Those Amish kids are going to rule! Growing their own food, making their own cloths and building homes with furnishings out of renewable resources. The girls are going fight and swoon over them. Don’t under estimate the attraction of fresh milk and fresh beef along with riding horse back and buggy riding.
Only if they pick up the truly huge amount of weapons available to all and sundry and defend it. I mean, think of everything that is going to be left behind. 
I can’t imagine the environmental impacts either…I assume you’d have ships full of oil and everything else at sea, power plants, and toxic chemicals all over and gods know what else impact stuff. Along with the global warming stuff happening already, it’s going to be a pretty rough ride for those who survive.
I’ve been privy to many trade secrets, and they were all written down, just not published outside the walls of the company. In the given scenario anyone could walk into Intel headquarters and take the highly sensitive microarchitecture manuals - not that anyone would want them. Ditto for really important stuff like the Coke formula.
There will be a lot of trial and error to make up for the lack of mentors.
I agree with the rest of your post which I didn’t quote.
Certain areas, like the Texas coast, are going to be uninhabitable. But I wouldn’t worry about global warming. Carbon emissions would be way down. So would pollution except for the spills. Look how things improved during the beginning of the pandemic.
Now there is no situation so good that people can’t mess it up, so as I said in the beginning if the kids went all Lord of the Flies it might be a long time before learning is restored.
There is plenty of canned and preserved food in grocery warehouses, and plenty of seeds for gardens for when these run out. Nothing that little kids couldn’t do.
Anyhow, the question was “could” our knowledge be relearned, not would it be. I think it is pretty clear that it could be not even assuming the best possible scenario.
That made me laugh! But I see rather a Cargo Cult developing: kiddies not knowing how things worked, pretending to go through the motions. Beats them why it does not work.
That is rather like it. Imagine all that they will not be able to do if we humans are not able to do the right thing today, with all in our favour. I read this article today on the burning out of the USS Bonhomme Richard in Juli 2020. Reading the errors the professionals made I don’t want to picture what children without adult guidance would do in perfectly normal situations. Not all knowledge can be learnt from books, and even if, not all relevant books will keep, and if they keep, they will be hard to find. I love reading in Wikipedia that zettelkasten is an actual English word, but who under 16 can use, manage and keep up to date a library catalog, keep the books in good condition and borrow them out to the right person and get them to bring them back, mantaining the order of the library?
Botulism, anyone? In three years time, when we all think the worst is over, after 90% have died out?
Ah, if only Monsanto had not put this terminator gene in those seeds, so they have to be bought anew and not grown from plants the old way! And careful with that RoundUp™, kid!
Fire. The Library Book by Susan Orlean is excellent.
The hospitalization rate for kids is really low, but I agree that small kids without siblings are going to be gone, gone, gone.
I teach English to kids now and things are really different than when I grew up in a large Mormon family back when cavemen walked around. Get off my lawn!
In Asia, kids are supposed to be focused on school to the exclusion of everything else. Many kids learn music instruments but only through the elementary school and they have to give it up for full time studying in middle school and high school. These kids would have very little survival skills.
When I was young, we had little homework and did more things such as scouting and such.
Most fathers could fix cars and many 12 to 16 year olds would be helping and the older ones of this range could fix them themselves. I had friends who bought beat up VW Bugs and fixed them up themselves.
That’s a dying skill, cars today can’t be fixed by the average person anymore.
In previous threads about life after catastrophes, it’s been pointed out that gasoline won’t last that long.
Manufacturing simply collapses. There are enough knives, pots and pans, clothes and guns for people to scavenge for decades but eventually things will get too old. Knives should be fine but I don’t know how long gunpowder can be used.
Solar panels will provide electricity for a while but there wouldn’t be replacement parts.
I also agree with the idea society would collapse. Taking care of children is time and energy intensive. Trying to take care of unrelated, traumatized preschoolers just isn’t going to be the norm, especially since the caregivers are traumatized kids themselves.
In parts of Asia. The parts where the kids aren’t sewing shoes or picking e-waste…
I don’t have the time to research industrial seeds (though I know Monsanto sues people, so anything they put in can’t work all that well) but I’m on my fourth generation of volunteer tomatoes and the third of volunteer squash, so the garden seeds you can buy don’t have any problems.
That assumes neighbor kids wouldn’t take care of them. I think they will.
The way we do it now is time intensive, but 200 years ago kids didn’t get nearly as much attention. Assuming that the age cohorts are equal in size, one 15 year old can easily take care of 20 ten year olds. No testing, no paperwork.
Like most of them? Never play library when you were a kid? Kids check out books at school libraries all the time, even if public libraries were automated. At 10 I knew how they worked pretty well, and at 18 1/2 I took over as Librarian for one of the largest sf libraries in the world. I could have done it easily two or three years earlier. I started recording and indexing my books at 16.
You must know some really dumb kids.
I hope this link works. In the middle of this picture is a banana plantation (farm? grove?) and in the middle of that is an entirely derelict house that originally belonged to my great-great grandfather. It was last lived in by my great-grandparents sometime before 1980. My grandmother told me that she was saddened to see its deplorable state in 1989. I visited in 2016 and poked around for a bit. (The distant cousin my grandmother sold it to still owns it and I had her permission). The roof is partially missing. There are are banana trees growing in the kitchen. It has no locking doors and has been almost entirely looted. There are empty wine and beer bottles everywhere. In it, I found my grandparents’ wedding photo (ca. 1945) still hanging on the wall, and still in very good shape. There were books on shelves that certainly appeared readable but, since I don’t speak Portuguese, I didn’t look too closely. I have a hard time believing every printed technical manual that exists today will be gone within 10 years of the apocalypse.
When I was a kid, many moons ago, yes. But this recent thread
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/
says today it is no longer the case. Library catalogues are mentioned at least four times, and I did not post it myself.
BTW: The question was a little longer than what you replied to, but never mind.
And no, I know no dumb kids. I know nobody younger than 40. Really.
I suspect many Dopers were precocious, and although it would take time to learn new skills, the documentation would make a big difference. Almost any skill or procedure one might use exists in web tutorial form. Most university courses that were traditionally taught made the switch to web-based because Covid. Sure, no one can learn everything. But people will always follow their interests, and trial-and-error will continue to work well. Yes, there would be problems while these skills are developed, and I have no idea how long this knowledge recovery might take. If the reason for this rather artificial scenario involved disrupting existing infrastructure than this changes the answer. But if that was okay somehow for long enough, I do not see why most things apart from some advanced research would not be relearned eventually given enough time.
I deal with high schoolers every day.
The Earth is doomed.
Now I understand. Kids, some of them, many of them, are a lot smarter than you might think if you don’t know them. I won’t talk about my brilliant five-year old grandson, but a 16 year old girl joined our writers’ group, and she can not only write well, but is very together about planning her future. There are plenty of kids like her.
Recall the bumper sticker “My kid beats up your honor student.”
So in an collapse, the question becomes who gets to say what the remaining group will do, and how the remaining resources will be allocated. We can hope that the isolated groups of teenage society adopt a “small town meeting” form of government.
But I’ve seen “small government” situations like this where the reins are seized by people who are great at machinations to put themselves in power, terrible at getting needed things done.
I don’t see where the OP said “all the adults and the precocious kids disappear”
I can’t even imagine how adults would reorganize their societal affairs, let alone kids. Maybe some would offer bursts of genius and creativity that would recognise past mistakes but I fear that all too many would just go all Negan on the rest.
I doubt you understand, I think you have rather pigeon holed me, but never mind. The fact hat you only selectively answer to the parts of my posts that suit you and ignore the rest is more irritating. When I write
you just center around the first line. How will kids prevent the important books from being stolen? That has driven saintly monks to despair, and your smart kiddies will find the solution? I don’t think so. Nor do I believe they would be able to decide who to lend the books to. The bully will grab them, steal them, and won’t be able to use them. That is what bullies do when no grown up is around to stop them.
I’ve known bullies, they don’t take books unless its just to show you they can control you. Generally you get them back when they are done tormeting you.
At 16 I lived in the library. I could see building my own collection of books and guns. Reading books about booby traps and frontier survial would occupy my time between getting dinner and girls. Oganizing a new world order, not so much at 16 but maybe after a few years if I survived
You said you didn’t talk to anyone under 40. Given what is on TV, I totally get that anyone who doesn’t know kids would think the OPs situation would lead to having them go back to the Stone Age.
I haven’t read the thread you mentioned and it is too long for me to read now, so I didn’t respond because I didn’t think I could say anything intelligent about it.
As for stealing books, where are they going to sell them? And why steal the useful ones. Each kid could get all the books they want, including ones with dirty bits.
There are definitely going to be libraries which burn down, there are going to be communities which devolve into chaos, but I think there will be enough communities who get it together to preserve our knowledge, mostly.
They would gather books only for heating fuel.
Anything could be relearned as long as it was in a YouTube how-to video. Anything only found in books? Forget it.