[Certified]

I was taught the concept of drafting a hierchical outline [1] around 3rd or 4th grade in language arts as one of the first steps in writing a paper. Even today, this is probably the mental model I most associate with file systems. I am also fairly confident I encountered this before ever having to interact with a physical file cabinet full of manila folders. Is it still common for outlines to be taught in early grade school?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_(list)

[kritiko]

By 3rd or 4th grade, wouldn't you have interacted with a library's card catalog or say, how your family's cassettes or cds were stored for retrieval?

I don't think the concept of hierarchies is foreign to these kids, I think it's the concept of storage of physical media.

[Certified]

I can only speak to my individual experiences and my admittedly fuzzy memory of things so long ago, but here goes:

"By 3rd or 4th grade, wouldn't you have interacted with a library's card catalog"

In that school's library, they had just replaced the old card catalog with a computer terminal based dewy decimal system a few years before I started. Looking at screenshots today, I'm fairly certain it was Dynix[1]. It was the early nineties, and a pretty big deal they had a computer in the school at all. In those years, the librarian was the only one trained to use the terminal, so you simply told her what you were looking for and she helped you find it. Maybe some of the older kids were taught how to use the computer, but there was serious resistance to letting us sticky handed younger kids touch it. I'm sure I had visited the local public library as well by that age, but again, I probably got assistance from parents or librarians to find things until I got older.

"or say, how your family's cassettes or cds were stored for retrieval?"

My father might have had a few audio cassettes, but VHS tapes were all I really interacted with before grade 5. A few of my family friends had walls of VHS laden bookcases in their living room, but we were not that family. The VHS tapes were bulky, but you could record over old things you had already watched so you didn’t need a lot of them. Our system of organization was more akin to shoving them all in the largest drawer in the living room. If anything, my family’s approach to media storage would have encouraged the “all in one bucket” approach that so many of the students in the article seem to favor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)