Because math is still a useful skill.
Reading an antiquated clock isn’t.
Can’t fractions be replaced by decimals? Why don’t you think fractions are antiquated?
Sure But for some reason the US doesn’t want to switch to the metric system. So here we are.
For some reason clock and watch makers still make analog dials…so here we are.
Yes and who are they selling them to?
Banks, schools, churches, town squares…
I’m with you. Like Roman numerals and cursive, I don’t think they’re all that important. If you want to learn them, learn them on your own time. Or spend one lesson introducing the idea, but there’s more relevant things to learn.
Ah, an opportunity to again share a favorite anecdote:
I was on a whale-watching boat, standing near a mom and her teen daughter. The mom spotted a whale in the distance and was trying to help the teen find it. They were both getting frustrated that the teen still could not see the whale. After a few minutes, mom exclaimed, “he’s right there, at 10 o’clock!”
The teen angrily shouted “I don’t know my o’clocks!!”
mmm
What about the ‘draw a clock face’ part of the standard cognitive test? I wonder if, as our Millenials and Zoomers begin to age, some might inadvertently be misdiagnosed with incipient dementia because they fail the ‘draw a clock face’ test, but only because they were never familiar with what it looks like or how it works to begin with.
I suppose at some point ‘draw a clock face’ will have to be replaced with something else.
“How do you know when he’s going to be there?!?”
So I’m in a bank, I need to know how the time. And all they have on the wall is an analog clock. But I can’t read analog!
No biggie, I’ll just look at my phone.
Which is actually the first thing one would probably do anyway instead of opting to look on a wall for a clock that may or may not be there.
When my daughter was about 4 she put up a fight at bedtime and I relented and told her she could stay up for another 30 minutes. “That’s not fair, you can tell time and I can’t!”
There are several in my workplace - I suspect at least 4. And on the wall of the retirement home where my band plays. And there are analog church/courthouse tower clocks - as opposed to digital bank clocks.
I would imagine many/most schools have digital clocks tied in with their bells/alarms.
A standard psych test for cognitive impairment/dementia asks the patient to draw an analog clock showing a specific time. But I imagine some clever person will come up with a substitute.
I’ll have to pay attention now when I’m out and about. But I would wager that at least 50% of wall clocks I encounter will be analog. Of course, if someone is using their phone 100% of the time to get the time…
My kids are 15 and still can’t read an analog clock. We have one in every room of the main floor. It pains me to say it, but it’s just one of those skills that’s no longer important because of the computer that lives in their pocket, and the ubiquity of digital displays everywhere else.
Both my son and daughter can drive a stick shift though, and change a tire using a crappy scissor jack. I stood my ground on that one.
Grand Central Terminal…
Is there any other kind of scissor jack?
Not learning how to read an analog watch could certainly save you a lot of money in the future, as collecting expensive watches would be a pointless hobby.
Here’s what the educated folks at Cambridge had to say about analog clocks:
“Children who learned time concepts using analog clocks showed significantly improved performance on spatial reasoning tests compared to those using only digital displays.” - Journal of Educational Psychology, 2024
Why Analog Clocks Still Matter in 2025: Educational Benefits & Research | TimeLab
As someone who has been able to read an analog clock for three decades now, I think I would still be confused where to look if someone gave me “o’clock” directions.
Forward (or the direction of your movement) is 12. Behind you is 6. Fill in the rest
Speaking solely to Big Ben, and not to analog clocks in general …
I’d be looking up to see it even if it hadn’t moved in a decade and was permanently stuck on 12:00 or 6:00, or even 4:20. 
Reading the whole thread to the bottom I think that where and how you live has a lot to do with your personal experience of analog clocks. Lotta folks live where nearly everything is recent construction or at least recently remodeled and they rarely venture to old facilities. Other people live where most stuff is old. So analog clocks are either absent or ubiquitous here in the modern world depending on who you ask.
An interesting thought about @HMS_Irruncible’s clock-clueless 15yos as examples. Not meaning to pick on their kids personally.
If you (any you) wander around indoor public spaces, be that museums, malls, restaurants, airports, etc., there’s all sorts of decor painted on or hanging on walls. Most of which most of us most of the time don’t really notice. There’s stuff to break up the expanses of blank, but exactly which stuff is sorta beneath our notice.
But we older folks tend to notice clocks as more than just decor because we think of them as providing useful information. I suspect for a young person who really can’t read them, even with effort, they simply become a sort of effectively motionless kinetic sculpture of no interest whatever.
So part of why they don’t feel a need to know how to read them is that even in places where analog clocks commonly exist, they don’t see them. Their world doesn’t have analog clocks in it even if they and parents are walking along and parents are noticing clocks here and there.
Possibly related example:
I watch a lot of travel vids that take place in urban settings around the world. So the background is full of signs. If they’re in a script I can read like Latin, or mostly read, e.g. Greek, I see and notice the signs and take a stab at what they might mean.
If they’re written in a script I can’t, say Cyrillic or any of the Indian, Arab, or CJK scripts, the signs just stop being signifiers of meaning. They’re essentially just decor and no more interesting than the wall behind them. In the context of a vid about whatever’s happening in the foreground, the signs are now just visual clutter to be filtered out, not meaning to be attended to.