Digital clocks are anyway not cool décor. Go for the grandfather clock every time.
One didn’t need to do the “subtract from 10” thing in North America. It looks like that author is in New Zealand on a different system.
Here, you tap once for one, twice for two…up to 10 times for zero. I used to do it all the time. I don’t recall if it worked on payphones though, without putting money in, I mean.
Does it take long to teach an adult to read a traditional clock?
Kids in earlier generations learned it by age 5. Kids learn and absorb information much quicker than adults.
Reading a clock doesn’t seem that hard. But, I never tried teaching an adult. I’d guess a few minutes explanation is all that’s needed?
I only tried it a few times. I wouldn’t call it needing the correct rhythm, but you did have to tap pretty quickly to get the numbers to register correctly, and no way of knowing if you were doing it correctly until you’d done the whole number and it rang the other phone. I also recall that you could spin the dial from the zero and stop it partway through the return and it would register a different number depending on how many times it clicked before you stopped it.
You can also touch dial on a rotary dial phone by playing the right tones into the mouthpiece.
To get back to the original question, I work at a high school. They still have analog clocks on the walls, but there are a fair number of students who can’t read them.
I remember back in the 80s when Radio Shack (R.I.P.) sold a little digital box that you entered the number into and it generated touch tone frequencies that went out over the phone line and connected you to the other party.
I was supposed to have been taught how to tell time in 2nd grade, but the teacher breezed through it in a day or two and didn’t bother to make sure everyone had grasped the concept. (My parents attempted to pick up where this teacher left off; this ended with much yelling and crying.) I can read an analog clock, but I have to look at it for a few seconds, and I have to really think when someone tries to give me the time as “a quarter past”, “10 'til”, or similar wording. The only digital clocks in my house growing up were the clock radio in my parents’ room and the VCR, so lack of exposure to analog clocks wasn’t the issue. I’ve wondered if it’s related to dyscalculia, but I don’t have any other symptoms of that, other than extreme discomfort when asked to perform any sort of calculations in my head (tips, fraction conversion, etc.) in front of other people.
Strangely, I don’t have issues with any other analog gauges. And we inherited an old rotary phone when I was fairly young; it was mounted on the wall in the kitchen, and I would occasionally use it for the novelty of the experience because I thought it was neat.
Changing your bearing by a number of degrees does not require thinking about a clock face. It requires thinking about plane geometry. You can learn one and not the other, although if you know one it might be helpful in learning the other.
I thought this was going to be a riddle. 
Not in the US.
When you dialed ‘9’, the mechanism emitted 9 pulses.
I was pretty good at dialing with just a headset and some clip leads.
At the pool we swim at there are several analog clocks on the wall. This is common for many public places. I can’t imagine this being a problem to younger folk.
In addition, there are several large timing clocks (minute and second hands). I assume that the high school swim team has no problem timing their practice laps using those. (There is also a digital “scoreboard” for meets, but that isn’t used during practice.)
I started to write a reply to some of this. Then I thought my response was sounding familiar. So I looked it up. Turns out I had written on this in another thread, from my capacity as an elementary math specialist and former elementary classroom teacher who has taught hundreds of kids to read both digital and analog clocks.
Rather than rehash it all I’ll summarize:
–It is actually rather time-consuming to teach kids to tell time to the minute on an analog clock. There are many moving parts <snerk> and for the average child it certainly doesn’t happen in 10 minutes.
–Analog clocks are less and less common, except in schools. Sure, you’ll see an occasional analog clock in a public place, but digital clocks have just about taken over. In a world where enormous numbers of people carry digital clocks on their persons, knowing how to read analog time is increasingly useless.
–Studying analog time may have some benefit in other areas, such as visual/spatial reasoning and fractional thinking, but its effectiveness in this regard is overrated and there are lots of better ways to get where you want to go.
–Bottom line: The time and energy spent in teaching analog time can better be spent elsewhere. I’d drop instruction in it if I could, and replace analog clocks in classrooms with digital models.
Here is the link to my previous post: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20069830&postcount=49. Many gems of wisdom 
are in there from one who has been in the trenches for a very long time. (One note: I said that I thought most watches were digital; that was probably not the case. Still, the overall points stand.)
I’m an adult. I was taught how to tell time on an analog clock by kindergarten. But I have to get within a few feet of the clock on a lot of clocks to be able to tell which hand is which - I feel like there used to be a greater difference in the lengths of the hands than on the clocks I’ve used lately.
A family member of mine took a test, the MOCA (Montreal assessment). The test is generally used to detect dementia.
I saw examples of other people who took the test, including one person who took it when healthy and then twice while suffering from dementia. The particular part of the test was the analog clock drawing test, where you have to draw a clock face set to a particular time. The first one was perfectly clear, and the right time. The second had the numbers moving toward the center, and the hands were at the wrong time. The third simply had a bunch of numbers at the center of the circle, with no hands at all. The numbers were from 1 to 12 but weren’t even in the right order. I was freaked out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clearer description of dementia.
They’ll have to phase out the test, if children aren’t learning how to read an analog clock. I have no distaste for the format, and I currently wear an analog watch, but it’s not like I’ll miss that format if it disappears. (It won’t entirely. There will be clock enthusiasts for a long time, I think.)
Interesting story!
My wife, as a grad student in the late 1990s, had to give some kind of intelligence test to several miscellaneous kids. One of the questions involved explaining what happened at Mt. St. Helens…which of course had exploded in 1980 or so, several years before the kids had been born. Time marches on. (So to speak.)
I agree with you: there’s no question that even if analog time were completely dropped from the school curriculum TOMORROW, there will still be folks using it for years to come. I imagine there are a few people even today who enjoy telling time with sundials, water clocks, and hourglasses, and more power to them!
Kids these days. One asked me the time, I told him it was “ten to five.” He couldn’t understand that. I had to say “four-fifty.”
Don’t expect them to understand what “25 or 6 to 4” means.
Does that mean that the whole overpriced analog watches are going to be worthless in a couple of years? I like that idea.
Remember, these are fashion items (especially the “overpriced” ones). Have digital wristwatches/smart watches ever been fashionable post-1975? OTOH today people happily shell out $15000+ for a nice manual-wind Swiss watch, not for the Apple version.
I guess when talking about analog watches there is no point in asking if people still now how to use a slide rule, many will not even know what that is. Those were cool devices though.
When I was in the psych hospital most recently, the only clock they had readily available was an analogue clock. Combine that with the fact that I lost my glasses for several days (I’m near-sighted), and I was thoroughly frustrated. For the record, I’m 36 years old.
I just don’t see the appeal of analogue clocks when digital exists.