back to the 3Rs

[miriam_e]

Heard a twerp on the radio the other day rattling on about how we have to return to the 3Rs and how kids today are illiterate and know nothing about their culture. He was citing the example of how few kids know what the term "Achilles' heel" means and where it comes from. I felt like retorting that ancient Greek mythology is far less important now than understanding why carbon dioxide alters our climate, or that over-use of chelates can be lethal, or that DRM means you have to rent your own culture from corporations. I bet this fool didn't understand any of these things, yet here he was, living centuries in the past, and dictating as if he was some kind of knowledgeable authority on the present.

The only reason he had any kind of voice was because our nasty little prime minister agrees with him -- but Howard believes that poor deserve to be poor, that killing people in order to steal their resources is reasonable, that a woman's place is in the kitchen, that guilty till proven innocent is okay, and that it has all been downhill since the 1950s, the two-faced era of the double standard. That Howard agrees with him should have been the death-blow to his opinions. Instead he was broadcast nation-wide. A bad day for Australia.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

You misunderconstumble me. :) I'm a great fan of literacy. I love to learn everything. I'm actually happy that I know a fair bit of ancient mythology, have read a lot of "classics" and have a pretty broad background that includes current science and literature (and I include TV and comicbooks in 'literature'). The thing is, that unlike the guy who gave the talk, I have very high respect for the kids of today. Most of them are far from illiterate, and have jaw-dropping levels of knowledge. They study things in early high school that were university topics in my day.

What angered me was this prawn getting national airtime on the radio and stating that kids now are inferior to those of his childhood fantasy. (I'm about the same age as him and I know that most of his and my peers hardly measure up to today's primary school kids.) He makes the sadly common mistake of thinking that the "classics" are somehow superior to current literature, but his only real reason for thinking so is that they are old. If you or I sat down today and wrote a story which had a plot like one of Shakespeare's plays it would be childish and clichèd. The storylines of kids' shows like Veronica Mars or Deadwood are far more biting, complex, dramatic, and tragic, as well as infinitely more relevant.

Culture today is like a runaway locomotive. It is advancing incredibly fast. Look at books or TV shows only a couple of decades old and see how transparent and unimaginative they seem, when only a short time ago they were challenging and cutting edge.

The guy who gave this talk has no idea about current culture. He has given up and lives in an imaginary past when all was rosy. And he thinks everybody should be educated to live there with him. He doesn't see that now is the most vibrant and alive culture in history. He doesn't notice what is happening in the Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese parts of the world -- that their cultures are about to explode onto the scene in a very big way, making even more possibilities available to us.

What an exciting time to be alive!! But that dead-shit giving the lecture would have nothing of it. Nothing outside his narrow English/Mediterranean history, or later than the 1960s was alive for him. I pity him.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I think TV is as poor an example as his. TV today is produced on the basis that (in countries with cable) there are 500 channels to fill. Vast amounts of utter rubbish go to air that would never have seen the light of day 20 years ago. And even on broadcast, what about those midnight "quiz" shows where people get to spend their money phoning up? Like a poker machine in the home.

The main difference technology has given is choice. While the choice is there to find interesting, modern, imaginative media, the choice is also there in abundance to glue oneself to crap. There's no guarantee that kids will make the right choice, and some parents are too dumb or too busy to direct that process appropriately.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is a lot of crap on TV, but at the same time there are some real jewels there. The same is true of books, films, comicbooks, music, art, sculpture, science, technology, and so on. It is the same with anything: you don't generally find gold scattered around on the ground -- you have to look for it among the dirt. The ratio of good stuff to bad stuff may be about the same as it always was, though with increasing intelligence of each generation the good stuff may actually be disproportionately increasing. TV executives are far below the average though, so that would have a depressing effect on TV quality.

There is a general effect of "things today are not as good as [I remember that] they were". I'm certain creative genius as a fraction of the population is either a fixed or increasing value. Look at music. I don't know how many times I've heard my peers say that music today is crap, and that it is not as good as the golden age of music when they were younger. When I show them some undeniably brilliant recent pieces they generally grudgingly agree with those selections, but nevertheless continue to believe music has degenerated. The thing is, for every generation it is always the values/music/books/films of their youth that happen by some marvellous coincidence to belong to the golden age.

This says much more about how we are wired up to [mis]remember our past, than about current culture.