perfectly legitimate answer to that question might be that we stopped teaching them.

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.