Robert's Rules of Order

Now it is Monday, so it should be time for Monday Morons. But I don't want to put that label on this post. I don't think that these people are morons, but I just wanted to point out that I was a little surprised at something.

People seem to have gaps in their education. When you are in school, some of your subjects involve trying to learn to do something, like math, while other subjects are mostly memorization, like history. Some people are better at some thing more than others. And then after school is over, we keep learning things, but also we forget a lot of the stuff that we learned in school. I don't have a career that requires me to use complicated math, so I've forgotten how to do a lot of it. And most of that memorization that we did for history didn't get memorized permanently. A bunch of stuff that used to be in my brain soon got filed away under --not useful in my everyday life-- and --not really that interesting to me personally. I then learned other things, which often later were also filed under not useful or not interesting. And then there are still other things that are either useful or interesting, but I don't really use them that much, so I still tend to forget them. But often I at least remember that I used to know them.

My husband was laughing at this guy on Millionaire who missed one of the easy first five questions. It was something about Hannibal going over the mountains with elephants. I don't know anything about Hannibal going over the mountains with elephants either, so if that had been me I would have missed the question too. While I know a thing or two about elephants, I don't remember anything about Hannibal. Knowing about Hannibal is not something I have to know in everyday life, and I guess that it wasn't that interesting to me, so it was quickly filed away as unimportant.

So I'm very aware that people have these little gaps, as I have them as well.

So it happened to come up last week that a lot of people I know don't seem to know about Robert's Rules of Order. Not that they don't have the whole thing memorized, not that they don't know what is to be done in certain situations when one should be using Robert's Rules of Order, but just that when Robert's Rules of Order are mentioned that they don't even know what you are referring to.

I thought that they were joking.

Robert's Rules of Order is just a book about rules on how you should conduct a meeting. It's just a book. It isn't the Bible or anything. It's some rules made up by this guy named Robert. But the guy put a lot of thought into his little book, and the rules are very useful, and over time this has become the standard. So when you are at a meeting and someone says that they would like to make a motion that a vote be taken on whatever is being discussed, and then someone seconds the motion, and those in favor say "Aye" and those opposed say "Nay", then that is something from Robert's Rules of Order.

That's probably all that a lot of us will ever use of Robert's Rules of Order, unless you have to go to a lot of very formal meetings. There are more rules about who gets to speak and when, and how to move the discussion to something else, voting proxies, time limits on speaking, what to do in the event of a tie, etc.... But that's all very formal stuff that I very rarely have to deal with.

But while I know very little about the rules, I am very aware that the rules exist, and I happen to know that the name of the book is Robert's Rules of Order. And while I would not be terribly surprised if someone in their teens or early twenties didn't know what was meant by Robert's Rules of Order, I do tend to expect that people older than that might have heard of them, and I was really surprised to hear that mostly intelligent people my age or older had not heard of them.

How can there be grown people who have never heard of Robert's Rules of Order?